Adam Keys is Thinking

Best albums, singles of the years. Who is better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Top 100 smooth jazz to fall asleep to. We love to put music into boxes and then rank the items in those boxes. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the string section of the orchestra, as rated by the string section.

There's a bit of a tie for first place. The violins and cellos feel equally strongly that they are the best. The cellos and basses are equal mixes of ambivalence to these status games and envy that they are not in the violin or cello sections.

Here's a sampling of the sentiment data our polling gathered, aggregated by section.

Violins: I’m better than everyone else or I’m better than that violinist over there.

Violas: I wish I played cello. Or, that I'd gone to that writing workshop.

Cellos: I am underrated, more composers should write good solo work for cello. I am going to use every minute of this melody to shine. I am overflowing with emotion, which you will hear through my extremely wide vibrato.

Basses: I wish I played cello. Or jazz. Or that this instrument was as loud as the brass section. Or that I was out at the loading dock, smoking.

I spent some time this weekend attempting to make front-end code with Tailwind CSS. Tailwind is a utility-first approach to CSS wherein styles are organized into classes by how they function, not what they style. Instead of avatar-image as a class name on a user’s photo, you would probably have m-4, roughly meaning “margin four”. It’s a bit cryptic at first!

Reading through all the documentation before getting started is a good idea! Once I read through it and tinkered with it (or any other utility-first CSS approach) for a bit, it was pretty easy to use. The point where it clicked for me was when I thought “hmm, this needs a little room on the top” and then “that means I want mt-2, perfect!” Having a good autocomplete for class names helps a lot too.

I started off trying to use Tailwind in a Code Sandbox, but it seems like the community hasn’t quite figured that one out yet. That said, once I cloned a not-quite-working sandbox locally and ran it, I was off to the races.

I’ll probably read more through the component gallery next. If I can get closer to being to thinking/sketching up a UI component and then coding it up in just HTML and utility CSS, that will be a huge step forward for my craft.

Onward and upward! 📈

I’m refreshing my understanding of mainstay Rails libraries lately¹. This week, it’s OmniAuth.

When you sign-in (authenticate) to website A (say dev.to) via website B (say GitHub), that’s delegated authentication and the protocol underneath it is OAuth2. OAuth2 is a bit tricky because there is a lot of back-and-forth between the service that the user signs into (GitHub) and the service that you’re signing into with that authentication (dev.to).

Once you’ve set it up set it up, OmniAuth encapsulates much of the back-and-forth with a Strategy class. A bunch of folks out on the internet have bravely contributed literally hundreds of strategies for various services that provide OAuth2 sign-in, e.g. omniauth-twitter or omniauth-github.

A nice thing about the Strategy implementation is that each phase of the OAuth2 callback scheme² is a method; you can overwrite each one to handle the particularities of the provider you’re integrating with. For example, the “callback phase” is the most common extension point since every app is likely to want to store user information and access tokens differently.

In the wild, OmniAuth is often used in combination with Devise for user models which in turn uses Warden for authentication.

Also nifty to note: the Rakefile for OmniAuth has developer tasks for benchmarking performance and measuring memory overhead. It’s pretty awesome that an essential gem like this has that level of detail in its maintenance.

The time required to do a simplistic OAuth verification is negligible; about as fast as a call to Redis:

% rake perf:ips
Warming up --------------------------------------
                 ips     1.210k i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
                 ips     12.329k (± 5.1%) i/s -     61.710k in   5.019465s

I have no baseline to compare this with, but memory usage looks like this:

% rake perf:mem|head
Total allocated: 147317 bytes (831 objects)
Total retained:  60863 bytes (152 objects)

allocated memory by gem
-----------------------------------
     74492  lib
     52894  rubygems
     12659  omniauth/lib
      4200  rack-2.0.7
      2832  hashie-3.6.0

So that’s OmniAuth. If your Rails app is more than a few years old and integrates with other services, you’re probably already using it. Thanks, OmniAuth community!

Gorillaz, Demon Days - this one holds up, still a solid album.

News to me, Moby has been making extended ambient tracks in some manner of partnership with the Calm app. They make good “I need to focus and get stuff done” music, but aren’t particularly high energy, if that’s your thing. Says Moby, “my suggestion is to not approach this as music, but to approach it as a sleep aid or tool”. Okay!

I would like to some day learn enough piano to play and sing the songs of the original Van Halen line-up, e.g. “Panama”, “Hot for Teacher”, “Beautiful Girls”, and “Unchained”. My theory here is, the original Van Halen is very Vaudeville, except louder and more late-seventies. Corollary: played literally and with a little bit of a vaudevillian spin, they’d work perfectly. Case in point: “Ice Cream Man”.

Somehow, I’ve never mentioned Soulection Radio. It’s equal parts new R&B/hip-hop, classic soul, and a lot of sample culture. It’s one of the best things going on Apple Music, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

They’re on our phones, in our voicemails. Computers or sometimes even humans calling in massive volumes, funneling people into bad purchases. Questionable insurance at best, outright fraud at worst. Sometimes, depending on the state you live in, politics!

There’s no reason to pick up on an unknown number in 2019, or even 2009. For many of us, Dunbar’s number for phone calls is in the low single digits. Outside those few numbers, why answer an even remotely questionable number, ever?

If you squint right, robocalls appear they were  designed for the technological landscape of 1995, of Friends and cordless, landline phones. Robocalls,  could have made sense in 1995. You get a call, it’s Friday, there are no repeats of your favorite show on, you’re a bit bored. Sure, maybe you’ll pick up. Or in 1992, when receiving a phone call was not only a big, exciting deal!, but also a social imperative. You can’t just let the answering machine pick up? It could be…someone. Probably a human!

Sadly, the technological landscape I just described is exactly folks who aren’t “technology natives”. I suspect that’s largely who Robocalls prey on: the bored and lonely, those who grew up before the pace of technological evolution surged and haven’t developed a layered defense to those who would prey on them.

Space isn’t a dead-end, it’s just taking us longer to figure out than our earliest trajectory. The New Yorker has a great look at The Race to Develop the Moon for industrial purposes:

Lunar construction projects now look feasible. “Down the hall, we have a telerobotics lab,” Burns said. “You could print components of habitats, of telescopes. You use the lunar regolith”—the dust of the moon—“as your printing material. You could print the wrench you need to fix something.” Fifteen years ago, the moon was believed to be a dry rock; now we know that there’s water there. Both private industry and national agencies regard the mining of water and precious materials as something that’s not too far off.

Only twelve people have walked on the moon, all of them between the summer of 1969 and Christmas, 1972. All the moonwalkers were men, all were American, all but one were Boy Scouts, and almost all listened to country-and-Western music on their way to the moon; they earned eight dollars a day, minus a fee for a bed on the spacecraft.

Buzz Aldrin had hoped, and briefly expected, that it would be he, and not Neil Armstrong, who would take the first human step on the moon. The astronaut Michael Collins, who manned the control module that orbited the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin walked below, has said of Aldrin that he “resents not being first on the moon more than he appreciates being second.” On the moon, Armstrong took photos of Aldrin posing, but Aldrin took none of Armstrong doing the same. One of the few photos that shows Neil Armstrong on the moon was taken by Armstrong himself—of his reflection in Aldrin’s helmet, as Aldrin salutes the flag. We are petty and misbehave on Earth; we will be petty and misbehave in space.

​Futurism isn’t dead, it’s just not all around us like Tomorrowland promised.

Into the Great Wide Open strikes me as a singular album. Perhaps it’s not even the best Tom Petty album, but it stands out from the rest in some kind of way.

Maybe it’s nostalgia? It’s the first Petty album I bought.

Maybe it’s humble? None of the songs are flashy, sitting right on the fence between songwriting and rock ‘n roll.

Maybe it’s the lyrics? I’ve listened to this album a lot, so I’ve actually heard the lyrics and they’re the right balance between clever and storytelling, for me.

Maybe it’s Jeff Lynne? Love that guy’s production work. Great touch.

It’s not too long, it’s not too short. All the moving parts do their job without getting showy. Perhaps, it’s just more than the sum of its parts.