As I wrote about here yesterday I am taking my exploration of Kotlin to the next level by looking at performance metrics using the Computer Language Benchmark Game .  As of right now I’ve completed my first two steps: got the benchmark building/running Kotlin code, and doing a straight port of the suite (follow along at the Gitlab project ).  This was really 90% IntelliJ auto-converting followed by me fixing compiling errors (and submitting a nasty conversion bug that came up from one test back to JetBrains).  So now onto the results! Well, actually not so fast on that one…

A little over a year ago I switched from the FitBit ecosystem to the Garmin one when I traded in my ChargeHR for a VivoactiveHR, reviewed here .  I made many compromises when I made the move to pick up a lot of additional capabilities, but now that the FitBit Ionic is on the horizon it may be time to re-evaluate that equation to see if it still balances out.

Like many people I got into my software development stack rut; complaining about the things I hated about it and why I wanted to change. The Java stack had been treating me ever increasingly well, especially with the refactoring of Spring into what it is today, but the language itself and it’s stagnation bothered me and had me starting to gaze at .NET now that it’s open source. I am now officially done with that exploration and will be sticking with the JVM-based system for the time being. This is driven by three major things: Kotlin, JavaFX, and the fully open source nature of the pieces I use.

I am totally loving ArsTechnica’s two part series on the history of the IBM-PC (Part 1 , Part2 ).  However there are some glaring omissions around the MS-DOS part of the story that I think they should have added in at least an afterward.  My write-up here is based substantially on other articles but most importantly this article from the Computer History Museum .

Although my primary development language of recent years has been Java I have been itching to get to a more modern language.  Yes, Oracle made lots of good strides with Java 8 but they are still falling woefully behind.  As a former heavy .NET developer the open sourcing of C# and making it truly cross platform was my original go-to choice.  You can see that in articles I wrote here and contributions I made to Sharpen to get it working under Java 8, with the new date types etc.  Throughout my experiments with C# I refused to go back to Windows, and sadly while there have been great strides the bottom line is that Linux is a third rate supported platform compared to Windows and the not quite so poorly treated macOS.  But what alternative do I have?  The answer came with the increased news coverage, dare I say hype, around Kotlin.  This was a language I looked at notionally before but now I did a deep dive and I have to say I am really liking it.

At the end of June, part of the way through this year’s 7th goal accountability phase I decided to finally get my shit together.  I carried that momentum into the 8th phase.  I haven’t done too many summaries this year, since I’ve mostly been sucking wind, but I have been keeping up my daily grading.  Now that I’m dialed in from the goal perspective, so too will I be dialed in on reporting it. I am happy to report straight A’s across all my goals, finally!

Apparently there are some very unscrupulous people who are faking their solar eclipse glasses to make it look like legitimately rated ones.  It goes without saying that if you don’t have legitimate solar eclipse glasses then don’t even think about looking directly at the eclipse, no not even with layers of polarized sunglasses.  If you can’t find them last minute then make an eclipse projector box such as the suggestion from Popular Science or this pinhole model .  However now that I know that there are people who are low enough to fake out eclipse glasses just having ones rated is insufficient comfort for me.  So, how do you make sure you don’t burn out your eyes using some something some POS manufacturer cranked out (they should be prosecuted)?  You test! These are the tests I’m doing to confirm for me I can safely use my own glasses to view the eclipse.  Use any of these steps at your own risk.

This has been quite a year of lifestyle transformations for a lot of people I know, and a lot of it has been spawned by documentaries.  Health documentaries aren’t new, perhaps the grand-daddy of this current generation going all the way back to Super Size Me in 2004.  There is also no shortage of new awareness about problems with the Standard American Diet (SAD) between all of the various diet and lifestyle trends.  It therefore makes sense that year after year more documentaries are being cranked out covering the topic of diet and health from a myriad of points of view.  However the quality of these documentaries to seems to be plummeting, but they still seem to be showing success into converting people to healthier diets.  The question I struggle with then is if that’s a net positive or still a net negative.

I’ve been a computer geek literally my whole life, at least as far back as I can remember.  I grew up getting “online” back before there was a thing called “internet” and quickly transitioned into all of the technologies associated with it. What started off as costing way too much to be online and with mostly text based interactions has become, as we all know, a pervasive and universal multimedia rich infinite stream of connectivity.  But is that connectivity too much, or at least too much for me?