The offline laptop

The tent at the Maple Grove finish line has a folding table, a thermos, and a laptop whose wifi died at 8:20. Nobody in the tent is worried.

The timing crew’s desktop app, the fourth door from Act 0, keeps every crossing on the laptop itself. Work happening on the machine in front of you is localConcept · lights on your maplocalHappening on the device you are using, with its own processor, memory and storage. The opposite of remote, which is any machine reached over a network.; everything this story has otherwise cared about, Traversal’s servers, the database, the pipeline, is remoteConcept · lights on your mapremoteHappening on another computer reached over a network. The word says nothing about distance. Not-this-machine is the whole meaning.. The app was built local-first precisely because finish-line wifi is a coin flip, and a timing system that needs the network to remember a crossing is not a timing system. The laptop records alone, happily, for hours if it must.

At 9:05 the wifi returns, and the morning’s crossings travel up to Traversal in one gulp. Sending from your machine to a remote one is an uploadConcept · lights on your mapuploadYour device sending data to a remote system, up and away. Like its opposite, it usually creates a copy rather than moving the original.; the reverse trip is a downloadConcept · lights on your mapdownloadYour device receiving data from a remote system, down and toward you. A copy arrives; the original stays., and this act’s push and pull were exactly these words in Git’s uniform. Both make copies. The tent keeps its own record all day, which is why the crew chief, asked if anything was lost, answers by patting the laptop once and saying nothing.

The pile leaves as one file

The course photographers finish the morning with three thousand shots, and the shots travel as a single object because of compressionConcept · lights on your mapcompressionRe-encoding information so it takes fewer bytes, like storing “repeat blue a thousand times” instead of the word a thousand times. Lossless restores the original exactly; lossy trades detail for space.: re-spelling bytes so they take less room. Bundled and compressed together, files become a ZIP fileConcept · lights on your mapZIP fileA compressed archive bundling files and folders into one. Unzipping restores the originals exactly; ZIP is lossless., and unzipping restores every pixel exactly. ZIP promises losslessness. Seven weeks from now, a much larger ZIP with Case’s face in it will make the same trip in the other direction, and you will know precisely what is happening.

The splits are up, the photos are in, the tent is folded by noon. One more Maple Grove scene: Finn, parked behind the school, reading the morning’s logs the fast way.