Two of my favorite recent finds.
But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction.
Encoding data in dubstep drops
Fourier Transform & Dubstep Drops
12 years training for this role!
So far, my children's senior year of high school has been mostly wasted time. This is especially so as their graduation day comes ever closer. I propose that we alter senior year from one of listening from the back of the classroom to one of teaching from the front. It should be year when the seniors go out into all the lower grades, K through 11, and be teachers's assistants. Who else has a better understanding of how to be useful and successful in schools than do these young adults that have spent 12 years training for this role?
Sleeping dogs
Sometimes you forget those services that quietly run for months at a time in a corner of the datacenter. I am thinking of using gRPC to replace the communication layer for our micro-services. They currently use a home-grown RPC over HTTP that, while successful and simple to use for new services, is home-grown, non-streaming, and Java specific. One of our earliest micro-services handles over 2B requests per month. Perhaps I should let sleeping dogs lie....
Struggling to load Arabic text into MySql 5.6
If you are struggling to load Arabic text or Emojis into your MySql 5.6 table then:
- Ensure your database, table, and column use uft8mb4 character set.
create database XXXX character set 'utf8mb4' collate 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci'; create table ( ... ) ... character set 'utf8mb4' collate 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci';
- Ensure that the data file you are loading is UTF-8 encoded.
- Run the mysql client with the binary character set.
mysql ... --default-character-set=binary ...
- Load the data with the binary character set.
loading load data local infile 'XXXX.DAT' into table XXXX character set binary ( ... );
Good Terraform and AWS tutorial
The Learn DevOps: Infrastructure Automation With Terraform tutorial from Udemy is very good. While it is focuses on using Terraform to manage AWS it also gives a good introduction on how to assemble AWS' many moving parts.
The only trouble I had with the examples was that the initial ones assume that you have IP access via the AWS default security group. That might not be the case and so you will need to use the AWS console to allow your machine's public IP address ingress. To do this, go to the AWS Console, then to the EC2 dashboard, then to the Security Groups resource, and in that dialog select the default security group and add an Inbound rule for your public IP address.
The only trouble I had with the examples was that the initial ones assume that you have IP access via the AWS default security group. That might not be the case and so you will need to use the AWS console to allow your machine's public IP address ingress. To do this, go to the AWS Console, then to the EC2 dashboard, then to the Security Groups resource, and in that dialog select the default security group and add an Inbound rule for your public IP address.
Two masters
I attended last night's release of the Providence Geeks new website developed by Kenzan. Owen Buckley, Kenzan's director of engineering, did a good job describing the management and implementation of the project. The final result is a useful website, but with little polish. This is because Kenzan had two customers and not one for this project. Providence Geeks (customer 1) wanted a new website to replace Facebook. Kenzan (customer 2) wanted a learning opportunity for its staff. So the project had too many acceptance criteria, or, as Owen Buckley said "when do you know it is done?" Unfortunately, "done" was having built an 18-wheeler to haul a pin.
Patreon's self-inflicted death wound
I like that the Patreon service exists, but am just now discovering what a rip-off it has been for creators. When I give $1 to a creator Patreon takes a 5% cut, which was acceptable (if high), but then Patreon charges the creator for serving the payment. The servicing cost is between between 7-15%. I had no idea that Patreon did not assume the cost of service fees as part of their 5% cut. Now they want to shift the service fee to the patron via a 2.9% fee plus 35 cents on each pledge. My $1 is now going to be $1.38 (ie 100 + 2.9 + 35)! Patreon needs to rethink this change or discover how quickly they will be replaced as an intermediary.
See Funny money, Patreon Style.
Update: Patreon responds We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change.
Two kinds of noise
I started to read Twitter again. The user experience sucks. Twitter is mostly for information delivery. Let's look at a page of contents as presented and as is actually present:
Three tweets in 100 square inches of screen space. (Large editorial photos and illustrations do not count as content.)
Three tweets in 100 square inches of screen space. (Large editorial photos and illustrations do not count as content.)
Which did you read first?
I swear that no one reads email anymore. Anything after the first sentence, nay the first line, is never read. Perhaps I should only communicate via bullet points.
- I swear that no one reads email anymore.
- Anything after the first sentence, nay the first line, is never read.
- Perhaps I should only communicate via bullet points.
The quiet crisis unfolding in software development
Bill Jordan's essay The Quiet Crisis unfolding in Software Development is spot on. Good advice for any development manager. (Ignore the hyperbolic title.)
4 skills you need to be successful in software development
Comment on Why I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts Majors
The article is a half truth. There are 4 skills you need to be successful in software development. Two of these skills are needed to be successful anywhere and they are (1) coherent written & oral communications and (2) working well with others. Any university degree will develop these skills. The other two necessary skills are (3) having broad software development experience (both re/ tasks and teams) and (4) actually knowing the foundations of computer science. A useful programmer can get by for a long time having only skills 1, 2, and 3 but a successful programmer has skill 4. Critical thinking skills alone do not design a successful system nor do they diagnose the root cause of a problem.
I have been developing software programs and software systems for 37 years. I have met lots of very useful software developers in that time. I have met only a handful of successful software developers.
I would never build a team of only useful programmers.
The article is a half truth. There are 4 skills you need to be successful in software development. Two of these skills are needed to be successful anywhere and they are (1) coherent written & oral communications and (2) working well with others. Any university degree will develop these skills. The other two necessary skills are (3) having broad software development experience (both re/ tasks and teams) and (4) actually knowing the foundations of computer science. A useful programmer can get by for a long time having only skills 1, 2, and 3 but a successful programmer has skill 4. Critical thinking skills alone do not design a successful system nor do they diagnose the root cause of a problem.
I have been developing software programs and software systems for 37 years. I have met lots of very useful software developers in that time. I have met only a handful of successful software developers.
I would never build a team of only useful programmers.
Running out of entropy
Some of our services make a million UUIDs per day. I have recently been worried about how random they are, and especially with the question are we creating duplicates? I use Java's java.util.UUID.randomUUID() to create the UUIDs. These are created using random data from /dev/urandom. I have been told that /dev/urandom never blocks and never runs out of randomness. I find this hard to believe.
You check on how many bytes of entropy are available using
Our counts are always less than 200. That is not enough. And so my concern is that I have a system that depends on random UUIDs that does not have enough entropy and so, so as not to block, it is using math to get randomness. I don't trust math randomness.
I don't yet have the full picture yet. Hopefully I will soon.
See Check available entropy in Linux.
Update: We have deployed haveged and available entropy is always over 1,000.
You check on how many bytes of entropy are available using
cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail
Our counts are always less than 200. That is not enough. And so my concern is that I have a system that depends on random UUIDs that does not have enough entropy and so, so as not to block, it is using math to get randomness. I don't trust math randomness.
I don't yet have the full picture yet. Hopefully I will soon.
See Check available entropy in Linux.
Update: We have deployed haveged and available entropy is always over 1,000.
Slides for your generic talks
Recently we had the generic TED talk. I think I am going to start collecting the images that seem to be used by all talks. The inaugural image is, without a doubt the most used in more slides than any other, the iceberg.
Searching browser history using Google Chrome search engine
Hum. If you add to Google Chrome the search engine
chrome://history/?q=%syou can quickly search your browser URL history by typing
Cmd-l h search-text.
Grumble about messaging conversation indistinguishability
Why, why! oh mighty God, do Slack, Skype, Messenger, iMessage, and every other messaging application not make any visual distinction between two or more conversations? Squint at the screen and you will see that every conversation looks identical -- even across messaging applications! How many times have you and I and, most likely, the developers of these applications sent a message to the wrong conversation? Lots. Please, oh pretty please, allow me to at least change the background color of conversations.
$0.43 for Psychotherapist Barbie services
All the wonderful applications and toys that requires an internet service for operation have a very short life. Most application startups don't last two years. That great calendar extension, or small office workflow coordinator, or automatic uploaded video curation you use every day quickly becomes inert. You anxiously wait for their death. The situation for toys is even worse. Almost no toy manufacturer has had to provide service support and maintenance. Once the toy is sold, the only worry a manufacturer had was that of product liability suites. So what are we to expect as we move ever forward into the internet-of-things?
Suppose that Hasbro sells "Psychotherapist Barbie" and she needs to store years of voice recordings and to run complex voice, tone, and sentiment analysis algorithms so as to synthetically voice the appropriate response. How long is Hasbro going to operate this as the number of active customers and maintenance income dwindle?
Hasbro should not run the services. Instead, Hasbro should use the Barbie owner's own Amazon Web Services account to run them on. That is, on behalf of the owner Hasbro will provision the AWS services needed to use Psychotherapist Barbie. Once running, Barbie's owner pays for the services until he or she no longer wants to use the toy. If Barbie's owner prefers Google Cloud Services or Microsoft Azure then Hasbro would provision there instead.
We need manufacturers that sell applications and toys requiring connectivity, storage, and computation for their operation to use the owner's preferred cloud services provider. This is quite easy to do with applications or toys that are used in isolation. For applications or toys that require a network of users then the solution is a little harder as the manufacture would need to implement services that share without centralization and to scale from two users to many, or perhaps millions, of users.
I look forward to the day when I receive my monthly AWS services bill and see listed the applications and toys I use that make my life a little easier and more enjoyable.
PDFs, comments, and Dropbox
I love commenting on long-form documents. If the author put the necessary work into creating a cogent examination of a topic then I am going to put in the effort to understand it. And I do that by making comments. Some are questions. Some are observations. Some are petty, especially the typographic ones.
When you like commenting you want to have the space needed to comment. I seem to recall that I once forced an author to use double line spacing and an extra wide right margin so that I had room to write. That was great. When Microsoft Word added the comment bubble user-interface I did not think my commenting life could be better. I was wrong. Online collaborative commenting is even better.
Most of my documents are written using Google Docs. Docs has weak formatting and content structuring tools, but it does have great commenting (and version control). I am willing to lose a little structure and style for that. Not all documents come my way via Google Docs, unfortunately. Most of them use Adobe's PDF as authors want structure and style over commenting. Especially, it seems, those working in elementary and secondary education. Sigh.
Today I wanted to read and share my comments on RIDE's "Creating a Shared Understanding of Personalized Learning for Rhode Island," a PDF document. So I looked around the web for tools. There are a fair number, but I was happy to find that Dropbox allows for online collaborative commenting of PDFs. Just add the document to Dropbox and share it. Anyone viewing the document sees the comments and anyone wanting to add comments need only login with Dropbox or Google credentials.
Another online problem solved.
When you like commenting you want to have the space needed to comment. I seem to recall that I once forced an author to use double line spacing and an extra wide right margin so that I had room to write. That was great. When Microsoft Word added the comment bubble user-interface I did not think my commenting life could be better. I was wrong. Online collaborative commenting is even better.
Most of my documents are written using Google Docs. Docs has weak formatting and content structuring tools, but it does have great commenting (and version control). I am willing to lose a little structure and style for that. Not all documents come my way via Google Docs, unfortunately. Most of them use Adobe's PDF as authors want structure and style over commenting. Especially, it seems, those working in elementary and secondary education. Sigh.
Today I wanted to read and share my comments on RIDE's "Creating a Shared Understanding of Personalized Learning for Rhode Island," a PDF document. So I looked around the web for tools. There are a fair number, but I was happy to find that Dropbox allows for online collaborative commenting of PDFs. Just add the document to Dropbox and share it. Anyone viewing the document sees the comments and anyone wanting to add comments need only login with Dropbox or Google credentials.
Another online problem solved.
3 times a loser
Last night the Town Council for the second time since the November election had to appoint a replacement School Committee member. I was not appointed. I am disappointed; more so than I thought I would be. Losing 3 times in so many months drains the spirit.
Liz Gledhill nominated me and Joe Viele seconded the nomination. Since Scott received the necessary 3 winning votes my nomination was never voted on. Meg Healy, Abel Collins, and Bryant Da Cruz appointed Scott Mueller to the vacated seat.
I want to thank Liz and Joe for having the courage to support my positions and this governance rookie. I also want to thank all those people across this country that stood up for what is right over these last weeks as it was their example that inspired me to try again.
Scott was not a good choice. Healy, Collins, and Da Cruz made a politically safe choice and, moreover, a safe Democratic party choice. The ramification of their choice is that the SC is effectively the same SC as we had before the November election. An election that clearly called for change. Roland Benjamin and Alycia Collins will do their best to shift the SC's focus towards, I am guessing, finer budget control and reducing the barriers that obstruct educating all of our children. The other 5 members and the Superintendent will continue as they always have. The brazen submittal to the TC of a school budget that increases spending by double the State mandated limit clearly shows that they are not adequate to the task of their responsibility. Shame on them. And shame on the TC for not listening to SK's voters.
Liz Gledhill nominated me and Joe Viele seconded the nomination. Since Scott received the necessary 3 winning votes my nomination was never voted on. Meg Healy, Abel Collins, and Bryant Da Cruz appointed Scott Mueller to the vacated seat.
I want to thank Liz and Joe for having the courage to support my positions and this governance rookie. I also want to thank all those people across this country that stood up for what is right over these last weeks as it was their example that inspired me to try again.
Scott was not a good choice. Healy, Collins, and Da Cruz made a politically safe choice and, moreover, a safe Democratic party choice. The ramification of their choice is that the SC is effectively the same SC as we had before the November election. An election that clearly called for change. Roland Benjamin and Alycia Collins will do their best to shift the SC's focus towards, I am guessing, finer budget control and reducing the barriers that obstruct educating all of our children. The other 5 members and the Superintendent will continue as they always have. The brazen submittal to the TC of a school budget that increases spending by double the State mandated limit clearly shows that they are not adequate to the task of their responsibility. Shame on them. And shame on the TC for not listening to SK's voters.
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