3,118 karma · joined August 23, 2011
Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength.
In effect the four components are like numbers you
can multiply together to get a score for
usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly
reductive, but nonetheless true.
PERRY: Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans
Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully understand poetry, we
must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and
figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One,
how artfully has the objective of the poem been
rendered, and two, how important is that objective.
Question one rates the poem's perfection, question
two rates its importance. And once these questions
have been answered, determining a poem's greatness
becomes a relatively simple matter.
Keating gets up from his desk and prepares to draw on
the chalk board.
PERRY: If the poem's score for perfection is
plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its
importance is plotted on the vertical, then
calculating the total area of the poem yields the
measure of its greatness.
Keating draws a corresponding graph on the board and
the students dutifully copy it down.
:)
As a developer who does server-side stuff, a mac was an obvious easy choice for a long time -- a tradition that has been widespread going at least as far back as dhh's intro to rails development using textmate [1].
What does that open source crowd want now? They want to build OCI/docker containers and deploy them to kubernetes clusters. You can do that on mac, but these containers need to run on a linux kernel, so the setup winds up as containers on a VM on the host OS.
If your dev machine is linux, you can remove the VM layer in between and the setup is simpler and more efficient. I think that might push a lot of developers from mac to linux. I just got a new dev machine recently and it's a linux laptop.
Training/Certification Firewall
The Linux Foundation has two separate training divisions:
Course Delivery and Certification. These two divisions are
separated by a firewall.
The curriculum development and maintenance division of the
Linux Foundation Training department has no direct role in
developing, administering, or grading certification exams.
Enforcing this self-imposed firewall ensures that
independent organizations and companies can develop third
party training material, geared towards helping test
takers pass their certification exams.
Furthermore, it ensures that there are no secret "tips"
(or secrets in general) that one needs to be familiar with
in order to succeed.
It also permits the Linux Foundation to develop a very
robust set of courses that do far more than teach the
test, but rather equip attendees with a broad knowledge
of the many areas they may be required to master to have a
successful career in open source system administration.
However for this essay in particular, had I been among the set of draft readers, I would have suggested toning down the “I hadn't realized X until now, so now I think other people haven't realized X either” message.
Back in college I remember noticing choices of “better learning vs better grade” and deliberately choosing the former with a proudly “screw the authorities” attitude. I'm sure plenty of other Tara Ploughmans could say the same.
Bill Gates is probably a good example to look to. He also stayed on the board (as chair) and remained a large shareholder, and was looked up to as the cofounder. So I'd imagine “like Bill Gates but with less active interest and involvement”.
A recent episode of Radiolab, dated August 27, 2019, introduced a large audience (including me) to another podcast, The Memory Palace:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/memor...
With that strong endorsement I began going through the whole back-catalog of The Memory Palace, and Episode 36, dated January 7, 2011, “six scenes from the life of william james sidis, wonderful boy”, talks about Sidis' obsession with bus tickets. Or maybe more precisely, streetcar transfers.
http://thememorypalace.us/2011/01/six-scenes-in-the-life-of-...
I think it said he figured out ways to traverse great distances on a single fare by connecting transfers. That kind of graph traversal thinking strikes me as ahead of its time for the age of streetcars, and could plausibly have led to some interesting places.
I searched for a while for a decent way to deal with the "too many tabs" problem and SessionSync is where I've landed, so far anyway.
SessionSync doesn't ask you to set up an account anywhere new - it just saves tabs as bookmarks into a 'SessionSync' folder in your firefox bookmarks menu, which are then synced automatically with the rest of your firefox profile data, to any other computers or phones synced with the same profile. Even if you decided to stop using SessionSync, you'd still have access to everything using Firefox's usual bookmarks interface. It basically gives you some options that I think firefox was missing, to save and restore whole sets of tabs to ordered lists in bookmark folders rather than dealing with urls individually.
I have no affiliation with SessionSync; just wanted to mention it as one thing I really like in the firefox ecosystem. It has rough edges (e.g. no 'undo' if you save over the wrong folder accidentally, and sometimes weirdly changes the order of tabs on save), but it's the best tool I've found so far to do this sort of thing. Please let me know if you're using something as good or better though :)
Seems like infrastructure/devops always gets short-staffed, presumably due to being considered a cost center. Interesting to hear someone observe this even as they're saying a company "over hired" and "engineers ran out of things to do".
It comes in the form of "go ahead and install this thing, and throw this config value into it, and it should just work". And my reaction is "I want to read up on that thing first. I want to know what stuff it writes to my computer and where and what paradigms it uses. I want to think about how it will best integrate with the tools and workflows we have already. And then once I've done that, I'll probably be able to move forward with it comfortably. Then I'll want to document it so it becomes part of the regular setup others do when they onboard onto the project."
Just this past week when I said a version of this, I got a reaction like there is something wrong with me.
On a project where I was doing frontend work, I just tried to think about the semantics of html elements and http requests, and reason my way through the tasks from first principles. I really enjoyed doing that actually, and don't regret it. But it didn't teach me angular which is what the frontend people at that company were using at the time, or probably any of the other ones.
I hope to venture into frontend land again, because I think it's a valuable skillset, but I hope the next time I do things will have settled into something a bit more sane. When I find a layer of a technology stack that seems to have been misused or misunderstood, my tendency has been to stop at that point and dive into a rabbit hole trying to understand what is going wrong and how to fix it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch
I'll show myself out...
That's the tribal impulse right there. The one that says: screw the rest of the world, what matters is us and our in-group. Circle the wagons. Be a team player. Prize loyalty.
Maybe the type of person who bends this way has something valuable to contribute during their time on this earth, but often I struggle to see just what that might be.
Reading a few sentences, looking out at Lanai. Reading a few more sentences, and looking back at Lanai...
The open hardware part is extremely appealing, and the reason I started paying attention to System76 in the first place.
What's missing for me is form factor. Rather than a desktop tower, I want to rackmount a machine in an AV cabinet and put it in my living room alongside other devices like an ethernet switch, UPS, maybe an AV receiver, set-top box, or other bits of AV/smarthome type gear. Like those home stereo racks people had in the 80s and 90s (tape deck, cd changer, receiver, record player, amplifier). But with actual rack mounting hardware like you get in modern server rooms.
I already shopped around for, and have, a suitable cabinet: https://www.salamanderdesigns.com/racks-stands/hampton-317-r...
So when I look at their 'servers' page I see machines that belong in some company's server room, away from humans. The small height (1U or 2U) says "compute density" (which is one of the metrics emphasized on their product page) and also means small fans which need to move a lot of air, which means noise.
The servers offered go up to 28 or even 31.5 inches deep. The shallowest is still 22 inches deep. My aforementioned cabinet has 16.5 inches of depth from the front rails to the back rails. So while the rackmount hardware is the same standard 19 inch width with vertical hole spacing measured in U's, there is a distinct difference between what is built for a server rack and what is built for an AV-style cabinet in someone's home.
A chassis with 4U or more of height would allow larger, slower 120mm fans suitable for a quiet living room. I want something like that on sliding rails so it can be easily pulled out like a drawer for component changes.
That would be a great bit of design for a home server, I think. And if System76 or a similar vendor were offering this as a product category, I'd be asking them to take my money :)
I can ignore identity switchers provided by a site (google in this case) and just keep two gmail tabs, one for personal and one for work, open right next to one another. Firefox keeps each one sandboxed with its own session info like cookies etc.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...
Even if I'm not going to be judged out loud in this meeting, I'm going to have to explain myself. I have a problem in front of me that I'm working to solve. Maybe I decided to do some reading about possible ways to solve it. Maybe I decided to learn one of the tools that I'll probably use in the course of solving it. Maybe I'll try a particular approach.
Whatever I decided to do yesterday, I have to decide how to frame it and describe it today. I can practically hear another engineer or manager thinking "why didn't you just X" where X is some simple thing involving less time and thought than what I did. And I don't want to have that conversation with them right now. I am still in the middle of it.
I want to be able to say in a few days, "Here's a solution! It meets the requirements and in a really elegant way if I do say so!" I live for that. I want the freedom and flexibility to get to that point without being probed every day about how I'm getting there. I used to do that, before scrums and standups took over the programming world, and it was great. Having a daily checkin robs me of that latitude.
I'll gladly pick someone's brain if I want their input or feel stuck. But if I want to think outside the box a bit, a daily checkin can feel like a pretty short leash.
I've typically gone to Alamo Drafthouse. It's a somewhat upscale theater chain if you're not familiar. Pairs of seats share little tables, you buy a ticket for a specific seat, and they serve meals and drinks during the film.
When MoviePass came out I doubted they'd include Alamo but looked anyway. The local Alamo did indeed show up among the MoviePass theaters so I signed up.
When I tried to use it, I checked in advance because I've learned that the good seats get reserved early so unless it's a mostly empty showing, getting a ticket at the last minute can relegate you to the eyestrain seats in the very front couple rows.
The app said I could only get a ticket if I was geographically close to the theater. I can't reserve good seats well in advance. In fact I can't even head to the theater knowing I have tickets. I have to go there first hoping that a) I can get tickets and b) hoping I can get good tickets.
The idea being, I guess, that MoviePass' arrangement with Alamo is purely about helping Alamo fill any seats that may still be unsold when the movie is about to start. And then maybe Alamo can sell those people some food and drinks.
This might work for someone who will stop by a theater often, has flexible plans, and sees a lot of less popular showings. It's a total non-starter for someone like me who goes only occasionally to mostly highly anticipated films and always as a date with a significant other who cares a lot about having a plan in place and getting good seats.
Oh well, what did I expect. It's a cheap monthly subscription.
But the final frustration was trying to quit. I recall the app making this rather difficult and non-intuitive, and then warning that if I quit I wasn't going to be permitted to sign up again.
If you're the head of state, or the head of a successful company, or the venture capitalist, or simply heir to a fortune, you know you're on top. You wake up every day knowing your time belongs to you. You walk into a room and people smile at you, suck up to you, want to be your friend. You might even make frequent decisions about which other people in your world move upward or downward.
This seems like it would be a significant dimension for anyone wanting to measure quality of life. And for this reason, I bet a lot of people wouldn't mind terribly if they had to give up their electricity, air conditioning, color television, and the rest of their modern conveniences if it meant they could swap lives with the Vanderbilits and Astors of old.