#026

Fixed a small bug in dejafu to do with throwing an asynchronous exception to the current thread while it’s masked. The Control.Exception documentation says:

Note that if throwTo is called with the current thread as the target, the exception will be thrown even if the thread is currently inside mask or uninterruptibleMask.

So, this should result in True:

do me <- myThreadId
   catch (uninterruptibleMask_ (killThread me))
         (\ThreadKilled -> pure True)

However, dejafu would instead consider the thread blocked, as it’s trying to throw an exception to an uninteruptible thread. This was issue #267. I fixed it in PR #297, which was released as dejafu-2.0.0.1.

This week I was on support for Monday and Tuesday, back with my team on Wednesday, and then on leave on Thursday and Friday, so I didn’t get much actual work done. Probably the highlight is that I switched over the licence finder to elasticsearch 5. I continued with switching over all the other apps in our staging environment, which revealed a few issues. Some of those I fixed, others I left at the end of Wednesday.

A couple of weeks ago I applied to be a senior developer. I got word that I’ve made it through the initial weeding out phase, and will have an interview at some point in the next four to five weeks.

I wrote a silly memo about sed-as-a-service.

I blended the chillies I’d begun fermenting three weeks ago to make a hot sauce. The end result is alright, it’s got quite a kick to it, but it doesn’t really have much flavour beyond spice. It works well as a burger topping. I’ve seen a few recipes which call for fruit, so I think I’ll try that next time.

I made some water kefir, which turned out much better than my previous attempts at kombucha. I infused it with pear, and I’m now making a second batch with just sugar water. Being able to make it in 48 hours is definitely a big advantage.

My Masks of Nyarlathotep game resumed on Saturday, after missing a session due to a few people being away. The investigators arrived in London, and decided to split up and look for clues. They did a bunch of sneaking around, but haven’t found any concrete leads to the cult their good friend Jackson Elias was investigating.

There are a couple of relevant (real-world) deaths around this time of year:

• Friday was the anniversary of H. P. Lovecraft’s death. Sadly, I didn’t realise until Friday evening, so we couldn’t play the game then in honour of his memory.

• Larry DiTillio, author of the first edition of the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign and writer for a lot of TV stuff (including Babylon 5), died after a period of illness on Saturday. I only learned about this on Sunday morning, but it feels fitting we were playing Masks on his final day.