One-File Password Safe

TLDR: if you need a one-file HTML/JS password safe check out https://passpilot.com

Turn the Ship Around

I just recently finished the book Turn the Ship Around, and I don’t have anything insightful to say but I did want to recall some points from it. I found the book to be fantastic and insightful - I agree completely with Captain Marquet’s leader-leader style, and hope in future positions I can remain as committed and mindful as he was to creating environments like the one in the book. I think the practices in the book are very similar to those adopted by agile software teams and mission command leadership styles.…

DoD Architecture Framework Notes

Doing a little more reading about what Digital Engineering & MBSE are supposed to encompass, I looked into DoD Architecture documentation. I’ve seen some “OV-1” documents before, and found them to be intuitive (when they weren’t too dense). I did not know where the nomenclature came from… Now I do. https://dodcio.defense.gov/Library/DoD-Architecture-Framework/ The DoD office of the Chief Information Officer released the current version of the framework back in 2010. Now - while I think it is still completely applicable, and I acknowledge that perhaps it hasn’t needed any updates in that time… I think the age of this framework since last update probably says nothing good about how well it has been used and loved.…

Model Based Systems Engineering

I’m doing just a little learning about Digital Engineering, which seems to be almost synonymous with Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). The concept of MBSE is that, in contrast to more traditional methods where the team-of-teams creates documents to coordinate all efforts (think long contract-style English text), the team creates a variety of models. Some of those models would be UML-like diagrams, others might be executable. Each model interface provides a view on the underlying data & model - a view useful to some of the development teams for understanding what must get build.…

Smoke All the Things 2

16 lbs of brisket from Costco at $3.99 per pound (and people act like brisket is crazy expensive…), 15 lbs pork butt at $2.29 per pound, 4.87 lbs top sirloin at $5.99 per pound, and about 5 pounds salmon at $11.99 per pound. I’m going to try to cook the brisket and the pork butt at the same time… I think it’ll fit and not overload the smoker, but I’m a bit worried about that.…

Exploring VPC Networking in AWS

This is a tutorial for a class I’m teaching right now.

Amazon’s documentation of Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) is excellent. It is in-depth, and covers many use cases. It’s too complicated for the class I’m teaching though.

This tutorial will cover the topic of creating Internet-accessible and non-Internet-accessible EC2 instances within the same VPC, by hand within the AWS Console. At the end we’ll have one Internet-accessible Linux box which will be able to talk to a second, non-Internet-accessible Linux box. The instances will be accessible on ports 22 and 4000 from anywhere.

AWS Lambda Function URL Hello World

The ability to create a URL to AWS Lambda functions has existed for a long time - but has never been as easy as it is today. In April AWS announced Lambda Function URLs, and now adding a world-usable non-authenticated URL can happen in the Lambda function creation wizard.

With great power comes great foot-gun though… When the whole world can easily access your Lambda function URL, without authenticating, the whole world can run up your AWS bill easily.

Delete your Lambda function when you’re done with this tutorial

This blog post is a tutorial for creating a simple Hello World application using this new Lambda feature. I’m teaching some folks in my unit how to use AWS, and while there are many Lambda Hello World tutorials out there I didn’t find one that was quite right. This tutorial will go through almost the simplest setup possible, deploying Python code at a URL, then will iterate on the initial code to demonstrate some basic computation.

Power Sensor

TLDR: I made a current sensor that reports over cellular network to the Internet, providing a summary webpage and email alerting for when the current dies.

Smoke All the Things

Today I’m smoking brisket, salmon, and lamb. Last night I brined the fish, then got it drying around 10, and started the smoker at 1250. I’ll smoke it until about 1700, then do the lamb to 160℉, then do the brisket overnight. The lamb is 5.7 lbs at $7.99 per lb, brisket 14.2 at $4.99 per lb. Unfortunately the brisket has a ton of fat on it - this was a bad buy.…

Rust Number Conversion - Don't Follow the Book...

Bottom-Line Up Front: I think as should be harder to use for Integer conversion in Rust. I recommend you use TryFrom/TryInto instead. Here’s how I recommend doing it (more complete example of right/wrong at the end): use std::convert::TryInto; fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> { let orig: u64 = u64::MAX; let ti_u64: u64 = orig.try_into()?; let ti_i64: i64 = orig.try_into()?; let ti_u32: u32 = orig.try_into()?; Ok(()) } I’m at an intermediate level with the Rust programming language.…