srand.info is my personal knowledge base: a collection of projects, technical notes, lessons learned, experiments, and occasional detours. My career and interests have crossed software, infrastructure, photography, automotive work, and independent media.
The categories will evolve, but the purpose is simple: document what I build, preserve what I learn, and share anything that might be useful or interesting to someone else.
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A working title can survive much longer than expected. By the time my nutrition plugin had public calculators, a private diary, recipes, goals, trends, and barcode lookup, the generic name “Food Toolkit” had spread through the codebase. It appeared in class namespaces, function prefixes, database tables, shortcodes, styles, and documentation. Then the project acquired its … Read more
I started the alt-text audit with a straightforward accessibility problem. Only about six percent of the WordPress media library had useful alternative text. The plan was to derive conservative descriptions from the parent article and date, preserve anything already written by hand, and improve coverage without inventing visual detail. Then I found 281 images that … Read more
I knew the nutrition engine was correct. Its tests produced the expected calorie and macronutrient results. The REST endpoints returned the right values. The conditional fields had the correct JavaScript state. One of those fields still refused to disappear in the browser. The Application Was More Than Its Engine The form included controls that should … Read more
The ad server reported thousands of monthly impressions. The site had roughly 250 to 300 human visits per month. The server-side ad proxy delivered creative to crawlers as well as people, so both numbers could be technically correct. I could not prove the exact human-to-bot split from the ad counter alone. I could prove that … Read more
The calendar worked perfectly well for a person with a modern browser. Google saw almost nothing. The public calendar was a single-page application. Its initial HTML response was an application shell, and JavaScript supplied the useful content after load. Search Console showed one crawl followed by months in “Crawled – currently not indexed.” My diagnosis … Read more
Food logging fails at intake. The calculations can be perfect and the charts can be polished, but none of that matters if recording a familiar jar, package, or snack requires transcribing a nutrition label field by field. The obvious fashionable answer was image recognition. Point a camera at the food, ask an AI model what … Read more
The first user for Seasoned Pan was never an abstract persona. It was my mother. She wanted a practical way to keep an eye on calories and protein without adopting another subscription, learning a complicated fitness platform, or being treated like a data-entry clerk every time she ate the same breakfast. That constraint made the … Read more
Every calendar refresh used to leave me with geographic cleanup. Ticketing-market boundaries are not publication boundaries. A provider’s Southern California market can include Bakersfield, Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Imperial County, and occasional edge cases beyond California. A broad coordinate rectangle has similar spillover. The fetchers accepted those records, wrote them into several outputs, … Read more
The automation kept running. Scheduled jobs started on time. Processes exited. Logs continued to accumulate. Nothing obvious announced that the newsroom had stopped publishing. The external AI model it depended on was no longer available. Process Health Was Not Product Health NewsDesk uses language models for classification, entity extraction, clustering, and synthesis. At the time, … Read more
An integer primary key is unique inside its table. That last phrase is easy to forget. NewsDesk consumed articles from two source tables created by different stages of the editorial pipeline. Both tables assigned ordinary incremental IDs. Record 42 could therefore exist in both places and refer to two unrelated articles. A downstream cluster that … Read more