Didn't do a TWID post for a couple of weeks, will continue regularly from this week on. Had an issue with my foot... still not sure if I sprained my toe or if it was gout. Didn't run for 3 weeks but started to run again this week. It feels good to run again in nature. This morning I heard so many woodpeckers
This Week I Learned
Finished the book Space 2.0: How Private Spaceflight, a Resurgent NASA, and International Partners are Creating a New Space AgeSome interesting stuff, I like how the cost went down a lot after SpaceX, Blue Horizon and others made the government contractor
Started on the book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
Listened to the Tim Ferriss podcast with Safi Bahcall and in that podcast Safi mentioned that the 1st draft of Star Wars was so bad, no studio wanted it
It had these characters: Luke and Windy Starkiller. Lol can you imagine those names having made it into the movie
Summary of the Original Script of “The Star Wars”: https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/summary-of-the-original-script-of-the-star-wars/
Listened tot the final episode of East Coast vs West Coats Business Wars
Learned some stuff about how it is changing how artists get paid in the music industry. Artists used to be paid by album, now they are paid by the song, 1500 streams is about $9, this is cut between label/produces/songwriter. Since artists are paid by song.. , songs are getting shorter and an album will have more songs. So if you listen through an album, you are listening to more songs. Artist are also putting the chorus at the start of the song to hook you in, because if you skip before 30 seconds or so, the play doesn't count.
Gompertz function
The Gompertz curve or Gompertz function, is a type of mathematical model for a time series and is named after Benjamin Gompertz (1779-1865). It is a sigmoid function which describes growth as being slowest at the start and end of a given time period
One example: Mobile phone uptake, where costs were initially high (so uptake was slow), followed by a period of rapid growth, followed by a slowing of uptake as saturation was reached.
The Fertility Doctor’s Secret
Her husband had given her a DNA test for Christmas because she was interested in genealogy. Her heritage turned out to be exactly what she had thought—Scottish, with English, Irish, and Scandinavian mixed in—and she never bothered to click on the link that would show whether anyone on the site shared her DNA.
Apparently she did have relatives on Ancestry.com—and not just distant cousins. The people now sending her messages said they were Cline’s secret biological children. They said their parents had also been treated by Cline. They said that decades ago, without ever telling his patients, Cline had used his own sperm to impregnate women who came to him for artificial insemination.
According to her DNA, Woock, too, was one of his children.
This so messed up, and with more and more people doing DNA testing, I think this will only increase.
But there is a person who has 600 offspring, his name is Bertold_Wiesner
Space Angels
Space Angels is Venture Capital firm, they invest in SpaceX as well as the ones in the list below and more
Accion Systems
Accion Systems is developing revolutionary ion beam propulsion technologies for satellites, that are light, powerful, and affordable.
Analytical Space
Analytical Space is developing a cost-effective, high-throughput satellite data relay service using Cubesats with laser downlink capabilities.
Astrobotic Technology
Astrobotic will be the first private company to regularly deliver customer payloads and communication services to the Moon's surface.
Atlas Space Operations
ATLAS' network of RF satellite ground stations will offer reliable delivery of big data from LEO satellites at one-third of the cost of legacy providers.
Because Learning
Because Learning is an interactive STEM platform that enables any school to run experiments from Earth to space, through the Spire satellite network.
Bridgesat
BridgeSat is developing an optical communications network that offers secure delivery of big data from LEO at low cost and high speeds.
NanoRacks
NanoRacks is the leading commercial provider of hardware and services in low-Earth orbit for microgravity research and space station utilization.
Took some DevOps trainging this week... wanted to save the notes I took.. so I put them at the end of this post :-)
This Week I Tweeted
The lawyers who took on Big Tobacco are aiming at Realtors and their 6% feeHomeowners who are ready to sell their properties usually hire a real-estate agent to represent them by staging the home, photographing it, adding it to the MLS, marketing it, and showing it to prospective buyers. Sellers agree to pay that person a commission on the selling price of the home. That commission has traditionally been known as the “6%,” but it’s a little more complicated than that.
Sellers can really only negotiate with the agent they’ve hired, while agents representing buyers are generally assured of a standard 3% commission. That means that a seller’s agent who’s willing to negotiate, or one that works for a discount brokerage like Redfin RDFN, +2.93% , will be paid less than a buyer’s agent.
Buyers can choose to be represented by an agent, or to go without one – but in any case, all commission money for both sides of the deal is always paid by the seller, thanks to a 1996 NAR rule known as the “Buyer Broker Commission Rule.”
I always thought it was strange that listing a 100K house and a 2 Million house would give you so much more money for essentially the same amount of work. Of course selling a million dollar home takes more time. Then there are people who will talk to an agent...do the house tours and not put a bid down with that agent. If this prevails.. I wonder if the million dollar listing tv show will still be around?
Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years
Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data.
Facebook is probing a series of security failures in which employees built applications that logged unencrypted password data for Facebook users and stored it in plain text on internal company servers. That’s according to a senior Facebook employee who is familiar with the investigation and who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
This was maybe some logging, but still, this is bad
New Jersey becomes second state to ban cashless shops and restaurants
On Monday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a bill banning cashless retail stores and restaurants in the Garden State. Murphy's signature makes New Jersey the second state in the US to ban cashless stores, after Massachusetts banned them in 1978.
More recently, New Jersey's move follows that of Philadelphia, which banned cashless stores earlier this month. Philadelphia's legislation was a reaction to a growing number of stores that only accept credit cards or require customers to pay with an app, like Amazon's new Amazon Go stores.
Ha, I ran into this the other day in Manhattan. Left the office with a $20 in my pocket, went to this place named Dos Torros with my co-worker, ordered a burrito and then couldn't pay, had to have my co-worker pay for me and then had to pay him back. My main reason yo pay with cash in restaurants and smaller shops is that I don't want my credit card to be hacked, my next reason is privacy.
Also some people with bad credit might now have credit cards.. how would they pay?
I welcome this law.
Some cool stuff you might enjoy
Ten Lessons I Learned While Teaching Myself to CodeThe following is a guest post by Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99), a journalist who’s written about technology and science for two decades. Clive is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired.
In his guest post, Clive outlines the most important lessons he learned teaching himself to code after interviewing 200+ programmers for his new book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.
So, you want to learn to code.
Join the club! We live in a time when, as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously put it, “…software is eating the world.” So the people who know how to program are in a catalytic spot; they can make things happen. Maybe you’ve watched this from the sidelines and thought: Huh. Could I learn to do that? Perhaps you’re out of school; maybe you can’t afford either the money or the time to go back and do a four-year degree in computer science. You’ve seen a zillion of these online tutorials in coding. Could you just sort of, well, teach yourself?
The short answer is: Sure you can.
The longer answer is… the rest of this essay.
Some interesting tidbits
Some numbers that you will know by heart if you have been working with SQL Server for a while
I was troubleshooting a deadlock the other day and it got me thinking.... I know the number 1205 by heart and know it is associated to a deadlock. What other numbers are there that you can associate to an event or object or limitation. For example 32767 will be known by a lot of people as the database id of the ResourceDb, master is 1, msdb is 4 etc etc.
A fun and quick posts with some numbers that most SQL Server peeps probably know
Some DevOps notes I took
Had some DevOps training, took some notes, didn't know where to save them, so put it here
CAMS
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Culture
Automation
Measurement
Sharing
DevOps Principles 3 ways
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System Thinking (concept to cash) aka overall view
Amplified feedback loop (later you find the bug.. the more it costs to fix)
Work culture to allow for learning and continues experimentation (fail fast, working code wins..sharing..)
Five Methodologies
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People over process over tools
Continues Delivery
Lean management (small batches, progress limits, feedback loops, visualization)
Visible Ops Change Control (repeatable build process, manage dependencies, eliminate fragile artifacts, continues improvement)
Infrastrucure as code
10 practices for DevOps success
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Incident command system
Developers on call
Status pages (transparent uptime)
Blameless postmortems
Embedded teams
The Cloud
Andon Cords (anyone can stop the release, this way something doesn't go to prod)
Dependency Injection (Inversion of Control)
Blue/Green deployment (2 system, 1 live, the other is not..deploy changes and shift traffic towards it, if problems shift back to prev version)
Chaos Monkey (trash servers occasional so that you can code for it and be prepared in case it happens out of your control.. came from Netflix)
DevOps Tools ... cart or horse?
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Toolchain... that works together
Should be programmable.. no UI tools
Verifiable
Well behaved (from dev and operations point of view)
Write own tools if you need to....
