2025-09-14 03:00:00
Only a few more pictures to share from our vacation, which I’ll wrap up in conventional tourism advice.
It’s mostly about the oceanfront, and what you can see from it.
I recommend all of the following.
Schoolhouse Brewery in Windsor, NS; nice space, decent food, the Vice Principal is a good IPA. Maybe the beer that I enjoyed most was “Exile on North Street” from unfiltered brewing; you might want to follow that link and also check out the URL.
I didn’t love Halifax that much but it has this charming little neighborhood called Hydrostone, where The Brown Hound offered very solid food and beer. We didn’t spend that much time in New Brunswick, but Moncton’s Pump House was cheery and competent; a cool space; I can’t remember which of their IPAs I had, but it was good. The other peak New Brunswick goodness was Adorable Chocolat in Shediac, where everyone was effortlessly bilingual and the pastries just divine. Don’t miss it if you’re anywhere near.
People live by the sea, and swim in it.
Charlottetown’s not that rich in dining options, but got a really excellent lunch at The Cork & Cast. Maybe our best meal of the trip was at The Wheelhouse, in Digby. Scallops all around, seared is the best option.
Every good tourist spot in the world seems to suffer from increasingly intense and persistent overcrowding, and the Maritimes are no exception. On top of which, they’re thinly populated, fewer than two million souls in three provinces. The biggest city, Halifax (and the entire province of Prince Edward Island) are both smaller than individual Vancouver suburbs. It’s not a place for savouring urban flavors.
In Nova Scotia, Halifax has too many cruise ships; stay away from its so-called “farmers market” unless you love cruise culture. Lunenberg is big enough to soak up its waves of visitors and still offer unique visuals.
Overcrowded but has nice bits.
Peggy’s Cove I just can’t recommend; beautiful but jam-packed with cars looking for parking and people risking their lives on the rocks.
These were once defences but now just a pleasant walk.
I do recommend visiting Annapolis Royal; it’s got that great garden and Fort Anne, despite its lengthy and chequered military history, is lovely and peaceful.
In PEI, Charlottetown makes an effort and it has a beautiful basilica, but just isn’t big enough to reward a whole day’s visit.
In NB, Moncton is OK but its biggest tourist attraction is the tide going in and out.
Hopewell Provincial Park, NB. The clifftop trees are exceptional.
The hotels and Airbnbs and VRBOs were OK, mostly. The Harbourview Inn, near Digby, is a charmingly-traditional guest-house. The rooms are OK, but the downstairs is warmly welcoming, drinks available when the host’s there to man the bar, lots of space to sink into a comfy chair and conversation or your laptop. Also the breakfast was solid.
Excited clouds over Lake Ainsley, NS.
But the trip’s lodging highlight was this VRBO called Forest Lake House on Lake Ainsley, the Maritimes’ biggest. Isolated, comfortable, outstanding grounds, your own private forest walk; everything anyone could want. We stopped traveling and had a chill-out day there, enjoying every minute of it.
Lots of people but plenty at room at Cavendish beach.
We only swam once, at Cavendish Beach in PEI’s Anne of Green Gables territory, very nicely set up. But what looked most appealing to me was Crescent Beach in Lockeport, Nova Scotia; I wish we’d made time to have a swim there.
Turns out all three vacationers had farming or agriculture-adjacent roots. If you care about that stuff, driving around PEI is a treat; the agriculture is super-intensive and, to my eye, pleasingly well-done.
The farmlands extend to the seaside.
But if you have the time, get away from PEI’s farms and head northwest, drive down the coast from Tignish to West Point; that ride is full of colors and sea-fronts that aren’t like anywhere else I’ve seen.
Since it’s the New World there’s plenty of nasty history around the indigenous folk, the Mi'kmaq nation. But you really have to look to find it. We visited the Millbrook Cultural & Heritage Centre in Truro, which is much better than nothing.
You gotta drive; we put 3,742km on a basic rented Kia. The roads are way better taken care of than here out West.
Bye-bye, Maritimes.
We didn’t run across a single human Maritimer who was anything less than friendly and welcoming.
Nice people living along beautiful oceanfronts, plenty good enough for me.
2025-09-02 03:00:00
When someone (like us) comes back from a trip to the Maritimes, they’re apt to have pictures of brightly-colored houses. This is to show those colors off and not just in houses. Plus a camera color conundrum.
On the northwest coast of PEI, probably near Cape Wolfe.
In that picture above, glance at the bit of beach showing left of the little lighthouse. There’s a color story there too.
As it happens, our very first outing on the vacation was to Lunenberg, which features those cheerful houses.
It wasn’t just tourist magnets like Lunenberg; anywhere in the Maritimes you’re apt to see exuberantly-painted residences, a practice I admire. While the Maritimes are a long way from my home in Vancouver, we share a long, dim, grey winter, and any splash of color can help with that Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Also, we recently bought a house and, while we like it, it’s an undistinguished near-grey, so we’re looking for color schemes to steal. Thus I took lots of pictures of bright houses.
A couple years back we painted our cabin a cheery blue based on sampling photos of the shutters on Mykonos. A few neighbors rolled their eyes but nobody’s actually complained.
That’s the other color you have to talk about down east; I mean the color of the soil and sand and rocks. PEI in particular is famous for its red dirt, when you come in the on the ferry from Nova Scotia the first thing you notice is the island’s red fringe. I took a million pictures and maybe this is the closest to capturing it.
Not far from that first picture.
One of Nova Scotia’s attractions is the Cabot Trail, a 300km loop around Cape Breton, stretching northeast out into the Atlantic. This one scenic turn-off has you looking at a big, densely-forested mountainside. It’s more chaotic than our West-Coast temperate rain forests, with many tree species jumbled together. The spectrum of greens under shifting clouds was a real treat for the eyes. Here are two of the pictures I came away with. Have a look at them for a moment.
Above is by my Pixel 7, below a modern Fujifilm camera. When I unloaded them on the big outboard screen, I was disappointed with the Fujifilm take, which seemed a little flat and boring; was thinking the Pixel had done better. But then I started feeling uneasy; my memory kept telling me that that mountainside just didn’t include that yellow flavor in the Pixel’s highlights. I mean, those highlights look great, but I’m pretty sure they’re lies.
After a while, I edited the Fujifilm version just a teeny bit, gently bumping Lightroom’s “exposure” and “Vibrance” sliders, and I thought what I got was very close to what I remembered. The Pixel photo is entirely un-touched.
I’m not sure what to think. Mobile-phone cameras in general and the Pixel in particular proudly boast their “computational photography” and “AI” chops and, yeah, the Pixel produced a photo that it’s hard not to like.
And quite a few of the pictures I publish in this space have have been adjusted pretty heavily in Lightroom. I stand by my claim that I’m mostly trying to make something that looks like what I saw. But increasingly, I suspect the Pixel is showing colors people like, as opposed to what’s real.
2025-08-31 03:00:00
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick each have plenty of wilderness; PEI not so much. So pictures of bears and cougars and so on would be plausible, as would marine mammals. But no. Herewith, from our recent vacation, birds and bees, with a little lens-geek side trip.
Having touristed around Charlottetown, we drove down a series of smaller and smaller back roads and ended up at Canceaux Cove near Rocky Point, which I thought might present a nice vista of the city. It did, but the city looks boring. By way of consolation, there were these cute little birds running around on the beach and then flying loops in formation over the water.
Pretty sure these are Semipalmated plovers.
I wanted to get a picture of them in the air so I sauntered down the beach, assuming they’d fly away picturesquely. They studiously ignored me and eventually I had to jump and down and wave my arms and even then they took off grudgingly.
They were graceful and did this mysterious thing that birds can do, staying in formation with no obvious leader. I’ve had the pleasure, very occasionally, of being in engineering teams like that.
We went to Annapolis Royal because of its Historic Gardens and wow, what a treat. I think even those who don’t see themselves as garden fans would enjoy an hour or more sauntering around in there. I like taking pictures of flowers and a lot of these flowers had bees in them.
This one was cute enough to reward a close-up.
Aren’t her wings cute?
And I ask, what could be better than a cute bee in a pretty flower? Obviously, two bees.
And again, a closer look.
Bees are admirable creatures and I don’t want to make fun of them, but this surprised-looking little citizen makes me laugh. (She’s just navigating from one blossom to the next.)
All of these are shot with Fujifilm’s 55-200mm lens, which I’ve had for at least eleven years. Up till now, I’ve always pointed it at faraway things, but wow, I think I’ll be taking this to more gardens in future.
I mention the lens partly so I can link to this awesome (and funny) teardown piece from Lensrentals.
And, on the way out, let’s let that lens show off with a couple of roses.
Remember, pink and black are the colors of rock & roll. And if you’re anywhere near Annapolis Royal, stop and visit that garden.
2025-08-28 03:00:00
The sound of the wind surging through birchy Eastern woods isn’t like the same coastal gusts in my own Pacific rain forest; around you not above you, alto not baritone. The colors differ too: Forests, houses, soil, and sea. And everywhere little white churches, each with its cemetery. A scattering of forts, far too many cannons. And everything faces the sea.
Birchy Cape Breton forest.
For the first time since Covid and, more important, since Lauren’s 2½-year battle with Long Covid, we went on the road for pleasure; Lauren and I and our dear friend Sally from Warragul, Australia. To my shame, all my decades’ travel had never taken me to Canada east of Montreal, so we spent a couple of weeks poking around Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, plus a bit of New Brunswick. I took many pictures and it’ll take a few blog pieces to share those that I think deserve it.
No part of Canada’s settler culture is old by European or Asian standards, but ten generations of white people lived and died here before the first rough town organized itself near what’s now Vancouver. They had to be buried someplace, thus the graveyards everywhere you go. These were captured near Whycocomagh.
Lillian S. DeWolfe, Oct 1876 Sept 1958.
How long will it still matter that my hometown is one of the world’s youngest big cities?
Many graveyards are church attachments, but many more greet you at a random turn in the road; always framed by forest. The density of churches is remarkable; all built of wood, mostly white, mostly well-kept. This one was attached to the graves above and is untypically faded (but lovely inside).
Some of the churches have become boutiques and breweries, but those that haven’t still occur more densely than in any other New World jurisdiction I’ve seen. Why should faith hold stronger down East?
Another church, St Dunstan’s Basilica in Charlottetown, offered perhaps the most intense experience of the whole trip, because a singer and organist were practicing elaborate hymn treatments. Both were great, the organ is a magnificent Casavant, and parish organist Leo Marchildon was having fun, putting lots of wind through those pipes including the 32’ bass monsters. My ears and I were smiling when we left.
The stained glass is nothing special
but I liked the opened panes at the bottom.
Forts and cannons, I said; the Maritimes’ messy history included repeated captures and recaptures by the forces of France and Britain and the USA, and quite a few of the forts had been put to their intended use, repelling or falling to one invader or another.
The locals, at least the ones who set things up for tourists, seem to take their history seriously; I don’t pretend expertise or even much interest in it, but I have to say that some cannons have good typography.
“VR” is Victoria Regina of course,
so sometime in the second half of the 19th
century.
The colors are different, and an entry later in this series will dip in gleefully and give me a platform for camera geekery. One expects changes in houses and vegetation when you travel four timezones away, but nothing prepared me for the shockingly red soil in Prince Edward Island (hereinafter PEI).
Past Tignish at PEI’s northern extremity,
well off the paved-roads part.
I opened with words about everything facing the sea. Not entirely true, sometimes you’re looking at a lake.
Those kids don’t know how lucky they are.
This is in the wonderful Kejimkujik National Park in central Nova Scotia, mostly closed due to extreme wildfire peril.
All across the Maritimes, drought was in effect; crops failing, forest trails closed. Which reminds me; near that lake there was a birch-bark-canoe workshop. I asked the guy making the canoe how long it took. He said “My great-grandpa could do it in seven days, because back then there were birch trees big enough that you could make the whole hull out of a single piece.” It’s very difficult to find any aspect of life on earth that isn’t exhibiting Anthropocene damage.
Usually, it’s the sea that you’re looking at.
Above, coastline near Annapolis Royal.
Below, low tide near Chipman Brook.
From one end of Canada to the other; to me, the surprise was not so much the difference in the landscapes but the similarity of the people; they spoke my accent, shopped in my stores, obeyed my road signs. More on that later. For now, this.
On Bell Island, among the LaHaves.
2025-08-15 03:00:00
Unicode is good. If you’re designing a data structure or protocol that has text fields, they should contain Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8. There’s another question, though: “Which Unicode characters?” The answer is “Not all of them, please exclude some.”
This issue keeps coming up, so Paul Hoffman and I put together an individual-submission draft to the IETF and now (where by “now” I mean “two years later”) it’s been published as RFC 9839. It explains which characters are bad, and why, then offers three plausible less-bad subsets that you might want to use. Herewith a bit of background, but…
If you’re actually working on something new that will have text fields, please read the RFC. It’s only ten pages long, and that’s with all the IETF boilerplate. It’s written specifically for software and networking people.
The badness that 9839 focuses on is “problematic characters”, so let’s start with a painful example of what that means.
Suppose you’re designing a protocol that uses JSON and one of your constructs has a username field.
Suppose you get this message (I omit all the non-username fields). It’s
a perfectly legal JSON text:
{
"username": "\u0000\u0089\uDEAD\uD9BF\uDFFF"
} Unpacking all the JSON escaping gibberish reveals that the value of the username field contains four
numeric “code points” identifying Unicode characters:
The first code point is zero, in Unicode jargon U+0000. In human-readable text it
has no meaning, but it will interfere with the operation of certain programming languages.
Next is Unicode U+0089, official name “CHARACTER TABULATION WITH JUSTIFICATION”. It’s what Unicode calls a
C1
control code, inherited from ISO/IEC 6429:1992, adopted from
ECMA 48 (1991), which calls it
“HTJ” and says: HTJ causes the contents of the active field (the field in the presentation component that contains the
active presentation position) to be shifted forward so that it ends at the character position preceding the
following character tabulation stop. The active presentation position is moved to that following character
tabulation stop. The character positions which precede the beginning of the shifted string are put into the
erased state.
Good luck with that.
The third code point, U+DEAD, in Unicode lingo, is an “unpaired surrogate”. To understand,
you’d have to learn how Unicode’s much-detested
UTF-16 encoding works.
I recommend not bothering.
All you need to know is that surrogates are only meaningful when they come in pairs in UTF-16 encoded text. There is effectively no such text on the wire and thus no excuse for tolerating surrogates in your data. In fact, the UTF-8 specification says that you mustn’t use UTF-8 to encode surrogates. But the real problem is that different libraries in different programming languages don’t always do the same things when they encounter this sort of fœtid interloper.
Finally, \uD9BF\uDFFF is JSON for the code point U+7FFFF.
Unicode has a category called “noncharacter”, containing a few dozen code points that, for a variety of
reasons, some good,
don’t represent anything and must not be interchanged on the wire. U+7FFFF is one of those.
The four code points in the example are all clearly problematic. The just-arrived RFC 9839 formalizes the notion of “problematic” and offers easy-to-cite language saying which of these problematic types you want to exclude from your text fields. Which, if you’re going to use JSON, you should probably do.
Doug Crockford I mean, the inventor of JSON. If he (or I or really anyone careful) were inventing JSON now that Unicode is mature, he’d have been fussier about its character repertoire. Having said that, we’re stuck with JSON-as-it-is forever, so we need a good way to say which of the problematic characters we’re going to exclude even if JSON allows them.
You may find yourself wondering why the IETF waited until 2025 to provide help with Bad Unicode. It didn’t; here’s RFC 8264: PRECIS Framework: Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings in Application Protocols; the first PRECIS predecessor was published in 2002. 8264 is 43 pages long, containing a very thorough discussion of many more potential Bad Unicode issues than 9839 does.
Like 9839, PRECIS specifies subsets of the Unicode character repertoire and goes further, providing a mechanism for defining more.
Having said that, PRECIS doesn’t seem to be very widely used by people who are defining new data structures and protocols. My personal opinion is that there are two problems which make it hard to adopt. First, it’s large and complex, with many moving parts, and requires careful study to understand. Developers are (for good reason) lazy.
Second, using PRECIS ties you to a specific version of Unicode. In particular, it forbids the use of the (nearly a million) unassigned code points. Since each release of Unicode includes new code point assignments, that means that a sender and receiver need to agree on exactly which version of Unicode they’re both going to use if they want reliably interoperable behavior. This makes life difficult for anyone writing a general-purpose code designed to be used in lots of different applications.
I personally think that the only version of Unicode anybody wants to use is “as recent as possible”, so they can be confident of having all the latest emojis.
Anyhow, 9839 is simpler and dumber than PRECIS. But I think some people will find it useful and now the IETF agrees.
I’ve written a little Go-language library to validate incoming text fields against each of the three subsets that 9839 specifies, here. I don’t claim it’s optimal, but it is well-tested.
It doesn’t have a version number or release just yet, I’ll wait till a few folk have had a chance to spot any dumb mistakes I probably made.
Here’s a compact summary of the world of problematic Unicode code points and data formats and standards.
| Problematic classes excluded? | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Surrogates | Legacy controls | Noncharacters | |
| CBOR | yes | no | no |
| I-JSON | yes | no | yes |
| JSON | no | no | no |
| Protobufs | no | no | no |
| TOML | yes | no | no |
| XML | yes | partial [1] | partial [2] |
| YAML | yes | mostly [3] | partial [2] |
| RFC 9839 Subsets | |||
| Scalars | yes | no | no |
| XML | yes | partial | partial |
| Assignables | yes | yes | yes |
Notes:
[1] XML allows C1 controls.
[2] XML and YAML don’t exclude the noncharacters outside the Basic Multilingual Pane.
[3] YAML excludes all the legacy controls except for the mostly-harmless U+0085, another version of
\n used in IBM mainframe documents.
9839 is not a solo production. It received an extraordinary amount of discussion and improvement from a lot of smart and well-informed people and the published version, 15 draft revisions later, is immensely better than my initial draft. My sincere thanks go to my co-editor Paul Hoffman and to all those mentioned in the RFC’s “Acknowledgements” section.
9839 is the second “individual submission” RFC I’ve pushed through the IETF (the other is RFC 7725, which registers the HTTP 451 status code). While it’s nice to decide something is worth standardizing and eventually have that happen, it’s really a lot of work. Some of that work is annoying.
I’ve been involved in other efforts as Working-Group member, WG chair, and WG specification editor, and I can report authoritatively that creating an RFC the traditional way, through a Working Group, is easier and better.
I feel discomfort advising others not to follow in my footsteps, but in this case I think it’s the right advice.
2025-08-05 03:00:00
All of these Long Links pieces have begun with more or less the same words, so why stop now? This is an annotated parade of links to long-form pieces. Most people won’t have the time (nor the weird assortment of interests) to consume them all, but I hope that most readers will find one or two reward a visit.
I don’t know if it is still the case, but in my youth, Canadian elementary education included several overexcited units about the Coureurs des bois, early European settlers in “New France” (now Québec) who ventured, by foot and canoe, far to the north and west, mostly engaged in trading with the indigenous peoples: trinkets (and later, serious hardware including guns) for furs.
The names I remembered were Radisson and Groseilliers, but I don’t recall learning much about who they were and what they did. Then I ran across the 2019 book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson and, wow… The writing is pedestrian but who cares because what a story! Radisson lived an absolutely astonishing life. He went as deep into the bush as anyone of his era, interacted intensely with the indigenous people as business partner, friend, and foe, worked for Charles of England and Louis of France (changing sides several times), in 1670 founded the Hudson’s Bay Company (recently, 355 years later, deceased), and fortunately took notes, a copy of which was preserved by Samuel Pepys.
I learned more from this book’s pages about the early history of Upper and Lower Canada than all those elementary-school units had to offer, and had loads of fun doing so. I guess this is a fairly Canadian-specific Long Link, but I think anyone interested in the early history of Europeans in North America would find much to enjoy.
It’s rare these days that I discover interesting new musicians, but here are two of those rarities.
Lucie Horsch plays recorder, you know, the cheap plastic thing they use to introduce second-graders to music. It’s actually a lovely instrument and I wish we would switch to its German name, “Blockflöte”, which to my ear sounds a bit like the instrument does. Anyhow, check out this YouTube entitled only Lucie Horsch - Bach, annoyingly omitting any mention of which Bach. Annoyance aside, it’s a pretty great performance, Ms Horsch is the real deal, full of virtuosity and grace.
I got an unusual mid-week message from Qobuz, all excited about The New Eves’ new record The New Eve Is Rising. So I played it in the car on a long crosstown drive and now I’m all excited too. The New Eves are talented, musically surprising, and above all, insanely brave.
Their music doesn’t sound like anything else and flies in the face of all conventional wisdom concerning popular music. They take absurd chances and yeah, the album has klunkers amid the bangers, but when I got to its end I went back and started at the beginning again. I found myself smiling ear-to-ear over and over. Maybe I’m being a bit over-the-top here, but check them out: Mother is live. Cow Song is off the new album and strong albeit with forgettable video.
Every Long Links has hardcore-geek threads and there is no harder core imaginable than Filippo Valsordi’s Go Assembly Mutation Testing. I have always admired (but never actually used) mutation testing, and Filippo offers a convincing argument that it moves catching certain classes of bug from nearly impossible to pretty easy. Good stuff!
And of course we can’t ignore genAI and programming. Most of you are likely aware of Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity, but I’m linking again to boost its visibility, because hard quantitative research on methodology is damn rare in our profession. I will confess to being a little (but just a little) surprised at the conclusions.
It is apparently quite possible that Intel will exit the business of making high-end chips, leaving TSMC with a global monopoly: Intel and the Wide Open Barn Doors. This is an unsettling prospect. Not, I have to say, surprising though. I’ve sneered at Intel leadership cluelessness for years and years, see here and here.
Finally, here’s the charmingly-titled How to Surf the Web in 2025, and Why You Should. I love this piece.
The news keeps making me want to build something around the classreductionist.org domain name I’ve owned for
years.
The tl;dr on Class Reductionism is something like “In the best possible world it’ll take generations to disassemble the global tangle of intersectional oppression, but we could treat the symptoms effectively right now this year by sending money to the poor. I’m talking about Universal Basic Income or suchlike. I wrote a couple thousand words on the subject back in 2023, and there are complexities, and I probably won’t put up that site. But I still do maintain that a very high proportion of our societal pain is rooted in the egregious inequality, and consequent poverty, that seems a baked-in feature of Late Capitalism.
Let’s start with Nobelist Paul Krugman, who’s been writing an “Understanding Inequality” series on his paywalled newsletter and then republishing a gratis version, start here. Very data-dense and educational. Hmm, that site is slow; there’s a livelier table of contents here.
Don’t kid yourself that this is just an American problem, see ‘The Better Life Is Out of Reach’: The Chinese Dream Is Slipping Away.
Let’s pull the impersonal veil of facts and figures aside and focus on the human experience of what we used to call Class Struggle. Confessions of the Working Poor is beautifully written and opened my eyes to lifestyle choices that I didn’t even know some people have to make.
But hey, there are people who are just fine with this: Delta's premium play is taking advantage of the growing economic split.
Look, being class-determinist-adjacent doesn’t mean you should ignore intersectional awfulness: What We Miss When We Talk About the Racial Wealth Gap.
The remaining Long Links refused to be organized so I had to turn them loose; call it the Long Tail.
The Venetian origins of roman type. You might think you don’t care about typography but still enjoy the pictures and descriptions here.
This guy is a full-time Coyote researcher. What a great gig! I’m an admirer of those animals and how they’ve carved themselves a comfy niche in most of North America’s big cities. (Even if it means that you better not let your cat out at night.) They’re also remarkably attractive.
Here’s another long list of Long Links, and many of you will wonder why anyone would choose to browse it: The Best Camera Stores in Tokyo: The Ultimate Guide. Some of the interiors are remarkable.
Oh, while we’re on the subject of photography: A Photojournalist Took a Fujifilm Instax Camera to a Mexican Cartel Wedding.
GLP-1’s (i.e. Ozempic and friends) would probably dominate a large section of the news if weren’t for all the political craziness. Here’s one small example: How GLP-1s Are Breaking Life Insurance.
Science is hard. There are lots of largely-unsolved areas, and “gap-map.org” tries to organize them: Fundamental Development Gap Map v1.0. The UI is a little klunky but the thing still sucked me right in.
I’m going to give the last word to Laurie Penny. I don’t know what we’d do without her. In a time of monsters: do we have any ideas for surviving the zombie apocalypse that aren’t nightmare patriarchy?