Introduction

Today I finished reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which is a first-person recounting of his experiences fighting Fascism during the Spanish civil war. Scattered thoughts follow.

The author

I want to point out that George Orwell was a true mensch–and that his wife was amazingly competent and patient, both for putting up with his adventurism and then saving his ass when the secret police came knocking. In the author’s own words, he set out to Spain to shoot himself a Fascist, and participated in the most direct of action until he was shot in the throat.

Little under the weather yesterday and today, so just gonna list some things I’ll try to write about soon:

• Multisystem deployment with KVM and Nixops
• NAS Appliance with Nix
• Fermi estimations and how web development is an embarassment
• Assorted things standard libraries Should Just Do (tm)
• Adventures in home smart lighting
• Thoughts smart city data stores

Catch y’all later.

Every year I do a huge gumbo cookout (8 gallons) with friends for NYE. I figured I’d record the recipe for posterity:

Gumbo ingredients

• Pack of turkey necks (3 or so)
• whole bunch of Andouille sausage (pack or two)
• whole bunch of mild italian sausage (pack or two)
• a duck (dead, cleaned, boneless if possible)
• 5-10 lbs chicken boneless chicken breasts
• a handful of bay leaves
• bunch of file powder
• bunch of green onions
• 12 qt. (plus or minus) of low-sodium chicken broth
• 3-4 celery bundles (transverse sliced, say 1cm wide)
• 3-4 green bell peppers
• whole bunch of garlic, minced and whole
• Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce
• few yellow onions, diced
• few big cans of diced skinless tomatoes (Rotel or other)
• couple cups of butter
• couple cups of white flour
• whole bunch of okra, sliced (deseed if you want to thin the gumbo a little, leave seeds in if you want to save a lot of time)
• salt
• parsley
• black pepper
• beer or beverage or your choice

No shellfish because I don’t want to deal with those allergies at my parties, but otherwise shrimp and crab make for some good eating.

This post was originally going to be about how I provisioned a 20TB NAS using ZFS and NixOS. At lunch today I got word that my old boss and friend Michael (Mike) had passed a bit over a week ago, so instead I’m going to write about a few good memories of him by way of celebrating his life and my privilege of having been part of it for a few years.

Once upon a time I worked on a web-hosted research platform for human-robot interaction. My colleague and I partnered to make a nice series of games which could phone home, log results, and show data.

It was built on JS, jQuery, Rails on the backend, and hosted on Heroku. I’d later rewrite the backend to be a much smaller node-based one. I think we may have been the first group to get ruby on Rails into an ICRA paper!

Introduction

This is a quick little ramble about the scope of minimum viable products (MVPs), their schedule for creation and delivery, and finally the interplay of those things on developers.

What’s in an MVP

The entire purpose of an MVP is to create the simplest, cheapest expression of a business idea possible to test if the market wants the thing you’re making.

Ways to succeed:

• Your MVP should contain be clear, incremental step towards a business feature or idea–ideally testing only one thing.
• Your MVP should be instrumented/monitored to figure out if it is actually creating results for the money funnel.
• Your MVP should be cheap enough you don’t care if you need to replace it or throw it away. There’s no point in running an experiment if you’re not gonna try new things when if it doesn’t pan out.

Ways to screw up:

Introduction

I’ve been assembling furniture and rearranging my office into a semblance of a standing-desk, so I’m gonna be pick a quick topic for today.

This morning around 0930 I was awakened by a text from a friend who was distressed that a community I sysadmin seemed to have no server active. I immediately sat up in bed, stretched a little, and sprung shuffled, yawning, into action.

I did what I’d consider a bare-minimum outage response and report, and I figure I’ll share that today.

Introduction

Software testing philosophy is softball subject for blog posts, and after a month of fighting with a NAS build I’m in the mood for an easy write-up.

This is an adaptation of a work thread where I reflected a bit on testing practices, why we test things, and mostly importantly which things we as professional developers should emphasize and put in the extra effort for.

Fuckhueg disclaimer: The following all assumes that the software being worked on is not library code, being produced to serve as a fundamental reusable component for other folks. It similarly assumes the software isn’t being done in a regulatory regime (say, United States DoD or FDA) where testing values and procedures are spelled out. Either of those domains likely requires a different mindset about testing.

Introduction

I used to dabble in amateur game development, and one of the most interesting bits to me was trying to figure out how to make believable, interesting, and alive worlds.

There’re a whole bunch of interesting resources on trying to render large virtual worlds and procedurally generate them–but while the environments are increasingly high-fidelity and cool, the denizens of those environments aren’t really seeming to get more interesting.

Now, I recognize that there have been some really amazing advances in game NPC AI. There was amazing use of STRIPS planners in F.E.A.R., for example. Left 4 Dead made some amazing strides both in ally NPC AI and also in dynamic story-beat/encounter generation.

Introduction

A relatively quick little ramble today, inspired by some pre-game chat while eating early dinner and getting ready for the second half of our Delta Green game from last week. One of my friends had been considering asking a person out in spite of their professed interest in chakras, energies, and that sort of thing. Another friend was in favor of bailing on the idea, I was in favor of giving it a shot, and we had gotten into a conversation about value systems. That’s how I ended up doing this today–and I’ll cheerfully warn you ahead of time that this is going to be a ramble without any intent of making a strong point. I’m also going to use all kinds of examples of varying taste–since we’re talking about ethics–so expect things including: sex, violence, politics, child abuse, and so on.