Jan 12, 2019

Here are some thoughts how I think about being a great engineering mentor. To me the most important thing is remembering “who to be”, and not as much as “how to act”. You won’t remember how to act. You can look up all the listicles you want on tips on what to do as a mentor, but if you can just “be” the right person, the choices you make and the things you say might just come naturally.

Oct 5, 2018

I recently finished a project to make a vinyl mural of Sutro tower: The “source code” of this project is on github and is in the public domain.

Jun 18, 2018

I have finished a month long road trip totaling 8741 miles: I rode a 2014 Kawasaki Ninja 300

Feb 23, 2018

Let’s survey the past and present of how we manage distributed systems, and then maybe try to predict the future. For this survey I’ll look at a few open-source technologies to give concrete examples (in Kardashev style. Type 0: Manually Deployed and Configured Type 1: Host-Centric Configuration Management Type 2A: Infrastructure-scoped Orchestration Tooling Type 2B: Application-specific Orchestration Tooling Type 3: Compute-Platform-Native Application-Specific Frameworks * Type 3A: Mesos Frameworks * Type 3B: Kubernetes (k8s) Operators Type 4: Hybrid?

Feb 10, 2018

I recently added a pair of electric motors to my Gemini 105m catamaran. Haul out Although I don’t have any photos of the actual installation, here is what they look like: motors wake These are a pair of Caroutte S400’s. In theory they have a thrust of 180lbs each and a peak power consumption of 2.7kw each. Although it cannot be directly compared, the onboard diesel is a 20kw (27 Horsepower) engine.

Nov 25, 2017

Time for another round of terminal-based ascii/ansi art image conversion tools. Check out my last post from 2015 with more comparisons of more tools. This year I compare the best tool from 2015, img2xterm, against a new set of tools that I’ve stumbled across. email me with other tools if you would like to be included in the next round. Methodology For these tests I used an image with a 160px width, twice that of a standard terminal.

Jul 9, 2017

Over the last 5 days my wife and I cruised from Port San Luis to San Francisco. The total distance was 228 Nautical Miles (nm). We recently purchased the boat and decided to relocate it to a Marina closer to where we live. We knew the trip would relatively difficult. The majority of the journey would be against the wind and waves. For this reason we decided to motor the entire distance up North.

Jan 1, 2017

For winter 2016 I made Lichenberg Figures. I used a 5kV 10mA (50W) neon light transformer. I also experimented with a 2kW microwave oven transformer, but found that the lower powered neon transformer produced finer, better, and safer results. To produce the figures, I would first apply the electricity to the wood, often at the corners. Initially the resistance of the wood is not sufficient to allow any burning. Then I would use a spray bottle full of water/baking soda to moisten the surface of the wood until the electricity could find the path of least resistance and start the burning reaction.

May 22, 2016

Intro Who browses on the terminal now-a-days? However you are, you are crazy, but you might appreciate this comparison of text-based web browsers, with screenshots of a few different popular sites. I wanted to test these browsers with more than just simple pages, so where possible I actually logged into places and took screenshots of the actual webpage in a realistic state. Methodology All browsers were set to use xterm with TERM=xterm-256color.

Jan 23, 2016

I recently read “Why Are SO Many Millennials SO Uncool?”. Let’s start with a quote: *For the purpose of this writing, I’m defining “cool” as those who don’t conform, who don’t always fit in nor do they try to, and who follow their own path; and “uncool” as those who dress, act, and have the same tastes as the masses and are vulnerable to corporate influences. Now, I’m by no means some sort of authority on coolness.