Back in October of 2015, I started writing the following, and never finished or published it:

I upgraded the Mac to Yosemite a year or so ago. Yesterday, I wanted to do some development on a project that I’d been idly thinking about. Unfortunately, it required a dependency in a package I’d installed via Mac Ports. I tried to upgrade it, but got an error that I was compiling for the wrong Darwin version. This means I haven’t actually updated any of my Ports since upgrading to Yosemite! For shame.

Rather than fix Mac Ports for Yosemite, and then again when I upgrade to El Capitan, I decided it was time to do that upgrade and then fix it. I also thought … hey, there’re all these neat new container technologies and configuration tools. Maybe I should look into some of those, and save myself the agony next time around.

So I dove into some articles, and pretty soon had become a seething mass of quivering rage.

To set up my environment in Docker, I need Docker, and a VM. I could set it up using Vagrant, or, as some people recommend, Vagrant running Chef or Solo. Then, of course, I need to set up some replacement for vboxsf so I can access my files in the Virtual environment. Each of these requires its own configuration, of course.

Today, I was struggling with something similar. I’m building an iOS app. Years ago, I’d built a few native iOS apps, but I’ve forgotten everything I ever knew about Objective C, and I don’t know Swift. Plus, I need to publish for Android too. So, six months ago, when I started this process, I decided I’d be using Ionic Framework. It had the advantage that it was based on AngularJS, and I’ve done some work in Angular.

Now that I’m starting, I discover that Ionic 2 is the way to go — oh wait, not Ionic 3 was just released! And my AngularJS experience is ancient v1.2.x, knowledge which is largely obsolete. I’d be learning Angular 2 — no, we’re up to Angular 4 now — so better get cracking on that.

I remember, many, many years ago, how excited I was was there was a new version of Windows. I couldn’t wait to get all those 3.5″ floppies home so I could upgrade my machine to the latest and greatest. Now, I dread each year when a new version of Mac OS comes out, and I need to upgrade and track down all the things that broke, and rebuild my ports and and and… Not to mention when I installed a recent Linux on a VM to host some sites, and discovered to my chagrin that systemd has replaced all manner of things Unixy that I’ve been doing mostly-the-same for thirty years.

Well shit. There it is. I’ve become the grumpy old software guy. “Why are they changing things? Why can’t they just leave them alone?” The fact is, some of these changes are indisputably improvements. But so many of them seem to be changes for the sake of change. We have to have “new, improved!” all the time, even if it’s just changing the syntax (why, oh why, is *ngFor so much better than ng-repeat !?).

Part of this is struggling with obsolescence in general. It’s hard being middle-aged in tech. You can’t help seeing that look in the eyes of the youngsters: that old guy is so backwards. But it goes beyond that. My neighborhood is changing around me. Younger families are moving in, and suddenly I’m that guy who’s been in the neighborhood for a long time. I find myself navigating by past landmarks — it’s across from the Burger King, er, those condos, right by the Foster’s Freeze, er, Dunkin’ Donuts. The world is changing around me rapidly. The political world I grew up in has shifted. Every year, I see more obituaries for people I know, or whose names I know. Things that were true when I was a child are no longer true.

I have vague memories of hearing these thoughts expressed when I was younger by people I thought were old. I didn’t understand them then. I’m beginning to understand them now.

I just have to remind myself that change is constant, and not all bad. When I was a kid, there were no known exoplanets. When I was in my twenties, I’d come home from a night out, and I’d be stinking of second-hand cigarette smoke. We had to struggle with card catalogs to find books in the library. When trying to reach my friends, I’d have to leave messages on their home answering machines, and I’d have to call from a pay phone where I’d enter in a multidigit phone card number. If you were interested in obscure music or books, you’d have to read tiny ads in the back of magazines to track down sources or information. LGBQT people were all but invisible, and same-sex marriage was barely even in the realm of speculative fiction.

So, that being said, I’d like change to slow down a bit. Could I please just finish a project before all the constituent languages, libraries, and frameworks have a major version increment?

In the garden, we have a variety of highly aggressive, imperialistic vines that compete for space.

In one hotly-contested piece of real estate, have creeping fig (Ficus pumila), pink jasmine (Jasminium polyanthum), asparagus fern (I think we have both Asparagus setaceus and Asparagus aethiopicus), fo ti (Fallopia multiflora), and red trumpet vine (Campsis radicans). The soil there is just a solid mat of roots and runners.

I propose a very very slow reality TV series. We get a big pentagon of fertile soil, light it evenly from all sides, water it gently on a regular basis, and plant one of of these vines in each corner. After a few years, we’ll see which is the victorious species!

I needed to check that the index process that populates the Solr index succeeded and didn’t die during the night, leaving an empty index.

To make things more complicated, the versions of Solr and nagios in use are probably not the latest.

The check_solr -o numdocs command doesn’t work with our Solr configuration. But the internet tells me that the Solr query http://localhost:8983/solr/select/?debug=q‌uery&q=*:* includes the size of the result set. Testing it, I found this to be true:

<response>
   <lst name="responseHeader">
      <int name="status">0</int>
      <int name="QTime">0
      <lst name="params">
         <str name="q">*:*</str>
         <str name="debug">q‌uery</str>
      </lst>
   </lst>
   <result name="response" numFound="9832" start="0">
      <doc>
...

I want to use nagios to check that that numFound is never zero (or too small). I thought I’d just be able to use a nagios regex:

check_http -H localhost -p 8983 -u "/solr/select/?debug=query&q=*:*" -lr 'numFound=\"\d{2+}"'

It didn’t work. To make a long story short, there’s regex and then there’s regex. The kind that works for nagios is:

check_http -H localhost -p 8983 -u "/solr/select/?debug=query&q=*:*" -lr 'numFound=\"[1-9][0-9][0-9]'

This guarantees at least a hundred docs are in the index.

We’ve already established that PHP compares things weirdly.

It shouldn’t surprise us that JavaScript does too.

Consider the following:

> var k=['hello'];
undefined
> (k=='hello'?'Equals':'Nope');
Equals


Now, purists will point out that that’s an “equals” operator not an “identity” operator, but I mean seriously? We’re just going to pretend that


> ['hello']=='hello'
true


I think I’ll just go and rewrite all my client side code in C now.

The Goodyear Blimp was passing overhead. It’s noisy! Since it was pretty low, I tried to take an iPhone picture. In the shot, I got a serendipitous cameo by one of the local Anna’s Hummingbirds.

Click to see bigger.