Hidden in Public

A string cheese in plastic, sitting on a pillar in a breezeway — The cheese stands alone

How long can this string cheese sit here at the hospital entryway?

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Scope: Not Just Mouthwash

I’m teaching a Python class which acts as an introduction to programming, for most of the students there. This is an awesome experience - for me personally because I enjoy this, and for my resume. I hope to do this full-time someday, but today I’ve just got 3 sections of the same class. We’re doing a lot of cool things that I should write about some other time - one of them is using a free, open source textbook called, Runestone - How to Think Like a Computer Scientist.…

Deploying Github to Dreamhost

One feature I lost moving from Wordpress to Hugo for this blog was the ability to write a blog post from anywhere. I really liked being able to do that… I could be riding in the car, or smoking brisket at 2 AM, or on vacation without a computer, and just login and write something. I wanted that back - a posting solution from my cellphone. The reason I lost that ability is because the simplest update process for Hugo is:…

First Do No Limiting

I recently saw a quote from an old boss of mine. The full paragraph is below, placing it in context, but the part that seems notable (pointed out by a friend of mine) is the, “it is important for a leader to … not limit the potential of those they serve.” The command sets the tone/culture – which is difficult to quantify. I believe the best culture allows decision capability to those “closest to the fight,” while still maintaining a sense of responsibility should a problem arise.…

Comparative Advantage

This morning I finished Planet Money’s Episode 963: 13,000 Economists. 1 Question.. These fine folks make one of my favorite podcasts - each week is a different look at something weird from a weird perspective. It sounds like it’s very market/economy focused, but it’s really focused on everything economics. In the past decades economics has branched out to look at nearly every field of human endeavor with a mathematical eye. It’s not always very successful, but the economist perspective does make me look at things differently.…

A January Experiment: Intermittent Fasting

A friend and coworker told me about intermittent fasting a few years ago. She was doing it as part of a weight loss competition at work… She was one of those folks that says they want to lose weight, but - I’m not really sure why they actually need to? My wife does that too - doesn’t need to lose weight but makes plans to do-so anyway. Anyway - this woman was doing intermittent fasting by not eating for most of the day.…

Archive Pages

I recently converted this blog over from a WordPress installation to use static pages generated by Hugo. I’ve used Hugo for my other recent web creations and I’ve been very impressed. The templating system is very nice, the page generation is lightning fast, and I’m always able to find something near what I need in the themes. One WordPress feature I liked was the listing of articles by year and month… My blog had a little timeline on the side with each year and month listed, annotated with the number of postings I made during each.…

Syntax Errors

Syntax Errors in Python are great. Here’s one: File "asdf.py", line 2 print("Result is: {}".format(result)) ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax result = ((5 * 10) + 15 print("Result is: {}".format(result)) Two lines of code… Syntax error on the print line, evidently. But where? That line looks so simple and correct! And pointing directly at the t? Well - it’s not really on the print line. Folks who have done any amount of programming will look at the preceeding line fairly quickly and notice the missing parenthesis.…

Thoughts on SWAP

I just finished reading the SWAP study. The thrilling congressionally-mandated “Software Acquisition and Practices” study conducted by the Defense Innovation Board. 292 pages of discussion about the US government’s software acquisition practices. It’s actually quite a bit funnier than you’d expect. Admittedly, it helps to be in on the jokes. These are the same folks that brought us: Detecting Agile BS. A document which is unexpectedly funny, for a government report, and accurate.…

Providing Cloud Services in the Air Force

I was thinking this morning about how I might manage an Air Force unit that provides networked server management services. For some reason. I realized that, while I know a bit about some of the technology used to provide cloud services, and manage a server farm - or at least what’s used by some cloud providers - I don’t know much about how they organize their business. I started to wonder if someone from Rackspace, or AWS, or DigitalOcean had written a book about their management practices, or company organization.…