iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I'm saying no to the entire west end. I foresee drainage problems.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

If you see this, we IMPLORE you to post a picture from whatever device you're using without explanation.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

That gives me an idea. I use various "___ on Black" colour schemes in terminals. Why not employ some CSS thinking and come up with different and more appealing text colours? Bake those into iTerm2 dynamic profiles and voila, "Emerald on Black" and so on.

A screen cap showing a list of colour names such as emerald-400 and indigo-300 along with their hex RGB values, each line in the appropriate colour.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

In my personal music rankings, the best bangers/duds ratios are kind of an unusual pairing. AC/DC and Tedeschi Trucks Band. Well would you look at that.

Calender for August 2026 showing concerts by AC/DC and Tedeschi Trucks Band one week apart.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

Gotta take microclimates into account. Where I am, we have gone weeks lately barely if ever hitting 60 (uh, 15.5 I guess in Canada).

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

I found the setting, I changed the setting from what it's showing here. Music still starts when the car turns on. The flip side is, if music is paused and then I press play on the phone, it doesn't start through the car speakers. (That's been true since the start.)

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

For me, the worst UX with settings is trying to find the keyboard shortcuts dialog on macOS. Because there are a zillion "keyboard" items and a comparable number of "shortcut" items.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

I have the opposite experience. I think database pioneer Michael Stonebraker looks just like my high school graduation picture. But only when we are both wearing somewhat oversized and slightly tinted glasses. No one has ever brought this to my attention.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Case in point about the wonky sorting. They always said, someday SELECT DISTINCT might not implicitly ORDER BY. I was skeptical! The database got upgraded sometime after the codebase was frozen, to a version that needed explicit ORDER BY, and some of the alphabetical listings... weren't anymore.

Oracle8i list of Master Index letters, with the letters out of order due to changes in interaction between DISTINCT and ORDER BY clauses.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Users tended not to draw the same distinctions as we did between SQL syntax, PL/SQL syntax, functions, packages, etc. (Cf. Conway's Law.) So we mashed 'em all up together in a single cheatsheet. Later, SQL*Plus keywords were added too. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway'...

Oracle8i reference cheatsheet for SQL and PL/SQL keywords, all combined together.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Master Index, Master Glossary were too labor-intensive to keep constructing by hand. Entries were scraped out of the HTML and queried via PL/SQL. Each letter page is a 3-way self join. It's a tossup if ordering works everywhere; I was skeptical if ORDER BY really was needed for every DISTINCT query.

Page out of the Oracle8i Master Index, showing entries for letter L.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

One usability test subject scoffed at the 3-letter shortcuts that jump into the big list of doc titles. I asked how he would solve a performance problem. He instantly clicked on TUN to find "Tuning". I made special shortcuts TUN and PER - the official title is "Designing and Tuning for Performance".

Oracle8i big alphabetical list of books.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

I went to Oracle7 docs to see if that version had constraints. Because I remember documenting constraint stuff in Oracle8i - was that when they first appeared? Wow, what a blast from the past. Download Netscape or IE to use the Java version of the doc UI. "Applicaton" Programming Interfaces, cute.

Screencap of opening screen from Oracle7 Release 7.3.4 doc library. Showcasing some very old web technologies.

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John Russell @max-webster.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Uh oh, shades of the Fail Whale.

Bluesky home page showing a red "internal server error" banner.

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