Web

I thought I’d put out another collection of tidbits I ran across that give me ideas of things I might want to do or create. There are lots of other preoccupations in my mind besides these, but I prefer to collect the ones worth keeping around

• Every night we are witnesses to a bigger bunch of explosions than anything ever shot up into the sky, though we don’t get to hear the sounds of all that energy being released. Some observer looking at our galaxy from outside might notice this as the only interesting thing going on in our little patch of stars.
  The Great Orion Nebula Is Even Greater Than You Know
  
• From your browser you can dive down and down into the centuries-old canvas and wonder how little flecks of pigment end up assembling into full-blown forms in your mind. It’s like a different kind of space exploration
  HIROX - GIRL WITH PEARL EARRING - GIGAPIXEL PANORAMA
• I guess by now “impartial” has completely taken over the former meaning of the word and isn’t going to give up its place, no matter how old fussy pedants like me say they don’t like it.
  Disinterested or uninterested? How long we should cling to a word's original meaning.
  And similarly with the phrase that describes a circular argument.
  Beg The Question // Get it right.
• This game is a little like that cake cutting problem in mathematics, but rather than wanting to make the pieces equal in size, you need to partition it using only a few straight cuts. After a while I was starting to formulate a kind of strategy when faced with something that looked impossible to solve at first. Slices
• I will always love Japanese poetry, aware that it really cannot be rendered into English.
  Wim 🅾: "Here is an amazing poem by the Buddhist priest M…" - Octodon

Like most people, I like roaming around the web looking for cool things, and sometimes get the feeling that I’ve run across something worth bookmarking, something I want to mull over in the future. Some of them are worth saying a few words about, and I was thinking I would put these up on the blog in hopes that someone might find them fascinating too.

• This is the kind of video I think people are looking for in the middle of a frightening epidemic while there is talk of unrest liable to break out at any moment.
  Woodturning - The Pencil Globe !!
• There was one of these blooming in the Conservatory of Flowers just across the bay from me, but I missed seeing (and smelling) it for the usual 2020 reasons.
  Breathing Life Into the Corpse Flower
• Here is an impressive image gallery showing how nearly alien the many faces of our own sky can appear.
  Capture the night
• Here are some clips from a video game under development. I don’t know how the story is turning out, but I think these vignettes show lots of promise.
  section9interactive game clip
• How many names for colors do I think about? I don’t work in the visual arts or creative realms but I’m always eager to find out about the specialized vocabulary that that people use in those fields. Here it’s just the gradations of hue, across the spectrum and ranging from dark to light, given names that English-speaking people have a chance to remember. When I used to be an active stamp collector, I remember puzzling over listings of one old stamp described as crimson vs. scarlet or maybe carmine lake. This was long before the Internet existed to give some kind of easily shared meaning.
  Tertiary color
• We really don’t need more reasons to preserve the creatures we share the planet with. But sometimes we find out how our self-interest is aligned with their welfare.
  Neuroscientists isolate promising mini antibodies against COVID-19 from a llama: Preliminary results suggest anti-COVID19 nanobodies may be effective at preventing and diagnosing infections – ScienceDaily

© publicdomainpictures ID 91785348 | Dreamstime Stock Photos

• Predictive text parody sites produce a Trump White House exposé and a lifestyle website
• I haven’t investigated much into how this Amazon money laundering scheme makes sense for whoever is running it, but it seems like a way to generate profit with little effort.
• Is this really a good name for a shoe brand? Seriously?
• Data is king. Here are numbers for violent crime incidents in large and small cities around the country.
• Quincy Jones obviously doesn’t need to shade the facts at this stage in life.
• When you need a random number generator but lack resources, you come up with ways to improvise

© creativecommonsstockphotos ID 92160937 | Dreamstime Stock Photos

I’ve been keeping an eye on the some items that

• Something on a little bit of fossilized legal speech you have probably heard at some time.
• In my past life I did a few years of work on neutrinos, enough to find it that something as small as the Earth could manage to absorb them when conditions are right.
• True life crime can be more crazy than what thriller writers think up. The story of Susan Kuhnhausen.
• You can search for any term you like in the Trump Twitter Archive to find out what our leader has opined on the subject.
• Some of these trilobites look ready to get up and swim around.
• I could watch these traffic intersection simulations

I actually had a few more, but these are the best.

© creativecommonsstockphotos ID 89250373 | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Instead of passively consuming the nearly endless stream of content coming my way I thought I’d gather together a few items to share with everyone here.

• Forty-nine years ago this happened:

Here is a list of what I have put together or worked on for some significant amount over the last couple of years on the job.

• Monitoring will get its own post eventually.
• We migrated from a single service which ran on a single instance in Classic EC2 to a half dozen services running in separate VPCs, each with autoscaling instances behind an elastic load balancer to provide high availability. Getting all the plumbing on this right was a major effort.
• We also shifted our configuration management system from exclusively Puppet at first to Chef, where we could take better advantage of community-written cookbooks, and then brought
• Wrote an automation script which packaged service config files into a Debian package which would simply be pulled into a new instance like any other versioned package.
• Worked on a couple iterations of an ELK stack in order to accept logs and structured data
• Prototyped a stack which used Amazon IoT, Kinesis Firehose, DynamoDB, and S3 to accept mobile data streams and store them for business intelligence. The components were held together with Simple Notification Service and Lambda functions in a serverless fashion.
• Hacked out numerous one-off scripts in bash and Ruby to automate the recurring maintenance chores in our environments. For instance we needed something to clean up user logins which were not needed any more, scripts to take reference snapshots of volumes for safekeeping, and so on.
• Worked on some scripts to transfer information from our services to a data warehouse running on Amazon Redshift (so-called ETL scripts) so we would have an analytics service for our own use.
• Migrated some administrative tools off of dedicated virtual machines onto containers which would run under Rancher. The idea was that we could pack a bunch of light-duty tasks together on a cluster of instances which would run the same workloads with much higher density, reducing costs and maintenance.
• Wrote a simple Sinatra app which would gather information from our environments (addresses, instance IDs, running state, and so on) and display them in a tabular format. This saved me a lot of time switching between different dashboards and running things through the command line interface just to keep things oriented.
• Kept track of our hosting costs in order to find out where we could benefit from terminating instances or phasing out legacy services.

It took me a while to get this blog running properly and I think I should record what I had to do in case I need to refresh my memory sometime. I’ve had plenty of before including one which started out as a statically generated one (in a Python script I hacked together). Things have changed now and I wanted to do something that didn’t have so many tiers to it, just a simple virtually unhackable set of static HTML pages that can be hosted somewhere with a content distribution network.