Planetary Delights

From Westerns To Cyberpunk

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:46:47 -0400

I enjoyed watching Westerns. It included a temporal duality: a time long ago (the 19th century Western US) and a recent time ago (the 50s and 60s when these movies were made). So much has changed since both thens, but the absolute distance in years isn’t great: a film made in the 1940s from almost equidistant from me in 2025 as it was to its original time period of the 1870s. Stuff changes.

But I enjoyed the drama without judgement, a different way of seeing beauty and imagining an emptiness that is surely long gone. And the gunfire, while frequent, wasn’t authentic in its violence. I preferred that.

But good Westerns, complex Westerns were hard to find on Netflix or Amazon and I didn’t have cable. The classic spaghetti Westerns weren’t easily available to stream (I thought). But the genre stuck with me and my imagination.

I’m not sure where exactly I heard the bass recorder that is the signature sound of the Mandalorian. Probably in the background of a family party. But it caught my attention and I took a nibble.

After watching a few episodes and getting totally hooked, I saw the connection between the Westerns and Star Wars. Yes, the landscape and the lack or brutal violence (sure, lots of shooting, but no one bleeds). But the emptiness of the scenery, the thrill of moving through space, and I learned, the challenging morality of doing the right thing after an Empire has fallen.

So I’ve become hooked on Star Wars. I’ve started watching all the series in order, which is a delightful escape. Anything not live action is a cartoon, which is OK by me as I love animation. (Probably a topic for a different blog post: why I love animated TV.) So to sleep at night, I watch Anakin or Obi-wan fight some bad guys.

I’ve never cared much for the light sabre battles or scenes of them crawling through ventilation shafts. The movies are packed with that type of ‘action’. It doesn’t hold my attention as much as watching the world that is created, and what the universe could look and sound like.

Some of the most fun scenes in Star Wars take place on Coruscant, the capital planet. It contains depictions of furturistic cities: lots of neon, vertical instead of horizonal, a spave for everyone, including robots. And so much steel, not concrete. And one thrilling part, let’s be honest, is that they never have parking issues in Star Wars.

These scenes are gritty and colorful. They tickled my imagination more than others (Andor especially, though Book of Bobba Fett too) and left me wanting more. At which point I saw the overlap between the darker, grittier sides of Star Wars and another favorite of mine, cyberpunk.

I’ve read plenty of the classic sci-fi cyberpunk books and loved them. So it felt worth it to take a detour from the many hours of Star Wars I still have left to consume and take in a little futuristic grit in “Altered Carbon”. A delight, if way too violent for my tastes. And soon Neuomancer will hit AppleTv and I’ll have the perfect sweet spot for winter: a new series of one of my favorite books combined with many hours or Star Wars still to explore.

And I finally did find some Westerns. On a free streaming platform, Tubi. So I still return to the place where my TV journey’s all began. Out West, with black hats and horses.

Sobolak's First Law of Software

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:46:47 -0400

An experience very early in my career taught me a very valuable lesson about software development.

This was in the mid-aughts (2005 maybe?) and the existing reporting was using Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus 1-2-3. So it needed to go. We had to decide if we should build a totally new analytics suite or utilize the one we already had.

We were funded, but picking a technology path was more complicated than it sounds. This project was for our Canadian offices, and there was more than a little resistance to simply taking what we had and using it. The initial US implementation hadn’t gone well, so the reputation of the system I supported wasn’t great.

But it was reasonably good. A really important feature was that it worked. It cranked out reports. The calculations were correct. It had ways to get all of the data it needed. And it ran in a database, not a series of macros on Lotus 1-2-3. It had a team to support it, not one guy who was close to retiring.

So once we got the go-ahead to begin, we had to pick: start from scratch, or re-purpose the American system for the Canadians. We had to do a long series of cost benefit analyses, including feature comparisons.

About those feature comparisons: the new software didn’t exist, so it could do anything. Any feature the new suite needed, automatically existed, because it could be built. For example, if we said the existing system was slow, the designer would just put “Amazing performance” as a feature in the unbuilt thing. And who would disagree? He wasn’t wrong, because it was vaporware.

Software that merely exists as a PowerPoint deck will never have performance issues, or weird UI annoyances, or installation problems. But an existing system will, which makes true comparisons impossible.

The committee was clearly leaning towards starting over rather than use what was working. And this made me realize: Sofware that hasn’t been built can do anything.

Thus Sobolak’s First Law of Software was born.

Eventually the team go the go-ahead to build a brand new reporting solution. I was part of the team, and was responsible for making it a success. It failed dramatically – we build something that eventually shipped but it did 1/10th of what was already in production after months of hard work.

And it really never replaced the Lotus 1-2-3 macros. That didn’t happen for years. I had already moved on and they just bought something; everything was replaced.

I’m sure whatever they bought promised many great things before it was installed too.

It’s always easy to imagine great features and new problems when gathering requirements, and hard to go through the work to build something as great as it exists in the designer’s imagination. When looking at new things (esp. when considering buy vs build), this is a really important countenance to the perceived ‘shortcomings’ of something that actually exists. Software that hasn’t been built can do anything, so it’s critical to imagine what will fail or suck in the future, because something will.

Simple Webserver Hack

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 14:03:47 -0400

I needed to have a simple webserver for my home network and was not interested in trying to setup Apache. (I’ve done it before, not keen to do it again.) It’s helpful to have read-only access to files that I want to view, not necessarily need to copy wherever I’m working.

I was looking for any easy alternatives to apache and google suggested a python module that I could run easily enough from the command line:

python -m http.server 1234

(1234 is the port number that should be replaced with something usable, like 3001.)

But that worked while I was working, but if I left and the session died, then the webserver went with it. So while I probably could have found a few other ways to do it, I went with the least possible configuration option, tmux.

So whenevever I want to do this, it’s easy:

Start a tmux session and rename it web

tmux 
^B $ web

Within the session, start the webserver:

python -m http.server 3001

After checking it works, detach the tmux session:

^B d

I’ve had the same “server” running since Sunday without issue. And if I need a new one, I can a tmux terminal for an additional session as long I remember to use a different port.

My Latest Linux Loves

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:26:47 -0400

Two New Tools

Sway

I repurposed an old laptop that was sitting around and have become delighted with the results. It was a cheap number from 2020 that never ran Windows very well.

My biggest disappointment when starting out was that I couldn’t get FreeBSD to run a USB stick. Even though it’s been 20+ years since I’ve used it regularly it’s still my favorite flavor of Unix. Maybe I’ll install it if I ever get an extra computer. (Like bicycles, the solution is always n+1.)

I finally got the old laptop working with Fedora. I tried a few different Ubuntu distros that I didn’t really like. (I’m not entirely sure why I don’t like Ubuntu, but I’ve never enjoyed it. I have no explanation.) After looking what distros are available for WSL2, I landed on Fedora as the right mix of updates, features, and “mainstreamedness”.

But to challenge myself a little bit, I went with Atomic Sway. So instead of having a bunch of stacking windows (like, well, Windows), everything is divided into logical screens that I can switch between with a keyboard command.

Sway on a laptop has become the ultimate writing machine. I can lookup stuff on the internet if I need it, but I haven’t bothered to install email, messaging, etc. etc. I can do what I need, and only that, and easy switch around between windows without much having to use the mouse. It’s become so addictive that I’ve tried to figure out how to get the same experience at work. (No dice, sadly.)

But this has been fun and a drawn me back to Linux. If I were allowed to use this for work, I totally would.

JOE

I’m not sure why I tried Joe. I’m an Emacs native and kind of prefer Ctrl sequences for executing commands. (I can use vim, but I don’t love it.) VSCode has been a great tool, but the key bindings never have worked for my workflow. After XEmacs was retired, I’ve never found a suitable replacement I like. (I haven’t tried that hard either.) Nano is an editor I’ve been using since the 90s in its various flavors (pine/pico/nano). Getting the word-wrapping to work the way I wanted wasn’t flawless, and after some late night messing around, I found JOE.

It’s nano-like, so the commands are familiar enough that I don’t have to relearn a lot. The defaults that are included are what I expect – line numbers, word wrap, syntax highlighting for different tools by default. It just worked, and I’ve been installing it just about anywhere I can. I think the entire editor is like 600KB, not that I care about disk space, but it’s just lighting fast.

I’m hooked.

And So…

Using both these tools (which I am right now) has helped me with tons of personal projects. I’ll be doing this until this laptop dies… And I’ll find a new old one to replace it.

First Post

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 12:46:47 -0400

taps microphone

Is this thing on?

After a very extended break (10+ years?), I’m going to try blogging again.

Things I will probably write about:

books
computing, esp. Linux and Python
libraries
gardening
writing
cooking (esp. rye baking and fermentation)
Illinois / Chicago / seasons

I reserve the right to write about anything else I want.

Things I will probably not write about:

my family
work
national or state politics