Category Archives: Rants

I Like Make.

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With apologies to Tom T Hall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HkiMkGp_Jo
https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Tom-T-Hall/I-Like-Beer

In some of my posts I have casually mentioned
The fact that I like to write Make.
This little post is more to the point
Roll out the manual and lend me your ears

I like Make. It makes me a jolly good fellow
I like Make. It helps me unwind
And sometimes it makes me feel mellow
(all) (Makes him feel mellow)

C++’s too rough, Java costs too much
Rust puts my mouth in gear.
This little refrain should help me explain
As a matter of fact I like Make
(all) (he likes Make)

My boss stands mum when we’re having a scrum
And I’m building rules on the fly
She’s writing CMake and thinks I’m a flake
When I yell as devops goes by

I like Make. It makes me a jolly good fellow
I like Make. It helps me unwind
And sometimes it makes me feel mellow
(all) (Makes him feel mellow)

C++’s too rough, Java costs too much
Rust puts my mouth in gear.
This little refrain should help me explain
As a matter of fact I like Make
(all) (he likes Make)

Last night I dreamed and would not awake.
And I went to a place so swell
Oh, the build was clear and written with make
Then they turned it all into shell
(all) (aw)

I like Make. It makes me a jolly good fellow
I like Make. It helps me unwind
And sometimes it makes me feel mellow
(all) (Makes him feel mellow)

C++’s too rough, Java costs too much
Rust puts my mouth in gear.
This little refrain should help me explain
As a matter of fact I like Make
(all) (he likes Make)

Firefox vs Chrome

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Microsoft recently announced they were moving their Edge browser to the Chromium renderer. That makes me sad, not least for the risk of monoculture, but mostly because Google does not have my best interests at heart.

Google is an advertising company. They will not allow anything into Chromium that will have an adverse effect on advertising. To whit, anything that discourages human interaction will likely never make it into Chromium.

Eye catching is the name of the game in advertising. Any way to drag my attention to a particular point is the goal. We humans, having evolved as a potential prey animal, have a finely tuned visual system that will alert us to movement. “Oh, crap! Leopard in the leaves! Run!”

Case in point: animated gifs. Blinking, flashing, obnoxious animated gif have been the advertisement standard since Netscape banner ads debuted. Then came Flash. Now HTML5 has the <video> tag. My brain feels under assault.

Firefox has had the ability to disable animated gifs for years and years. There is still no built-in way to disable gif in Chrome. There are plug-ins that claim to halt/block animated gif, but I’ve never found one that actually works. The only solution to Chrome has been to globally block images and cherry pick sites to allow images (a whitelist). Firefox +1, Chrome -1.

Flashblock and other plugins would cure the scourge of Flash videos. Those plugins also made most of the web loading times tolerable. Chrome has “ask permission to run” for their built-in Flash player. Firefox +1, Chrome +1.

And now Flash is dying (buh bye) and HTML5 <video> is taking over. Video support is baked into the browser. Now the web is all about <video> advertising. Firefox to the rescue again. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033  Seems to work so far. Firefox +1, Chrome -1.

Total score so far: Firefox 3, Chrome 1.  Long live Firefox.

Firefox about:config

image.animation_mode;none  <– disable animated gifs (has worked for years)

media.autoplay.default;1  <– stop auto play HTML video (works so far)