Reflecting on the year 2018
Reflection on the year 2018, checking progress of the goals, and some numbers.
Journal
2018
75 posts
The Little Drummer Girl
The Little Drummer Girl is a British-American limited series. It aired on BBC One and AMC from 28 October 2018. Park Chan-wook directed it. The show adapts John le Carré's 1983 novel. Florence Pugh plays Charlie, a young English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence to infiltrate a Palestinian bombing network in the late 1970s.
TV Series
Bundles and Packages
The article clarifies the distinction between bundles and packages on Apple platforms, often confused due to overlapping use cases.
Development
CharacterSet
The article introduces CharacterSet, a Foundation type in Swift for manipulating Unicode scalar values, distinct from Set<Character> despite its name, as it conforms to the SetAlgebra protocol rather than storing Character values directly.
Development
Monthly update #0343 • November 2018
Monthly update 343 • November 2018 • 2018-11-01 - 2018-11-30
Monthly Updates
SecKey
SecKey provides one time passwords to be used with the two factor authentication of Dropbox, Google, Facebook, GitHub, Proton Mail and many more.
Projects
Past Tense by Lee Child
Past Tense follows Reacher to his father’s New Hampshire hometown, uncovering family secrets, while two Canadians face a deadly trap in a rural motel.
Books
Locale
Internationalisation (i18n) means building your app so it can support many regions and languages. Localisation (l10n) means actually translating and adapting it for a specific market.
Development
The User Experience of Chatbots
I absolutely hate chatbots! So much that I added a rule to Quiet to hide/block chatbots from websites.
Development
Useful macOS defaults: System UI Server
Handy defaults write commands for com.apple.systemuiserver, controlling the menu bar and system UI elements.
Mac
What is ctkd?
If you see ctkd running on your Mac, here is what this smart card and security key process does.
Mac
Monthly update #0342 • October 2018
Monthly update 342 • October 2018 • 2018-10-01 - 2018-10-31
Monthly Updates
It is time to leave the Facebook universe!
I left Facebook on 1 January 2012. I never used Instagram and stopped using WhatsApp on 30 April 2017. I have not missed them for a second. People often ask why I abandoned these platforms.
Essays
FileManager
On Apple platforms, the FileManager class in the Foundation framework provides a robust abstraction for file system operations like creating, reading, moving, copying, and deleting files and directories, using paths or file URLs.
Development
What is touristd?
If you see touristd in Activity Monitor or in a firewall log, here is what this macOS process does.
Mac
DateComponents
The article introduces DateComponents, a versatile Foundation type in Swift for representing either a specific calendar date or a duration of time, emphasising its use over hardcoded time intervals like 60 * 60 * 24 for a day.
Development
REPL Support for Swift Packages
The swift run command now includes a --repl option. This lets you start the Swift REPL and import library targets from a package.
Development
The Fox by Frederick Forsyth
In Frederick Forsyth’s thrilling modern espionage novel, The Fox, a British teen with Asperger’s, Luke Jennings, turns out to be a cyber-genius who can hack into the world’s most secure systems, like the Pentagon, NSA, and CIA.
Books
Monthly update #0341 • September 2018
Monthly update 341 • September 2018 • 2018-09-01 - 2018-09-30
Monthly Updates
Johnny English Strikes Again
Johnny English Strikes Again (2018), directed by David Kerr, follows Johnny English as he comes out of retirement to stop a cyber attack that has exposed every active spy in Britain. Rowan Atkinson plays Johnny, now a geography teacher who longs for the old days.
Movies
How Mirror Works
Swift provides runtime type inspection through the Mirror API. This allows developers to examine arbitrary values and traverse object graphs without prior knowledge of types at compile time.
Development
Swift 5.0 Release Process
Swift 5.0 aims to achieve ABI stability to enable a stable runtime for operating systems, with module stability as a key focus that may land in this release or a later 5.x update.
Development
Swift 4.2 Released!
Swift 4.2 is a major update that enhances compile times, debugging, the standard library, and moves closer to binary compatibility, while maintaining source compatibility with Swift 4 and 4.1 but marking the last release to support Swift 3 compatibility.
Development
What is nesessionmanager?
If you see nesessionmanager running on your Mac, here is what this VPN and network extension process does.
Mac
Remembering Opi
Opi, the father of my father, died today. He was born in March 1936 and lived to the age of 82 years. He worked as a pastor for many years.
Remembering