I am equally fascinated by the world’s fascination with zombies, as I am unfascinated with zombies. They appear to represent (in the modern manifestation) some kind of deep fear of the uncontrollable masses. LeCorbusier asked rhetorically, “Is there anything more pitiful than an undisciplined crowd?” The answer is yes. For instance, such a crowd trapped in mediated self-loathing, by way of a zombie trope. Somebody suggested a zombie/vampire feedback loop that follows a right-wing/left-wing sentiment shift: when people are fearful of their prosperity due to competition from other workers, people shift right wing and zombie movies get made.

One of the many ironies of Electron-based apps is that nowadays I rely on so many of them, I wish I could arrange them into tabs. Good morning! Another day, another box of stolen pens, amirite? No, but seriously. I found some energy lurking in the shadowy depths of my tordid existence last night and did half of the conversion to Typescript that I was bitching about yesterday. It’s amazing what you can get done when you just stop complaining for half a minute.

I’ve been doing these “work logs” publicly for a week now. The process is easy – when I sit down to start a workday, I start a new Markdown file. During the day I document what I’m doing, broadly, noting things like breakthroughs, frustrations, insights, useful links that come up. At the end of the day, instead of just forgetting the document exists, I commit it to my blog repo. Perhaps the public nature of this will come back to bite me at some point, but for now this is having a positive effect on me.

Short day today; have to go carry heavy objects for people. Just a few things. MuPDF Cloned MuPDF to try and determine how hard it would be to use as a library for something. Saw it had a makefile. Typed “make”, expecting the usual shenanigans, but no. It just freaking compiled. And quick, too. Like: No CMake shit, no Configure script, none of that madness. Just a well crafted Makefile.

Let us return briefly to the entire GRIB saga. Yesterday I complained about some weird overlaps in the imported data. Upon further inspection, it turns out the dates are being interpreted wrong. The way GRIB files store dates is that the beginning of the message indicates the start date and the templates indicate time step size. Data is then tagged as X time steps from origin, more or less. Except, how the time step is interpreted depends on the template itself, and apparently wgrib2 is reading that wrong for my data.

I’m making some progress. Naturally, I was being a bit dense by the end of the day yesterday. Of course Apache Arrow comes with Debian repositories and good instructions for installation. I mean, it’s not quite as good as just working™, but close enough. Solved. I also read up on the GLib-bindings mechanism that they provide, which makes a lot of things easier. The Ruby bindings base off it, for instance, and probably the Python bindings too.

Yesterday I spent a few hours making a decoder for the GRIB file format, which was a mostly pleasant experience, although the deeper I got the more I realized that there was something very wrong with the state of affairs. The data I’m trying to work with is the ECMWF’s Seasonal-to-Subseasonal daily averaged data, which is a pretty typical data set as meteorology and climate science goes. It’s very well curated, very precisely defined, and deployed to the world in a really difficult to use way.

I love a good file format. GRIB, however, appears to be… I don’t even know. It’s a file format for meteorological data, and stands for GRIdded Binary. There are two main versions, and they appear to be binary incompatible. Unsurprisingly for meteorological formats, a lot of the reference code is in Fortran. Sigh. GDAL has support for the GRIB format, but unsurprisingly, since GDAL is designed more around managing geographical imagery data, it makes it a bit complicated to just read the data out of a GRIB file.

Made jai-subprocess today. It was starting to be annoying that it was hard to interactively “chat” with subprocesses from Jai. The default system() and execXX() functions in POSIX are only good enough for very basic things. The situation that system() becomes insufficient for is when you want to capture the return status, the STDOUT and STDERR output, and be able to send input while it’s running. Currently the module is still missing the ability to write to STDIN on the child process, but I’ve run out of time for today.

Much like most of the people in the western world, I’ve had my attention span stolen and decimated by an abundance of distractions, including social media. Being addicted to the dopamine-induced thrill of relevance is counterproductive, stressful, and depressing. For that reason, I’m excited about Johann Hari’s new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–And How to Think Deeply Again. An excerpt was published in the guardian the other day, and it immediately struck a cord.