Isaac Diamond

i code and do other things too sometime

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🚆A trip to Antioch

My girlfriend was out of town this weekend so it seemed a fine time to do a trip I’d been meaning to take for a while and check out the new Stadler GTW railcars on the eBART. I’d been a fan of the GTW railcar for a very long time. This dates back to a middle school assignment where I (somewhat halfheartedly) tried to convince a poor teacher to let me present to the county about replacing a stretch of derelict track with a commuter rail line. (Needless to say, it didn’t work, and line in question is being converted to a trail) [0]. I didn’t know much about railcars at the time but the GTW appealed to me because of its nature as a multiple unit and what I perceived as its relatively low cost to operate (as well as its aesthetics).

When I took a long trip to Europe after college, I had the opportunity to ride a KISS in Switzerland. I came away impressed and feeling like my early feelings...

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🧀 Cream Cheese

I tried making cream cheese over the weekend. I love cheese (all kinds, hard, soft, blue, green, stinky, you name it) and had been wanting to try and make it for a while. Everything online suggested starting with something like cream cheese as it’s not too precise and relatively forgiving. I started with a schmear recipe from The Gefilte Manifesto, a lovely book I won during an event with the Jewish organization at work. I ordered other supplies from New England Cheesemaking, specifically Mesophilic cheese cultures and Butter Muslin. I was able to find vegetable rennet at my local vegetarian coop.

Cream cheese is indeed fairly easy. I started on Sunday night when my partner had plans because I expected it to be involved, but it only took about 30 minutes to do the bulk of the work. First, you cook equal parts milk and cream together for a bit to warm it. I tried using a candy...

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Notes on HTTP/2

Someone at work today linked my team this talk by Brad Fitzpatrick which has a really great introduction to HTTP/2.

History

HTTP/2 is the most recent version of the HTTP specification. The original HTTP Spec was released in 1991 and defined a single GET keyword. You’d open a TCP socket to a remote server that spoke HTTP, pass GET and the document address (like GET /mydocument), and the web server would helpfully return the document you requested. That was it.

HTTP/1.0

This worked pretty well for a while, but people realized it might be nice to use this same protocol to actually send material data the other way, from the client to the server. The HTTP/1.0 spec was released in 1996 and with it came the first notion of HTTP verbs. Rather than just GET and a document, you could POST some data to an endpoint using the same syntax.

HTTP/1.0 also defined the notion of status codes for...

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