Existing work

Firstly, after doing this much work, I have discovered someone already has done a similar investigation: How long is a Star Trek title? by Bruce Bennett, so check that out. One thing it does have that I don’t, is charts.

Improving workflow

The analysis so far has been done using a Google Docs spreadsheet. I then manually wrote the Markdown for the blog posts, which involved some tedious and error prone tables.

I was originally not going to include the giant list of every single-word episode title, since creating that table did not look like fun.

But… I also started working a little program to do more sophisticated processing, and realised I could also make the program generate the Markdown for me.

The program is a .NET 7 console application writen in C#, and writing it was probably quicker than the manipulation I had to do with the spreadsheet in the first place. It was definitely quicker than producing the Markdown tables in the first post manually.

The end result is I can generate tables of all sorts of random episode lists with different properties of varying levels of interest with very little effort.

After starting my previous post with this question but not answering it, I’ll get straight to the point. There is a tie for first place, with two episode titles that are two characters long:

Shortest episode titles

The shortest title per series is:

Every series has several single word episode titles.

Longest episode titles

Unlike with the shortest episode title, I had a good idea what the longest one was. At least, I had two candidates, but without sitting down and counting, picking one would have been a guess. I can confirm they are the longest two, and I present them both since they are such outliers compared to the rest.

And the longest per series:

This brings us our first controversial result. I decided that ellipses should be treated as a single letter (if only for a sense of typographical superiority). In this case, treating it as three letters would produce a different result:

The titles so far have been longest by letter-count. Longest by word-count can also be determined. This gives identical results, except Voyager and the Animated Series now have ties:

It is often necessary in computer systems to get the current date and time. .NET has had a straightforward way to do that since its inception. What it hasn’t had is a built-in way to customize the behavior, particularly for mocking during automated tests.

Quite why this situation has persisted for so long is a bit of mystery. The importance of automated tests has only risen over time and questions about how to deal with this crop up quite frequently. The general solution is to provide an abstraction that you can inject and mock easily.

The popular date and time library Noda Time includes IClock, and any developers are often directed to use Noda Time for anything making use of anything but the simplest of time-based logic. But it is still odd there is nothing built-in, especially considering there is an existing private implementation in .NET, as well as several in ASP.NET.

Well .NET 8 will finally be getting System.TimeProvider:

namespace System
{
    /// <summary>Provides an abstraction for time. </summary>
    public abstract class TimeProvider
    {
        protected TimeProvider();
        public static TimeProvider System { get; }
        public static TimeProvider FromLocalTimeZone(TimeZoneInfo timeZone);
        public abstract DateTimeOffset UtcNow { get; }
        public DateTimeOffset LocalNow { get; }
        public abstract TimeZoneInfo LocalTimeZone { get; }
        public abstract long GetTimestamp();
        public abstract long TimestampFrequency { get; }
        public TimeSpan GetElapsedTime(long startingTimestamp, long endingTimestamp);
        public abstract ITimer CreateTimer(TimerCallback callback, object? state, TimeSpan dueTime, TimeSpan period);
    }
}

Here is the original GitHub issue and the pull request implementing it.

As well as providing a mockable abstraction to get the current time (including a default implementation providing the system time), it also adds supports to a bunch of other APIs to use a specified instance instead including Task and Timer.

And, best of all, despite my earlier claim that this is a .NET 8 feature, this will also be made available as a package targeting .NET Standard 2.0, so it can be used on .NET Framework and other targets.

I recently found myself idly wondering what the shortest Star Trek episode title was. The first to come to mind was the Original Series episode “Arena” (the one which Captain Kirk fights a humanoid lizard in one of the most striking examples of 1960 “makeup”).

I guessed there were probably shorter ones, but was rather disappointed I didn’t know the answer for sure. So I decided to find out.

While investigating, I also started wondering other things, like: what is the longest episode title? Which series has the shortest or longest titles on average? How many episodes begin with “the”?

I have decided to gather the answers to these questions and more together into a series of blog posts.

Some ground rules

I quickly realised even for “shortest episode title” there were some decisions I would have to make about what would count.

What counts as a letter?

Any character is a letter. So including (but not necessarily limited to):

• The letters A-Z (regardless of case or accents).
• The digits 0-9.
• Any punctuation symbol.
• A space.
• An ellipsis (so three dots … is a single character).

What counts as a word?

Spaces separate words, nothing else does. 37's is one word, as is 11001001.

Which series/episodes are included?

I decided to include all episodes from The Original Series (including “The Cage”), The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. This is for the simple practical reason that no more episodes are being produced for these (with the recent annocunement that season 5 of Discovery will be its last, I may redo this including Discovery in the near future).

What about two-part episodes?

For two part episodes (that don’t have completely different titles), I’m just using the “base name”.

About those two-part episodes

The first two-part episode of Star Trek was called “The Menagerie”. In the episode title sequence it is styled as "THE MENAGERIE" PART I and "THE MENAGERIE" PART II, with the part information clearly outside the quotation marks used to identify the title. This suggests the title is in fact “The Menagerie”.

“The Menagerie” (as far as I am aware) was never produced as a single feature length episode. Many other two-part episodes were either broadcast originally as a single episode, or later made available as one (often with additional footage included). This means an episode could potentially have three different names (one for each part individually and one for the whole) and using the “base name” seems most sensible in this case.

It should also be noted, there is little consistency in how the two-part episode titles are handled. Some of them give the first part the “base name” and add “Part II” after whereas others include the part information in both titles. Whether the part information is inside the quotes varies, and even whether the word “part” is included.

So overall, I feel justified in in using the “base name”, just as a way of establishing some kind of order. Although I can already tell I’m going to have to write a detailed blog post covering all of this (especially if I get to including Discovery, since that messes everything up by having an episode titled as if it is the third part of a three-part episode, the first two parts of which are from another series).

Image copyright © Paramount Global and used under fair use.

New audio versions of all* of the Discworld books are being produced. They aren’t being released in order though and as far as I can tell there is no convenient page listing all the release dates.

So here are the release dates currently listed on Audible as of 15th March, 2023. There are a few different ways Discworld books get grouped. “Series” below is how Audible have grouped them (and I assume matches the narrator).

Release date

2021 December 21st

2022 April 28th

2022 July 7th

2022 October 6th

2022 October 27th

2023 February 23rd

2023 March 30th

2023 May 18th

2023 May 25th

2023 June 15th

Reading order

* There are 41 Discworld books. The website says “40 magnificent new recordings”. The one that seems to be missing is “The Last Hero”.

Over the weekend I was playing around with Blazor and created a little number game based on part of a popular British TV show.

In the future this may expand in functionality as part of my exploration into Blazor.

You can try the number game full screen.

Just to avoid any confusion, everything in this post is based on how things work in the UK and is for things available in the UK.

So far I have operated various business ventures off my personal bank account. Since I’ve been doing this as a sole trader, this is allowed. It does however make tax returns take more effort than necessary.

FreeAgent

I recently had reason to interact with FreeAgent, which is some pretty cool accounting software that makes a lot of things simpler. Unfortunately to really use it to its potential, you need to link it to a bank account used solely for your business.

Conveniently, they offer a free account to anyone who has a Mettle account. I had seen Mettle before, and it is described as “the free mobile business account with no hidden fees or charges”, and is operated by NatWest, one of the big UK high street banks.

E-money accounts

After a quick investigation, it seems one of the reasons it is free (which is the norm for personal accounts in the UK but not business accounts) is that it is not actually a bank account, but an “e-money account”. You get an account number as well as a debit card, but it is not subject to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (a scheme in the UK in which the government guarantees bank balances up to a certain amount if a bank goes under).

That limitation seemed fine to me since I did not intend to keep a large balance, so I created an account. Sadly, I found out there are other limitations which basically rendered it useless to me.

Prepaid cards

Firstly, it does not come with an IBAN (international bank account number). This means I cannot receive payments from Apple. Secondly, the card is a prepaid card. Since it is tied to the e-money account they give you, it feels like a debit card to use, except some things just don’t accept payments using them. Crucially for me, Microsoft Azure and Google Ads.

Conclusion

In the end, I opened a business account with Royal Bank of Scotland. RBS and NatWest business accounts also get free FreeAgent accounts. The application was more involved (for Mettle, besides verifying your ID you just have to declare you aren’t in one of their list of prohibited business) but in the end was fine.

New audio versions of all* of the Discworld books are being produced. They aren’t being released in order though and as far as I can tell there is no convenient page listing all the release dates.

So here are the release dates currently listed on Audible. There are a few different ways Discworld books get grouped. “Series” below is how Audible have grouped them (and I assume matches the narrator).

Release date

2021 December 21st

2022 April 28th

2022 July 7th

2022 October 10th

2022 October 27th

2023 February 23rd

Release date - To be released

2023 April 27th

Unknown

Reading order

* There are 41 Discworld books. The website says “40 magnificent new recordings”. The one that seems to be missing is “The Last Hero”.

I posted a while ago about a technical standard that was being used for consent gathering on websites and in apps known as the “Transparency & Consent Framework” by IAB Europe.

Well, the Belgian Data Protection Agency (the Belgian organization responsible for enforcing the GDPR) has fined IAB Europe €250,000 because the TCF “fails to comply with a number of provisions of the GDPR”.

I don’t know whether fining IAB Europe is the correct choice, as they themselves claim they aren’t a data controller and only provide guidance (and a spec) for other companies to use. But the fine itself is not really what is going to be turn out important. The judgement requires:

all recipients of the personal data processed in the TCF . . . to permanently delete all TC Strings and other personal data already processed in the TCF from all IT systems, files and data carriers.

One piece of irony - if you search for articles about this you will find they are nearly all protected by consent dialogs based on TCF.

Here is the full judgement in English.

There is now a preview package for Blazor that allows creating custom elements.

Custom elements are part of the Web Components standards and are intended to be a way of defining tags that can be consumed in HTML and interoperate with each other.

The docs mostly focus on using them with Angular or React, but that isn’t why they are interesting to me.

The site for Tic-tac-toe Collection includes pages that show some information about specific game mode (for example four-player Tic-tac-toe misère rumble).

That content is rendered as a custom element (in this case <ttt-settings short-code="T_D4_S6x6_W3_T0_P0_M1_O1_F0"></ttt-settings>). Since the site is statically generated with no frontend framework, I wrote the element in vanilla JavaScript. Blazor support for custom elements means I could rewrite that component in C#.