marilac was the virtual server that hosted all of the company operations for many years. Today is its last day.
Today I’ve finished moving all of the hosting, including this blog.
Now everything is hosted with mythic beasts.
Goodbye marilac, you served well for 23 years (2002-2025)
Bytemark built you well
A new lego star wars game (new to me anyway, my copy just finished downloading!)
I like what I see so far, the story is exciting, I love the introduction video, it has that “star wars is epic” feel about it.
Flying around is great and the episode 1 pod-race felt really, really fast.
Netflix has been suffering from Disney taking all their content and refusing to play any more.
Still more Korean dramas on Netflix than Disney though…
After a bit of a gap, SQLEditor 4 is now pretty much at the point of a public release.
Thanks to everyone who has been trying beta versions and the most helpful bug reports!
Finished, see the blog post:
🙂
Recently I’ve been working on providing SQLEditor with a dark mode canvas and here is the current development version (running in dark mode):
This work should hopefully appear in the next beta release.
And of course, with SQLEditor you can choose which option you like, whether light UI with light content, dark UI with light content or now dark UI with dark content.
Coming soon!
Absolutely awesome art + useful lessons for people trying to improve:
https://www.instagram.com/grizandnorm/
This is the link I was trying to find for L today but couldn’t..
Relieved that I found it 😌
The old Apple Java-dev mailing list and all its archives appear to have been deleted.
The mailman system is reporting “No such list java-dev“
Apple is really pushing the whole notarization thing right now.
It does seem a bit like the apocryphal story of boiling the frog, adding small additional restrictions on software freedom each year until the whole platform is under absolute control. (I really, really hope that’s not what’s happening)
At a practical level, I’ve been working away on implementing notarization with SQLEditor, which has caused some issues because of some of the dependencies that are used.
Even the Sparkle application updater requires some tweaking to the signing, which seems surprising, and the bundled Java had some issues too.
10.15 seems to be requiring notarization on newly built apps and I’m hoping to get a better view of the new operating system as soon as I can get the new beta running in a virtual machine. (Maybe Apple could build some virtual machines and save some time here?)
So there’s been a bit of a gap in the release schedule and some of the new work that’s been going on has been delayed. But unfortunately this has to take priority at the moment.
Hopefully I can get this stuff finished soon and work can continue on more interesting things.
Another day, another attack on processor architectures.
I remember during the computer architecture classes at university marvelling at how clever the processor architectures were. Branch prediction, the challenges of process management and context switching. How everything could be managed so carefully and all the book-keeping kept up-to-date! But it all worked and it worked very well, so I was extremely impressed.
Then when hyper-threading arrived, I was even more impressed. Now I could get most of the benefits of four cores, using only the hardware of two cores.The slight downside was some bits were shared, but this didn’t matter, because it had all been carefully thought through. It was produced by the same kind of people who I had marvelled at previously, and so it was obvious that it was a good thing.
Alas, it seems that hyper-threading (at least on Intel processors) has been over-sold, and doesn’t meet its promise. Data apparently can leak from shared components which, in some applications, is a bad thing.
Since my view must be absolute, I previously adored hyper-threading and now hate it absolutely.
Or, more sensibly, perhaps it’s a case of studying where the risks are and taking the performance boost where the risk can be mitigated and turning off hyper-threading where security is more important.