I have a number of friends who work on assembly lines and all of them are: Terrified of getting sick Have no option of working from home Want to work Need to work Once upon a time my father used to own a manufacturing operation and this is the advice that I'd give him - buy these for all your line w...

I am an old tech guy. I was at the conference where TBL announced the web and I wrote my first HTML snippet just a few years later. But I pretty quickly moved from front end HTML onto back end web development and there are techniques that, while common today, I have never learned. An example of this...

So I just dropped a pill on the ground as I took my daily vitamins and I picked it it up and said "5 second rule" before popping it in my mouth. And then it struck me: In the age of covid, the 5 second rule no longer applies. Covid can live on surfaces for up to 3 days. MIT Technology Review

Note: This is from a real world thing that I'm about to release. Like a lot of database apps in the world, mine generally tend to use auto incrementing ids for object identifiers. An object identifier is a value in a system which uniquely identifies something. Let's say you have a url like this: htt...

I'd like to say that I'm happy to announce: https://www.covidnearme.org/ but I'm not. Like a lot of us, nay, most of us, I find the current COVID-19 / Corona virus bothersome if not scary. But the world is what it is and we are better off knowing more about COVID-19 rather than less so I made a tool...

So I just signed up a new service, SimpleAnalytics because, well, if I never look again at Google Analytics then I'll be happy as hell. I can't say enough bad things about Google Analytics – and I've been using it since it was Urchin. Simple Analytics appears to be an impressive tool and I want to l...

Interviewing engineers when you aren't one is a regular human resources task that tends to give non technical folk fits and for good reasons. 1. Focus on What You Can Interview them About To the non engineer, our job is all about coding but that's actually only a part of what an engineer does. Engin...

Written: 3/10/2020 @ 4:25 PM EST When changes are made then I will put an update time on this. Preparation Here are the quick bullet points: This isn't the apocalypse; but it is going to be a bad time. The mortality rates vary by age but average many times worse than flu. Minimizing non essential tr...

Today is a short one, just pointers to some datasets for Machine Learning data sets that I keep losing. Kaggle LionBridge.ai Million Song Dataset Synced Review Twitter Sample Stream

I recently had this situation in Python and Redis: redis.lpush(kafka_topic_name, current_filename) redis.exceptions.ResponseError: WRONGTYPE Operation against a key holding the wrong kind of value So I did my normal deal of debugging by adding: import pdb and then a: pdb.set_trace() before the lpush...

When you know something well you always look to learn by analogy. Today's short topic is reloading the REPL (read-evaluate-print-loop) interactive console in Python and then contrast between Python and Rails. And, yes, I get that Python is a language and Rails is a framework but where you tend to wo...

One of the most confusing aspects of multi language programming is when you know how to do it in your preferred language and when you are trying to figure it out in your new language. And, as any reader of this blog knows, Ruby is always, always, always my preferred language. But, as my perspective ...

I have always found that serendipity plays a large role in my technical life. For example I recently ran into a great article and discussion thread on PDF Text Extraction: Article Discussion Thread The thrust of this article amounts to "PDF Processing Is Hard and Here's Why" (tldr - PDF isn't a docu...

One of the more interesting facilities in Rails helpers which reside in app/helpers/*.rb and are used, well, as helpers. Helpers are basically display level execution of Ruby code. I recently wrote what I thought was a great example of a helper so I thought I'd document it. What I had was a object, ...

I had a question recently about my use of git trash which isn't a standard git command. I accomplished this, about a decade ago, by modifying ~/.gitconfig and, well, I haven't thought about it ever since. Here's my ~/.gitconfig as an example. [color] diff = auto status = auto branch = auto [color "b...

Once upon a time I blogged about the controversial things but now, well, I mostly don't care. Still every so often you come along someone getting things so, so, so wrong that you feel compelled to respond. I'm speaking to this tweet by DHH, someone I deeply, deeply respect: Did Facebook just kill of...

Artwork by my friend Autumn Mott; Hopefully I can find a better link to put here It is a Monday and what better way to start your 6 am Monday morning then learning some of the elements of a new language – Rust. I started by adding a link in my Browser toolbar to the Rust Playground which amounts to ...

I've written about Open Structs before: Sorting Responding to Method Calls To review, an Open Struct is a hash like data structure that responds to dot methods (i.e. .id or .name). I use these in a lot of different places and I just finished using them for a form collection_select operation. The Rai...

This one is short but simple since I didn't have it on my last flight and I fly again tomorrow. To access your Rust documentation when you aren't online: rustup docs --book That brings up a browser with a full implementation of the rust docs. Not only is there a full table of contents but it is also...

So I just saw this log message popup on a SystemD service I wrote yesterday: Feb 24 10:27:11 ip-172-31-24-213 reddit_to_kafka[18391]: Already exists in redis so also in kafka so skipping Sometimes you need to solve a problem without a lot of effort. Yesterday I needed to populate a Kafka queue with ...

The Rust tool cargo is the Rust equivalent of rake and bundler and rails combined (these are Ruby tools). Cargo is what you use to generate a new Rust app. Here's an example: cargo new loader_datastreamer_to_kafka_rust This generates a new, correctly laid out project directory. And here's what it lo...

Wunderlist is now on the real verge of being shutdown by Microsoft and Todoist claims to be import compatible. One thing to know is that Todoist Free has a limit of 50 lists. If you've used Wunderlist for any number of years then you may find your import failing. Two options: Merge lists in Wunderli...

I don't often do the dance with new languages. I suspect you could view my approach to languages as monogamy – I've been in a long term, monogamous relationship with Ruby now since 2007. But 12 years is a long time and deciding to dance with Python this past fall was perhaps my break through event a...

As a contractor for the ADL, I recently went through our official bias and diversity training. I put together my notes on that for a new hire who recently joined us. Here are some of the discussion questions: Is it ok for people of a group to use slurs about their own identity? Should airlines be re...

This one is a short one but a good one. One really useful trick is to launch Rails console in test mode: ❯ RAILS_ENV=test rails c Running via Spring preloader in process 41705 Loading test environment (Rails 6.0.2.1) irb: warn: can't alias context from irb_context. You can check the Rails environmen...

I spent a lot of time in the world of Science Fiction and Fantasy conventions and it has fascinated me how far that world is beyond the normal (aka muggle or mundane) world when it comes to concepts like consent. I was recently at the Confusion convention in Detroit and I captured the signage that t...

I have a good friend who is about to graduate with a Computer Science degree and, as a seasoned professional in the field (aka old fart), I know he's going to be asking me for advice. And if I'm going to give cogent advice, I always feel that: It might be useful to someone else so putting it online ...

As of late, I have found myself writing a number of what amount to "Non Rails" tools. These are tools that tend to: Run continuously in the background Are deployed as SystemD services on Unix boxes Have the normal issues of coding complexities between development (OSX) and production (Ubuntu) Even t...

Rbenv provides a powerful tool for installing ruby on whether on your local box or on your server environment. While I have traditionally used RVM for local ruby development, I have found RVM problematic for use in a server context. As long as you are using bash -lc along with things like CRON jobs ...

This has bit me I think every single time I make a SystemD launch script using ruby and rbenv (RVM is worse; imho). Perhaps writing it down for once makes the lesson stick. Let's start with our SystemD unit file that doesn't work: [Unit] Description=Twitter To Kafka [Service] SyslogIdentifier=twitte...