weeknotes 12

baby’s first 3d print

I finally actually used the 3d printer!

As a resin printer, the Elegoo Mars has a high potential for mess, but I’m a lot less scared of it now, so might print some more things.

probot settings

A while ago the Probot Settings app was brought to my attention as a way of standardizing GitHub configuration for an organization. I spent an evening falling down that rabbit hole for my personal account and found that, actually the advertized inheritance from a .github repository doesn’t work. So I forked and fixed it (giant commit with a not great commit message, sorry). The Probot framework made it pretty easy to deploy to Heroku, too, so now it’s running for my user account.

I might work out how to make my changes a bit more optional and try to contribute them upstream, but given that the current maintainers have been giving holding responses on the issue for at least 2 years, I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

licensing

The mimemagic licence fiasco dominated my week. It’s hard to know what I would do in a situation like that. In practice I would probably be very reactive and go nuclear like the maintainer did. I think whatever you do, someone’s going to shout at you. It’s just annoying that the response was to relicense, instead of thinking about how to fix it and keep it MIT, and to release that without a klaxon to let people know the licence had changed.

A subtlety that a lot of people seemed to miss was that due to the implementation details of the package, it had always been in violation of the GPL. Lots of people complaining about the version yanking and licence change seemed to be unaware of that.

The incident caused us to investigate a couple of licence checking tools: FOSSA and GitHub’s licensed. Of the two, FOSSA does a better job of discovering licences than licensed, but it’s also ludicrously expensive. licensed only knows about a small number of licences. A small project I tested it on had ~900 dependencies in its graph and ~100 of them were marked as having none or other licences (FOSSA had trouble with ~10). Imagine having to review that many licences for hundreds of repositories, and keep it up to date over time… It makes me wonder how many other violations are just lying around in everyone’s dependency graphs.

tv

We finished the Man in the High Castle. I found the ending quite satisfying, considering it was clearly cut short by a season. I have mixed feelings about the show, though. Some of the most sympathetic characters are actual fascists, and I don’t want to sympathize with them…

roleplaying

I just finished a really good session. I’d had a big chase scene prepared (I did my prep in advance?!) but no plan survives contact with the enemy players, so instead I had to improvize a load of social interactions, which I’m not usually great at. But it was fun! And my days of worldbuilding procrastination helped (it’s not a big waste of time like everyone tries to tell you).