Peaches the Cat

Our family welcomed a new cat last week. He’s about a year old. We adopted him from Humane Animal Rescue last Thursday and he’s been adjusting to his new home ever since. The child named him Peaches, which is about as apt a name as I can think of.

He’s still in quarantine for now but he’s briefly met the older cat a few times and they seem to be on amicable terms. We’ll see what happens when he has the run of the house.

I had to write the following to my colleagues at Canonical today:

Warthogs,

After just shy of 6 years I’m afraid my time here has come to an end.
This has been a dream job for me, in no small part due to the people
I’ve gotten to work with and call my friends.

So thanks to all of you, especially the oft-renamed team that for now is
called system enablement. It has been an absolute pleasure and I hope to
see you again.

Cheers,
~Scott

I meant every word of it.

As it stands I’m on the lookout for some new challenges, but first I think I’ll take a few days and enjoy the extra time with my family.

I wish I’d seen this before we redid our kitchen.

In the 1940s, inventor Maiju Gebhard calculated that the average household spent almost 30,000 hours washing and drying dishes over the course of a lifetime. Machines take less time but still require loading and unloading, cost money and occupy quite a bit of kitchen real estate. Sink-side racks add labor and clutter while taking up space

Source: Finnish the Dishes: Simple Nordic Design Beats Dishwashers & Drying Racks – 99% Invisible

dryer lint

My team at work has been focused on snaps this year and one thing we’ve tried to do internally is establish a set of best practices for snap packaging software. Toward that end I’ve been working on a little tool I’m calling snaplint to encode those practices and verify that we’re following them.

Right now you can run snaplint against your snapcraft project directory
and it will scan the prime subdirectory for the following things:

  • copyright (basically that you included usr/share/doc/*copyright*) for
    any stage-packages
  • developer cruft (things like header and object files or static libs
    that might have made their way into your snap)
  • libraries (examine the ELF files in your snap and look for libraries
    which aren’t used)

The next things I’m planning on adding are:

  • checking for copyright info from apps/parts themselves.
  • checking for mixing of incompatible licenses

I would love to hear suggestions on further improvements.

You can find the source at https://github.com/ssweeny/snaplint

And, of course if you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 or later you can try it on your own machine with:
$ snap install snaplint
$ snaplint path/to/your/project

I made myself a profile over at Goodreads, since the text file I’ve been using to keep track of books has gotten untenable.

Friend link thingy is here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

On a related note, last night I finished Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie, which is the third book in a mind-bending and ultimately very rewarding trilogy. Highly recommended.