I’m back in Mt. Pleasant for Thanksgiving and after watching the Lions dispatch the Bears (not handily, but never mind that) I went out for a short bike ride through Mill Pond Park. The main bike trail comes out at Broadway opposite the old Ann Arbor Railroad station, now the Mountain Town Station brewery and restaurant. I’ve photographed it many times over the years, but tonight the fading light felt really special.

I grew up in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, a county seat and college town of about 20,000 people that hasn’t seen a passenger train in over 70 years (and counting). We had two railroads: the Ann Arbor Railroad main line, running northwest from Toledo, Ohio, up to Frankfort, Michigan, and a branch line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (originally Pere Marquette), running northeast from Mt. Pleasant up to Coleman.

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This past week Amtrak suspended travel between Albany and New York because of a deteriorating parking garage in Hell’s Kitchen. Service has resumed, but it’s a reminder of how fragile infrastructure can be in the United States. This is also the second time in about a year that a privately-owned building threatened the Empire Corridor, and the last time it happened it nearly wrecked my vacation plans.

Back in August 2022, I needed a break, and I drew up a plan to visit my sister up in northern New York and a friend in Boston. I’d take the first Burlington-bound Ethan Allen Express up to Middlebury, where my sister could pick me. After a few days, take the Essex-Charlotte ferry over to Vermont, and take the Ethan Allen Express back down to New York City. A day or two in Brooklyn, then an Acela round-trip to Boston.

The first portent of doom was waking up to see a missed call from Amtrak. Amtrak doesn’t call me unless there’s a problem with my train:

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Mark Hoolihan passed away on August 24, 2019, at the age of 49. I didn’t know him well. He was an adjunct at Kalamazoo College my senior year. I took one class, an evening seminar in Jewish History.

Winter terms at Kalamazoo were rough. I imagine they still are. The college was on quarters (trimesters); the winter term started the first week of January and ran ten weeks, plus exam week. Spring break came after, followed by the spring term. January and February in Michigan are cold and dark. I can remember a February where it snowed two days out of three and the sun never broke through the overcast.

The winter of 2005 I had to overload and take four classes instead of the usual three. I had a political science course (“Modern liberalism and its critics”), Advanced German, French Revolution, and the Jewish History seminar with Hoolihan, which met in the evenings.

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Following up on Nix flake with Node and PHP, I needed to enable an extension (in this case, MongoDB). The end result is simple enough, but getting there was a little tricky.

• A complete flake
  • Inputs
  • Outputs
  • Let…in
  • System
  • PHP
  • Shell

A complete flake

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I’ve written before about the various challenges I have reaching Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, from the East Coast. I never wrote it up, but back in January 2022 I went the long way round, taking Amtrak to Kalamazoo via Chicago, then Indian Trails buses to Grand Rapids, Lansing, and finally Mt. Pleasant. It worked, but looping through Chicago effectively adds a day to the itinerary.

Since then, Indian Trails has stopped interlining with Greyhound and started interlining with the Trailways system. Greyhound is in a real race-to-the-bottom ever since Flix bought it, but that’s another matter. I figured I’d give the Toledo connections another look. I’ve resisted mating up Amtrak’s Thruway Motorcoach with the Lansing-Mt. Pleasant bus because it meant a 4-5 hour layover in Lansing.

Good and bad news here. The good news is that there is Barons Bus/Indian Trails itinerary between Toledo and Mt. Pleasant. Eight hours and two transfers (Detroit and Lansing). The departure time from Toledo is 9:50 AM, which is a healthy buffer for a delayed Amtrak train. The bad/weird news is a bizarre pricing overage from the Trailways ticketing platform.

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We had interesting problem where the front page of a site in our multisite couldn’t load in the editing interface. The root cause was that the page had too many revisions and PHP ran out of memory. The presentation was a little unusual–no rich text editors displayed on the page. We used trepmal’s wp revisions WP-CLI plugin to resolve the immediate issue.

The problem

Our main multisite is built on Advanced Custom Fields with the Classic Editor. The individual site in question dates to 2016, and had over 400 revisions when we started having problems with it. We attach the rich text editor to the content areas toward the end of the rendering process. The reported issue (that we verified) is that the rich-text editors weren’t rendering on the visual pane and that the text pane wasn’t loading at all. The text was still in the textarea and selectable, although not visible (white on white).

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It’s the second weekend in November which means it was time for the Allentown Train Meet. These train shows are a mecca for train enthusiasts of all stripes. The lion’s share of the vendors are selling model railroading supplies, but there are plenty of dealers selling books, videos, or memorabilia. As always, there were several live model railroad setups going. I didn’t see an N scale one this year, which was a little disappointing. I didn’t buy any china this year, but I did find a good mix of stuff for my layout, books, and videos.

Media

The Lehigh Valley NRHS chapter had a table and I picked up two short histories, History of the Lehigh Valley Transit Company and Short Trolley Routes in the Lehigh Valley. They threw in a back number “Lehigh Lines”, their newsletter, for free. I’m not a member of the chapter though I probably should be. I have another book in this series, the history of the Lehigh & New England Railroad edited by Randolph Kulp, and I was impressed with the quality. It can be hard to find good information about the interurban era in the United States.

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Brief note on a nix flake that supports Node 20 and PHP 7.4. My use case is deploying an AWS CDK project that supports a Moodle 3.11 environment. I’m not version-limited on the Node version for CDK, but I need to start with PHP 7.4 to support the Moodle package code, though I’ll be moving to PHP 8.1 soon.

Here’s the flake.nix in its entirety:

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{
  description = "Example JavaScript development environment for Zero to Nix";

  # Flake inputs
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs?ref=nixos-unstable";
    phps.url = "github:fossar/nix-phps";
  };

  # Flake outputs
  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, phps }:
    let
      # Systems supported
      allSystems = [
        "x86_64-linux" # 64-bit Intel/AMD Linux
        "aarch64-linux" # 64-bit ARM Linux
        "x86_64-darwin" # 64-bit Intel macOS
        "aarch64-darwin" # 64-bit ARM macOS
      ];

      # Helper to provide system-specific attributes
      forAllSystems = f: nixpkgs.lib.genAttrs allSystems (system: f {
        pkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; };
      });
    in
    {
      # Development environment output
      devShells = forAllSystems ({ pkgs }: {
        default = pkgs.mkShell {
          # The Nix packages provided in the environment
          packages = with pkgs; [
            nodejs_20 # Node.js 18, plus npm, npx, and corepack
            yarn
            phps.packages.${system}.php74
            phps.packages.${system}.php74.packages.composer
          ];
    
          shellHook = ''
            yarn
            npx aws-cdk --version
            php -v
          '';
        };
      });
    };
}

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A few weeks ago I was at HighEdWeb 2023 in Buffalo and caught a talk (“Maybe some other time Docker: Fast, declarative and reproducible developer environments using Nix”) from Jason Woodward about Nix. Nix is many things, including an OS, but he focused on Nix-the-package-manager and that’s what I’m going to (briefly) discuss here.

To grossly oversimplify, Nixpkgs is a collection of tens of thousands of packages precompiled for various platforms. Each version of each package can be referenced by hash. Using a nix flake, you can specify which packages should be associated with your project. The nix develop command will then use path magic to load the specified packages into your shell. When you exit from the shell the paths are unloaded.

I moved this blog to hexo about a year ago. My authoring environment needs a few things: a reasonable version of node, hexo server running in the background to serve pages, and hexo generate --watch to catch changes as I write. My old process involved manually kicking those processes off. Before I could do that, I had to run nvm use to leverage the .nvmrc file at the root of my project directory to ensure that I had the correct version of node active, including the global reference for hexo.

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The vibe on Space Probe Taurus is weird, for lack of a more specific term. It has the bones of a typical 1950s-1960s hard science fiction near-future let’s-go-conquer-space flick. The four main characters, the only ones we spend any real time with, are stock types: the hard-driving commander, the older scientist/engineer, the tough-on-the-surface female scientist, and the wiseguy she eventually falls for. They crew a rocketship dispatched from Earth in the year 2000 to explore outer space and find a planet suitable for colonization.

Things start weird and get weirder. We open not with this crew, but with the last surviving member of a different rocketship. The ship is located on an undefined planet, the rest of the crew killed by an unspecified disease and/or radiation. Somehow in real-time communication with Earth (this movie’s hand-waving of time and space problems anticipates J. J. Abrams by over 40 years), he implores for Earth to destroy the ship and kill him. After some back-and-forth, Mission Control pushes a button on a panel (!) and destroys the ship.

On the one hand, this trope of self-sacrifice for the conquest of space was pretty common. The Quatermass movies were all over this territory; First Man into Space is another example. On the other, and this is going to be a pattern with this movie, we never really mention this crew and its sacrifice again. Our crew doesn’t travel to this planet; it’s not mentioned in dialogue. I’m not sure it’s a wrong choice–the planet was clearly unsuitable, no use throwing good money after bad etc–it’s just unexpected.

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