More optimizations to Rust’s regex library. I’m thinking about how to use ideas from grep to speed up general regex searching. For example, given a regex like \s+foobar\d+, how can we use the literal in the middle? grep does it by taking advantage of line oriented search, but you can’t do that in the general case. It seems like it should be possible to split the regex into three pieces: the first \s+, the literal foobar and the last \d+. Scan for the literal foobar quickly, then match \s+ in reverse from the start of the match and \d+ forwards from the end of the match.

Work: Laying off what’s left of my already withered dev/devops team. Picking up the slack. Triage. Fighting burn-out in the face of the burn-rate.

Personal: Finding my next job. Installing FreeBSD 10.3 in a VM before updating my personal VPS. MacPorts patches. Messing around with the Grav CMS. Cross-training for a bicycle half-century later this month and a century next month.

Installed OpenBSD on my main machine. Also probably going to install it on my server.

Continuing learning Common Lisp.

Working on my multiplexing keyboard (should be able to be plugged into multiple computers, and switch between them, but also act as a usb hub for devices like mice to switch with the keyboard and data drives to act as a netshare between all connected computers). The design is split/ortholinear but each module has a microcontroller sitting in it so you can use as many as you want. I finished the file for cutting out the faceplate (https://gist.github.com/distransient/cbd4c9366d8084d01b4ca5e24182c00d) and now I’m working on figuring out what material I’m going to use to prototype with and what controllers I want to source.

Work: Whatever I’m supposed to Agile to death, probably a lot of debugging, maybe a bit of refactoring. A lot of deep work, as I successfully implemented “hideaway time”, where I disappear and disconnect for a whole hour or more to focus. People have been receptive, I expect, mostly because of the immediate results.

Home: I’ve made a few mods to my autoapi project to allow filtering of generated HTTP methods. I also make use of vendoring. We probably are going to use this in a support tool at work, maybe.

Personal issues: We decided to cut off the landline and home internet, as it would save us a solid 80$ a month (along with Netflix), which is good. I realized I’m deeply addicted to my internet line when the idea was suggested, and I’m frankly not liking the idea. We do have cell phones with limited data plans, which is good, but this is pushing me way outside of my comfort zone and this semi-anonymous space seems like an appropriate place to vent my privileged north-american white male woes.

Horn toot: In about an hour I’m launching the Concise Guide to Substitutability, a short ebook that explains what’s at work in several seemingly-unrelated topics in real-world Ruby code.

This week I am attending MicroConf, a small conference for self-funded techie businesses. I’m here for the hallway track, to get advice from experienced devs about marketing and running a small businesses that’s starting with the above ebook and hopefully growing to be a full-time job helping devs write better code.

Daughter is out of school for term break this week and next, so we’re doing a bit of travel. Spending a couple of days in Bangkok now, then probably go to Amphawa for 1-3 days tomorrow, then back home. This weekend, we’ll head out to visit father-in-law near the border with Cambodia.

For a change of pace, I was wondering about some aspects of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu. I thought that maybe a good way to understand some of it better would be to run some of their open sourced code. So … I imported udanax-green into git and started fiddling with it.

I haven’t actually gotten it to work yet. The first issue was that sbrk doesn’t work on Mac OS X, but that was readily worked around. Now, there’s an issue with some of the file I/O code that results in lseek failing.

I’d forgotten how bad really old C is. This is K&R C, so pre-ANSI … and it lacks anything resembling modern best practices for C at all. Now, I’m a bit less sure that this is a viable way to come to understand Xanadu better.

I’d welcome any assistance with getting this running.

Our maid decided to return home, so we’re looking to hire someone new.

Lots of ops. Using Terraform to hammer out a production deployment on AWS. Currently figuring out VPN for our VPC.

It is a terrible idea to make me responsible for ops. Like to get back to Haskell code.

Book’s final chapter proving to be a gnarly slog. Tired all the time. Just want it to be over now.

Home My pet project has come a long way! It’s finally turning into a real usable program after several years of neglect. I’ve finally got the GUI to a point that I feel like it’s usable. And I’m starting to find and correct a lot of bugs thanks to the unit testing and just testing in general. I also managed to update the website to include a picture gallery. My apologies for my atrocious web design skills.

Work Python programming as is usual. My title was recently changed from “Research Analyst” to “Intelligence Analyst”. Cracks me up because I’ve never earned either title in my time here.

Trying to figure out what route to take in building up a new mail server on my freshly-minted Scaleway “bare metal” box.

• Go through all the aggro of making exim/db/dspam/clamav/opendkim play nicely with each other, and luxuriate in the neatness of only running exactly what I want?
• Or just go for iRedmail, have literally everything done for me, just put up with postfix/spamassassin etc and a more manual upgrade procedure, but save a whole bunch of time?
• And while we’re at it, moving to a new box with new OS, should I just go along with “upgrading” to debian 8.2, just accept that systemd is here and get on with it, or should I stay with wheezy-backports and sysvinit and the concomitant gradual-death-by-a-thousand-deprecations over time?
• Or, just ditch the whole lot, take the opportunity (and probably not-insignificant amount of time) to start learning OpenBSD and feel what looks like it might be a regular burn in dealing with an OS not frequently supported by VPS/etc providers?
• And once there, dive into the whole opensmtpd+other-packaged-systems approach again, or just whack iRedmail on there?

Thoughts/alternatives extremely welcome :-)

Last week I got pretty side tracked with the farm. I attended a conference on sustainable living, and sat in on a couple of talks about low maintenance sheep raising systems, which doubled my desire to raise a small flock of my own.

This week, I’m planning to finish those data structures. I’ve already wasted enough time, and I shouldn’t have too many distractions outside work/side work/animals, this week.

Work: More dissertation writing… I’ve finally found the time to transition from sublime to emacs which has been fantastic so far. The learning curve for emacs is far less steep than that of vim I think.

Home: I spent the past few days on a family holiday which was very much needed for me in terms of avoiding burnout. I also managed to collate the family photos into one place and am backing them up on tarsnap.

I’m prepping a talk on Ruby Object Mapper for my local ruby user group. Struggling with trying to find non-contrived examples of active record vs CRQS currently.

Trying out FreeBSD for a new personal webserver I’m setting up, and trying to remember how the hell you configure wordpress to be slightly less insecure & letting PHP write everywhere. Mostly WP seems to be going “Gimmie your FTP details!” which is slightly … concerning to say the least.

Finally back home in Buenos Aires! Luckily my family took care of me having a decent place to live when I arrived, so I don’t have to do much (buy a table, a couch, maybe a TV).

I have ~15 interviews lined up for this week. I’ll go to all of them and then decide which place I like the most, maybe I’ll start during next week. Deciding work affects your bank account and health coverage in this country, so being if I was going to be unemployed for a month I might need to get those myself and then change, which is kind of messy. Also it’s Monday 9am and I’m already bored of being home, I feel like I want to do something, not burned out. I enjoy routine.

The only problem about my relocation was that my cats were not able to flight because of some airline fuck up, so they’ve stayed in San Francisco with a friend and I have to figure out how to transport them. In the meanwhile, I’m missing them, which is quite sad.

A little application in C#. I’ve split the backend into a portable library, and so now I have a Windows and GTK frontend. Adding fit and finish, as well as mobile and Mac UIs are something I want to do.

This week, at work, we are shipping our new, kafka based, metrics pipeline which will open the door for lots of new things in the next 6mos, which is amazing.

At home, I need to do some work on cfdg, and I would like to reach out to a few people for a potentially new hifi by apg, which I haven’t published in months.

Work: Bringing our teetering Hadoop cluster back from the brink of disaster. This is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

Personal: Rust all the things! I ported an incremental backup script originally written in Python to Rust a month or so ago and finally got it rolled out (and it’s working great), and this weekend I threw together a self-instructive OpenGL demo. I would love reviews or recommendations on both of those!

Working on an active social app in Rails 5 to get up to speed on new features/ActionCable.

Applying for as many junior development jobs as possible.

Doubting my worthiness.

Prepping for migration of a Postgres DB to RDS. Started an #emacs-curious channel on our work slack team, and have fielded some questions there from 3-4 colleagues more used to Vim.

Learning to use Emacs/gnus for email, writing harmless mail in (you guessed it) org mode.

Still thrashing away on NeuralObjects, our new Machine Learning as a Service offering. Right now I’m focusing on the user signup flow and about to start on Stripe integration so we can, like, collect money. :-) The basic workflow of:

1. upload data via WebHDFS

2. Submit a job via REST API

3. collect results via WebHDFS

is working,although there’s still work to be done on the backend API service. We also plan to add support for a prediction API so that once you’ve built a model, you can make predictions directly via API. And, of course, we’ll be adding the ability to upload your own custom code both for model building and for predictions.

We’ll also be exploring whether or not there’s a need to implement something like Tsunami and/or GridFTP for uploading large datasets.

• Making good use of my employer’s new continuous delivery pipeline to get bug fixes deployed without a lot of hoopla.
• Putting the finishing touches on a fantasy novel I’m self-publishing. (Formatting, author bio, cover, etc.)
• Starting to pack for a cross-country move next month.

[Comment removed by author]

Webhook/JSON transformer, extractor, filter, proxy running on lambda (serverless).

School

Term project (web architecture) and finals (cognitive science, computer vision).

Personal

Figure out what’s causing my laptop to freeze once in a while. Not sure if it’s my window manager (awesome wm) or X11, or kernel problem yet (arch linux). Happened since last system upgrade, so need to check my logs.

I also just bought one of those cheap 3D printers lately. This is the one I bought. Heard good things about it and it’s the only one I’ve ever found at this price point that’s not made of acrylic (it’s aluminum!). So i’m going to have a great time building this and dialing down the settings!

This might also be a good excuse to get another raspberry pi (rpi model 3) to run Octoprint as well ;)

Personal: still cranking away on Paperdoll (a scala implementation of “Freer Monads, More Extensible Effects”). I’ve had a bit of scope creep in what I now consider required for 1.0, but I feel like I now have a much clearer sense of where the project lies on the idealism/pragmatism spectrum and I know what the remaining pieces are and how to do them. Now it’s just a case of cranking the rest of it out.

Bizarrely enough hardware is starting to be a limiting factor: my laptop has a dodgy fan and overheats and shuts down when I build the project. Can anyone point me to an ultrabook (i.e. thin and light, ideally 13" or smaller) available in the UK with NVidia graphics, 12gb or more of RAM, reasonable processor, and touchscreen (bonus points for 3D)? Currently I have a portable machine and a gaming/development machine and I’d really like my next one to be able to replace both.

In between jobs, I need to do tons of paperwork, and refresh flask, sqlalchemy and angular. But I just started a new client side form validation library in js. Damn cross validation

Making an installer for linux-based distros (debian for now, but not making it debian-specific from the start) completely from scratch for the needs of the company I work for. Will probably take more than a week.

Trying desperately to finish incorporating revisions from my collaborators on my latest paper. Morale is low, distractions abound.

I finished the SANE support for GTS (Studio Ghibli’s recently open-sourced scanning tool): https://github.com/stefantalpalaru/GTS

Right now it simply uses the first available SANE device, so I need to (dynamically) add a menu item to the FLTK interface and allow scanner selection. That, and somehow show the selection window when the scanning back-end is initialized with no device selected, before the main GUI loop is entered.

I could use a OS X tester, if anyone is interested.

While I do appreciate the architectural decisions that made the porting straightforward, the code quality and the interface’s usability are subpar. I wonder how many internal tools are like that, and why aren’t the people in charge tapping into the mostly free resources of the open-source community a lot sooner. It’s not like scanning / post-processing software like this one is what gives an animation studio its edge over the competition.

I’m conflicted about making more significant changes - is it more important to preserve a piece of history, or to improve the tool?

I just found employment in the nerd world and now I participate as a professional rather than as a hobbyist and onlooker. My company is building an online learning tool and the idea is that I eventually become the lead developer – not as a matter of experience but because it was built in the spare time of two developers who are busy doing other important work.

I’m enjoying myself. (=

Third in a series of command line utilities in Python - a binary file split utility:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/04/bsplit-binary-file-split-utility-in.html

The previous two - a (text) file split utility and a file compare utility - are linked to from the above post.