Similar to the Post-Mortem 2021 that I wrote last year,
it will be mainly about softwares, experiments and projects.
...I'm still waiting for the end of the world! Maybe this year?
The "What went well" and "What to try / continue" parts will be on projects I did or I will do.
The "What went wrong" part will focus on softwares stability which I'm still finding this area broken and worse than ever.
We will need a revolution for this part (AI?) or do we need to go back to the old fashion way ?
One thing that amazes me the last few years is the cost and resources needed today to create new projects or update projects with some basic features.
We are living in a time where we have so many tools, quickly access to information and a lot of power resources (e.g. cloud, services)
but it takes forever to release simple things that took a fraction of people 15-30 years ago.
- Notepad++ : "Initial release 24 November 2003; 19 years ago"
- SDI and MDI :
"MFC makes it easy to work with both single-document interface (SDI) and multiple-document interface (MDI) applications.
SDI applications allow only one open document frame window at a time. MDI applications allow multiple document frame windows to be open in the same instance of an application."
Same patterns for some big tech that spent millions or billions to create a product that almost no one will use (with or without legs).
I'm wondering what if The Onion released this video 13 years ago was a kind of prophetic guess where the productivity is gone, too much overhead or delegate ?
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail." - Abraham Kaplan / Abraham Maslow
What went well
- Audio version added for every blog post. It's also give me an hint about how long it takes to read a post
- Album package added in .wav, .ogg, .mp3 and .flac formats inside the Audio Assets page
- Youtube Youtube mirror added on my website (auto generated with youtube-dl and MisterPug)
- No XMAS project this year. I continued an old project (70-70-19) that I began in mid 2021. It's a very partial time project but I will release it when needed (for free)
- I released a project called git-whale to help to synchronize git repositories with some options (fetch, pull, submodule, ...)
- When I was a teenager (199X), my friends and I "created" a verbal trivia game where the goal was to link actors and movies together so I decided this year to do a web version of this app called Ma'am Popcorn!
- Gallery: There are a lot of social networks and websites to upload pictures but I decided to centralize my pictures so I created a section on my website.
One more reason: I think some social networks will change in the next few years and I don't want to duplicate content (pictures).
Everything is automatically generated. My tools (system.exe) will gather information from all web pages and generates this Gallery with some options like "Preview", "Source", "Slideshow", "Thumbnails":
- I bought some books for the year 2022 and one thing I tried was to read very old and/or used non IT books.
Some books were from centuries ago or even 1-2 thousands years ago.
Why old books?
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." - Karl Max
Also: "Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. The concept of historic recurrence has variously been applied to overall human history (e.g., to the rises and falls of empires), to repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity."
For the used books, there is an option on Amazon and if it's cheaper and in good condition, I target the used version (often sold through Goodwill).
Also there are book stores in San Francisco that I like called Green Apple Books where they sell new and used books.
I bought "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman there.
- I did some experiments (as usual) and if it's interesting, I will or have already released a blog post about that
"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times." - G. Michael Hopf
What went wrong
This section is about softwares stability, same as last year.
Please take note that I have more than 10 computers and halves are on Windows (7, 10, 11).
Below is a quick list of defects that I got during the 2022 year:
Android
- Bottom interface like the back button and switch button disappeared randomly on my phone. I need to turn off/on the phone to reset this state
- Google Chrome on my Android removed the option to bookmark a page. I need to go to "chrome://flags" to re-enable this feature.
This feature was already there 30 years ago with the Mosaic web browser.
Chrome / Google
- "Show bookmark bar" toggle flag didn't work. I clicked inside the Google Chrome app (iconito or not) on my main monitor and the bookmark bar appeared or vanished on my left monitor (another instances of Google Chrome)
- crashpad_handler.exe: party of spawning process
Windows
- A Window update resetted my file explorer configuration (e.g. file extension, hidden files) and another update on another computer my network configuration
- I got this issue on my main computer:
"Due to a memory leak bug with the default Photos app, users face the Shell Infrastructure Host High CPU usage issue when browsing through a large number of photos. Even after closing the faulty app, sihost.exe still lingers around with high CPU usage for hours, which can understandably be quite annoying.
Even though this bug has been around for quite some time, Microsoft still hasn’t addressed it. As such, as of July 2022, there is no way to permanently fix the Shell Infrastructure Host High CPU Usage issue at its root."
- I opened all softwares that I needed to work and Windows 10 restarted automatically while I was preparing a coffee...
- Windows freeze during an auto-update and stuck on the lock screen with no options to interact (need to do a cold shutdown)
- Windows 10 calculator fell in a strange state where I cannot use my mouse with it:
- File Explorer stuck on "Working on It" (typing c:\ directly inside the bar will stop the infinite search...)
- Visual Studio asked credential every time I launched this one for a while
- Visual Studio ClangFormat: out of memory:
- Windows time on delete items (stuck forever):
- A fresh Windows 10 installation, a visual studio compilation and Windows Security detected my website tools (System.exe) as a virus:
- High cpu usage of Antimalware service when compiling with visual studio on the same projects and same files. I added an exclusion for that
- Same pattern when searching with VS Code
Meta / Facebook / Instagram
- A messenger and a Facebook page opened on my computer. I received a call and one of them will "rung" forever during the conversation
- Notification inside messenger desynchronized between my computer and my phone
- I didn't open Instagram for one month and the day I used, I got this message multi time during the day:
Vampire Survivor
- Version 1.0 released: I tried this version and it seems that all my progress/achievements were erased. Steam synchronization or from the game ?
Not a big deal since I will restart a new game in 2023.
This game is amazing and it's my game of the year!
You probably saw this meme a couple of time if you work in IT:
"Try Catch Stack overflow (TcSo) Is a collection of Try statements in all the programming languages under the globe which catches the exception and searches for the cause of the caught exception in the stack overflow automatically."
[Javascript]
try{
// Try something wrong here
}
catch(e){
var xcb="http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=[js]+"+e.message;
window.open(xcb, '_blank');
}
Inside the README.md: "As you know, most of the developers waste their time by searching for the generated error on Google and finding out the right solution for those from stack overflow. What if we can fully automate this process. TcSo Is a collection of Try statements in all the programming languages under the globe which catches the exception and searches for the cause of the caught exception in the stack overflow automatically. So whenever a new exception occurs, it will automatically open the stack overflow page of that exception in your browser."
NOTE TO MYSELF: If one day, I need to integrate or add this kind of code. Please think about switching careers or retirement.
"The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What to try / continue
2023 will be a year of updates...
- I would like to focus on some existing projects I did by adding more features or improvements
- I have a good stack of books to read and I will also revisit some books that I read
- Maybe 1-2 tiny projects
- Release a blog post every month
- Experiment, experiment and experiment...
"... Two months in, it was clear the schedule wasn’t going to work. It was a masterpiece in Excel but a disaster in reality." - Mick Gordon
2023
There is one movie I'm waiting for 2023 called Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan:
"The story of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his role in the development of the atomic bomb."
I think 2023 will be an interesting year with some surprises!
Thanks for reading,
JS.
"Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
