Quirkedy Quirks

They are everywhere, and it is strange.

I wanted to setup a mirror for my website, and I forgot which quirk to use.

On GitHub, if you create a repository, with the same name as your username…

The readme file in that repository, will pop up in your profile.

That’s where I uploaded my website first, but actually, website needs to be under a different name.

Your github.io domain name, so it needs to be named username.github.io (as in alice.github.io).

Then automatically, alice.github.io domain name, which is usually blank, will show your website.

And it does work with custom domain names, but you may want to consider, using vercel for example.

This way your github serves as a backup, and vercel will copy the repository…

and here you can setup a custom domain, as your website grows github won’t complain.

Transferring domain names also comes with quirks, you have to wait 60 days after any changes you made…

Before you can transfer to another registrar, makes sense when you are registering names.

But it is problematic, when you are trying to save a few dollars, and get away from a soon to become overpriced registrar.

It is probably just 20 bucks, or so, but it is the principle that matters.

Buying out a company and then raising prices, is a silly business practice.

That will destabilize the company further, and probably turn the whole thing into a loss.

All my five domain names, are in transfer mode, so they certainly lost me.

Other than cat pea I have hit every beat, where maybe someday I will create workout music with the ais of AI, now.

And Fantasy UI which is about Fantasy or SCI-FI User Interfaces, it is in early stage, but I was also way ahead of the time.

Bootstrap my UI framework of choice, just now, like couple of months, got dark more.

Until then I had this beautiful and sweetly quirky, color transformation system that transformed SCSS files…

Not just the CSS files, but quirky, is no way to start a business.

Now that bootstrap finally has dark mode, I just glow the borders, use AI to generate tiled textures, and demo images.

Coding up a delicate and responsible dashboard in svelte, will be really fun.

The quirkiest of my code, is the simplest operation you can think of.

Copying a directory of files, I know right.

But you see, you need to calculate blacklisted files, that you don’t want to copy.

Figure out which files have already been copied, and may need an update…

And which no longer exist at the source, and thus should be cleaned out from the destination.

In just just six short lines of code, by using only two functions, difference and intersection.

This is fine after you chug a cola, but not so good, when you are hunting for bugs.

The last thing you need, is switching to trying to figure out what intersects what.

There is an additional component to the six lines, this is the one that get me.

It is when you take the step beyond comparing times-tamps, and try to check the contents.

You can’t just look at the file size, you need to calculate a cryptographic check-sum.

And the problem here is, that it is an expensive operation, and you should avoid it, or cache or what you can.

You still work with 6 lines, but instead of just file-names, you add a check-sum to the file-name.

Quirky to say the least, and it gets a bit more complex, when you are recursively copying files.

And need to figure out which directories have been emptied, by the not in source anymore, procedure.

This the one time where overkill is perfectly justified, when done right, you can do it all in 10 lines of code.

And make copying files smart, performant and efficient, it would be great to code this as a standalone program.

But rarely is there a need for general purpose copy, his us usually part of something bigger…

And probably connected to transferring files across servers, are forbid using standard utilities.

In my situation, every time I would update a remote server, I would also send in a snapshot describing all the files.

It is a static server, there is no real shell, so the next time I needed to calculate what to upload and what I can skip.

I would fetch that snapshot five, just over HTTP, and it would be like having proper access to that remote system.

There are better examples of quirky code, especially now as we are entering the age of AI.

Just wait until you try to get them to talk to each other, as they learn to move through a text game or a virtual world.

Based on interesting books, about life experiences and such, which is to say also created with AI.

Here the AI would navigate dreams and complex concepts, so that they may learn how to think more like humans do.

I suspect once you get the Language Models talking to each other, learning from each other, and creating and inventing plausible environments, you get really quirky results.