Showing posts with label TWID. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TWID. Show all posts

Friday, May 15, 2020

TWID May 16, 2020: random potpourri of things

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these

In last week's post I mentioned that the pepper and tomato plants were ready to be planted outside. This was done yesterday and the plants are outside now

In front of the house we have put them in pots


In the back of the house we have transferred the plants to a raised bed




It is over 80 degrees today, hopefully the plants will love this weather and grow big

For Mothers day... we didn't do much because we are still under lockdown.. my oldest son made this crumb cake.. it was delicious




This Week I Tweeted


US video game sales have record quarter, as consumers stay at home 

New numbers from NPD confirm what we’ve known for a while: The first quarter of 2020 was a very good one for gaming companies. The new report notes that sales hit a record $10.86 billion in the States between January and March of this year, marking a 9% increase over a year prior; $9.58 billion of that figure was from video game content.

 The primary driver is, you guessed it, COVID-19. As stay at home orders have been enacted on the federal and state levels, people are coping with the ongoing daily horror that is life in 2020 by playing video games. Lots and lots of video games.


Some cool stuff you might enjoy


The Rijksmuseum is today publishing the largest and most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch

Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online  

The Rijksmuseum is today publishing the largest and most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch on its website, making it possible to zoom in on individual brushstrokes and even particles of pigment in the painting. Work on Operation Night Watch will resume on Wednesday 13 May in the glass chamber in the museum.

I have seen this painting many times, the reason is because I grew up in Amsterdam and my neighbor worked for the Rijksmuseum. I always got complementary tickets. The interesting part is that I have been to the Rijksmuseum more times when moving to the US than I did when I lived in Amsterdam  :-(

This does looks pretty cool,  you can just keep zooming. Direct link  http://hyper-resolution.org/Nightwatch



Why millennials have fallen in love with stamp collecting

Covid has increased the number of people getting interested in stamp collecting. Here are 3 articles I happen to see in the past couple of weeks

Hyperinflation stamps Weimar Germany


Post modern: why millennials have fallen in love with stamp collecting

Philately is gaining popularity with younger hobbyists, who are drawn to its vintage - and Instagram - appeal

It was once a byword for boring, but it seems stamp collecting is finding a new – young – audience, despite the fact that some hobbyists have never actually posted a letter.

Philately is gaining popularity among millennials, many of whom see the creative pursuit as an escape from their screen-based lives, says 37-year-old Suzanne Rae, from North Yorkshire.

“Philately is tangible: it’s relaxing and unplugged. It’s also very Instagrammable,” says Rae, who is only the second female chairman the Philatelic Traders Society has had in its 91-year history. “Twitter and Instagram enable young collectors to find people like them, and see that it’s not only a geeky old man’s pursuit.”

Covid-19 Virus Affect On The Stamp Market

The strong reaction of the US Government to the Covid pandemic has resulted in the self-isolation and self-quarantining of millions of Americans as well as people worldwide. While this is having a devastating effect on the economy, it has been a real boost to the stamp market. Stamp collectors around the world suddenly have many hours of time to fill since they can't go out, go to work or watch sporting events. Hence, they spend time buying stamps. The dealers I spoke with all report a surge in orders, many from customers they have never had before.

COVID-19 a shot in the arm for stamp collecting

Well, if you’d asked me a few months back what was needed to give stamp collecting a kick up the backside, my first answer would probably not have been “a global supervirus pandemic.”

But it sure feels like that’s what has happened. The enforced worldwide recreation break has existing collectors burying their heads into their albums, lapsed collectors dusting cobwebs off old shoeboxes, and curious novices taking their first tentative steps into a mysterious world.

New philatelic blogs and Instagram feeds are starting up, and online viewers are devouring YouTube clips. Philatelic magazines have even been offering free access to an edition or two.

Even the mainstream media have noticed. Stamp dealers report rising sales. Kids are writing letters. Even before the COVID-19 crisis kicked in, both the BBC and the Observer were reporting the growing popularity of stamp collecting among younger collectors.


Bavaria Ring Cancellations

Some Progress

Books finished so far/in progress

In progress


Done with these


Book Completed
Stealth War: How China Took Over While America's Elite Slept 01/04
Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers 01/25
Alexander Hamilton 02/12
The Quick Python Book, 3rd Edition 02/13
The Gene: An intimate history 02/17
Moonwalking with Einstein 02/27
The Somme 02/25
The Art of Learning 02/16
Ready to Run: Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally 03/08
The Tudors, a very short introduction 03/17
South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917  03/18
The Body: A Guide for Occupants 03/30
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean 04/07
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything 04/11
Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To 04/27
The Stand 04/30
Fellowship of the ring 05/07
The Two Towers 05/15


Books in the queue
These are next... in no specific order

Books to get
Here are the books I plan to get. These were either mentioned on more than one podcast, recommended by friends, or are new books from authors I like, for example Eric Larson's latest book about Churchill and the Blitz





Running progress
My goal is to run 800 miles this year, this means about 4 runs of about 4 miles per week

Miles        Percentage
296.81 37.10%

So far that burned a bit under 45,600 calories


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Saturday, May 9, 2020

TWID May 9, 2020: Books and Plants

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


It has been a while since I posted here.. but I decided to bring back the TWID posts again

I have been reading a lot lately, since I am already home for 60 days, I decided to read some of the big books I own or re-read them.  I already finished the Stand, almost done with Gotham and I am 35% done with the Lord of The Rings book.

I read 10 pages per day of the Gotham book and then I usually have a book I read at home and one while I commute. Since I am home now, I read the commuting book in the morning

Here is a pic of the books I owe but never read (except for the Lord Of the Rings book)

Image

At the end of this post, you can see all the books I finished, what I am reading now and also what is in my backlog/queue to read.


Here you can see some of the seeds my son and I purchased


Image

That's right.. the second one from the left in the top is a ghost chile... not sure yet what I will do with those.  Maybe make pepper spray or some extremely hot sauce   :-)

This is what the plants looked like a couple of weeks ago

Image

This is what it looks like today


As you can see they are ready to be planted outside. It still cold at night but after Wednesday May 12th, these should be fine to be transplanted


Here you can see what the plants look like 2-3 weeks ago with a fan blowing on them


The reason you use a fan inside is to strengthen the the plants, this way they don't break when you put them outside and it is a little windy on the first day


This Week I Tweeted


As a result, crude was actually trading at a negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah’s screen had it at 1 cent; the reason: Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel.
At midnight, Shah some very bad news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He’d started the day with $77,000 in his account, expecting that his biggest possible loss was 100%, or $77,000.

Ouch that is so bad, who knew oil could go negative....


Can't quit Excel

This happened to me.. pasted a lot of data into Excel on a VM and then tried to cancel it and quit.... nope.  So I just used task manager to kill it

Image

Some cool stuff you might enjoy


You know about waitfor delay but did you know there is a waitfor time?

You may or may not know that WAITFOR has TIME in addition to DELAY

When I sold kinderzegels as part of school (semipostal stamps that benefit child welfare)

Mindmap Diagram Codes

This is pretty cool, you can create a mindmap, code on left.. output on the right, you can share it as well

Looks like this


Some Progress

Books finished so far/in progress

In progress

The Two Towers 21% done


Done with these


Book Completed
Stealth War: How China Took Over While America's Elite Slept 01/04
Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers 01/25
Alexander Hamilton 02/12
The Quick Python Book, 3rd Edition 02/13
The Gene: An intimate history 02/17
Moonwalking with Einstein 02/27
The Somme 02/25
The Art of Learning 02/16
Ready to Run: Unlocking Your Potential to Run Naturally 03/08
The Tudors, a very short introduction 03/17
South: The Illustrated Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917  03/18
The Body: A Guide for Occupants 03/30
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean 04/07
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything 04/11
Lifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don’t Have To 04/27
The Stand 04/30
Fellowship of the ring 05/07


Books in the queue
These are next... in no specific order

Books to get
Here are the books I plan to get. These were either mentioned on more than one podcast, recommended by friends or are new books from authors I like, for example Eric Larson's latest book about Churchill and the Blitz






Running progress
My goal is to run 800 miles this year, this means about 4 runs of about 4 miles per week

Miles        Percentage
279.57 34.95%

So far that burned a bit under 43 thousand calories




Interesting quote....heard it on a podcast... don't remember which one  .. sorry  :-(

A fool never learns
A smart man learns from his mistakes
A wise man learns from the mistakes of others

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Sunday, March 24, 2019

TWID March 24, 2019: Gout, Music Biz, Space 2.0, Luke Starkiller, space angels, DevOps Notes

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these


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 Age
Some 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% fee 

Homeowners 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 Code

 The 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
-------------
Culture
Automation
Measurement
Sharing


DevOps Principles 3 ways
----------------------------------------------
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
------------------------------------
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
------------------------
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?
----------------------------
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....

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Sunday, March 3, 2019

TWID March 3, 2019: Death by GPS, Python tool vs code, Alexa + Jenkins, Job Red Flags, Game of Thrones Fantasy League

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these

This Week I Learned

Finished the Pluralsight course Applying SQL Server 2016 Features to Real-world Data Problems by Ana Voicu

Death by GPS refers to the death of people attributable, in part, to following GPS directions or GPS maps. Death by GPS has been noted in several deaths in Death Valley, California; a lost hiker at Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California; and incidents in Washington State, Australia, England, Italy and Brazil.

Got to the wikipedia entry after reading some comments on this link on hackernews: The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans


This Week I Tweeted

Python in Visual Studio Code – February 2019 Release

Test Explorer
This release includes the ability to visualize, navigate and run unit tests through a test explorer, a feature that is commonly requested by our users.

 Validated breakpoints when debugging
This release also includes an enhancement to the debugger: validation of breakpoints targets. If a breakpoint is set on a line where breakpoints are invalid (e.g. blank lines, pass statement, lines in the middle of a multi-line statement), then it’s automatically moved to the nearest preceeding valid line

The team keeps cranking out more awesomeness every month


Jenkins + Alexa: Say Hello to Voice Controlled CI/CD 

Alexa (named after the ancient library of Alexandria) is Amazon’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered intelligent voice assistant that runs in the cloud. Software engineers make Alexa smarter by creating apps, called skills. From the time that I developed my first Alexa skill, I dreamed of deploying my Java projects to the cloud via voice. For me, telling Alexa to deploy my code is the ultimate level of cool! I recently made my dream a reality when I devoted a weekend to developing my newest Alexa skill, DevOps Pal. In this blog, I will show you how I developed DevOps Pal and hopefully inspire you to build your own version.


LOL, I have Alexa at home.. but I mostly use it to listen to Music. I am just wondering if they did this because they could and not because this is actually useful. Our builds build upon checkin (on dev, qa/test is scheduled), not sure why you would want to initiate it


Red Flags in Software Developer Job Descriptions

For some reason I’ve been reading a lot of job descriptions for junior devs lately and that has naturally left me with an inordinate number of opinions. I have, with great effort, condensed them here for you, dear reader.

 The following aren’t pulled from any specific listings because these types of awfulness transcend the individual - and because that would be dickish. But their spirit should ring true to anyone in the trenches of the job search process.

 “Technologies: Coldfusion + jQuery”
Your job search shouldn’t be driven by what’s fashionable in tech, but popularity and the market for a skill are important factors, since they influence a career track’s employability and profitability. The market for Coldfusion devs isn’t too hot (or even a thing) and jQuery simply doesn’t have the complexity or potential power of a full JS MVC. Companies advertising outdated stacks open you up to the risk of building the wrong sorts of skills, which can have far-reaching effects on your career.


One thing that caught my eye was  Coldfusion + jQuery, this is the stack that DJindexes website was built on so had to go and troll my ex co-workers  haha. One reply I got was: All of these jobs sound very interesting to me. Do they have any COBOL and JCL openings?

See also the comments on hackernews here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19268989



By now, it's not much of a secret that Motorola is working on a folding phone of its own: A patent for such a device surfaced late last year, and a subsequent report in The Wall Street Journal basically confirmed the company's plans. Despite the ensuing hype, Motorola has mostly kept quiet about its progress, but in an interview with Engadget this week, Motorola VP of Global Product Dan Dery shed some additional light on the company's ambitions.

"We started to work on foldables a long time ago," Dery said. "And we have been doing a lot of iteration."

Oh man.. now everyone is jumping on this bandwagon??  What happens when you only crack one screen? This still seems idiotic to me, especially at that price point that Samsung has.



This CTP 2.3 preview brings the following new features and capabilities to SQL Server 2019:

Big data clusters
Submit Spark jobs on SQL Server big data clusters from IntelliJ
Application deployment and management experience for deploying a variety of data-related apps including operationalizing machine learning models using R and Python, running SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) jobs, and more
Database engine
Accelerated database recovery to provide constant time recovery and instant rollback for long running transactions
Performance enhancements in query plan recompilations, transaction log management, and Query Store
SQL Graph enhancement to enable cascaded deletion of edges upon the deletion of nodes
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
Calculation groups in tabular models that reduce the number of measures by reusing calculation logic


Installed on Sunday morning..checking out what is new and shiny. One thing that Brent Ozar noticed was the is_result_set_caching_on as a new column in sys.databases. So far I haven't heard yet how to turn it on

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Finished The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by Charles Petzold. a little dry at times.. but if you like math or want to learn about Turing machines, this book is for you


There is a Game Of Thrones fantasy league? 

I signed up and created a league with a bunch of co-workers
Here is how some of the scoring works


Violence:

10 Kill Random Character / White Walker / Wight (capped at 50pts)
15 Kill White Walker
25 Kill Known or Drafted Character
150 Kill Dragon
5 Incapacitate Random Character (not killed)
10 Incapacitate Known or Drafted Character (not killed)
25 Exit Bonus for Drafted Character Dying Memorably


Status/Power:

200 Take the Iron Throne
25 Sack a City / Lead a Battle Victory (must be present at victory)
25 Get a Seat on the High Council
50 Magic Use (1x Episode / Character)
50 Gain ownership of Valyrian Steel (Must keep through end of episode)
20 Have a Vision/Prophecy (1x / Episode / Character)
15 Take up a Weird/New Religion
10 Get Engaged
20 Get Married
15 Get Pregnant/Get Someone Pregnant
-20 Lose a Baby
25 Official Promotion
-25 Official Demotion
50 Come Back from the Dead
15 Act of Betrayal
15 Form / Join existing alliance
20 Ride or Control Dragon (1x / Episode)
20 MVP of Episode (Scorekeeper's Choice)
50 Revealed as Azor Ahai


I just love Times Square, here is a panorama I took'

Times Square Panorama
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Monday, February 25, 2019

TWID Feb 25, 2019: Galaxy Fold, Huawei Mate X, Hololens 2, Juventus, Linux Fsync Issue fix for PostgreSQL, syrup

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these

This Week I Learned


Almost finished with the book The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by Charles Petzold

It takes a lot of maple sap to create maple syrup.  The higher the sugar content of the sap, the smaller the volume of sap is needed to obtain the same amount of syrup. 57 units of sap with 1.5 percent sugar content will yield 1 unit of syrup, but only 25 units of sap with a 3.5 percent sugar content are needed to obtain one unit of syrup


Those are my youngest two trying the sap. I tried it as well, I must say there really is no taste to it.

I will make a separate post about our visit to the farm

This Week I Tweeted

Samsung’s foldable phone is the Galaxy Fold, available April 26th starting at $1,980

Samsung first teased its foldable phone back in November, and at the company’s Galaxy Unpacked event today, it’s further detailing its foldable plans. Samsung’s foldable now has a name, the Samsung Galaxy Fold, and the company is revealing more about what this unique smartphone can do. Samsung is planning to launch the Galaxy Fold on April 26th, starting at $1,980, through AT&T and T-Mobile in the US, with a free pair of Samsung’s new wireless earbuds. There will be both an LTE and 5G version of the Galaxy Fold, and Samsung is even planning on launching the device in Europe on May 3rd, starting at 2,000 euros.

Overpriced and if you damage a screen how much to repair this. I rather have a phone like the showed in the Expanse or even better a phone you can roll up so it is the size and shape of a pen. This thing is just too bulky as well. A better design would have been if there was a screen that you could slide out instead.

 If you thought the Galaxy Fold was not expensive enough.. no worried The Mate X is Huawei’s 5G foldable phone... the price $2600.  Fitting name Mate X, as in mate you will need eXtra money for this one... 

 Pass on both from me
Juventus share price is down 9% after their champions league result

Juventus share price is down 9% after their champions league result

  Ouch, that is not good, but Atletico played a much better 2nd half and converted their chances. Let's see if Juve can advance by scoring at least 2 at home in the return game.


Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers 

Some interesting things you might already know, still good to revisit this list


Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Microsoft’s HoloLens 2: a $3,500 mixed-reality headset for the factory

The Microsoft HoloLens 2 is available for preorder today for $3,500, and it’s expected to ship later this year. However, Microsoft has decided that it is only going to sell to enterprise customers who want to deploy the headset to their workers. As of right now, Microsoft isn’t even announcing a developer kit version of the HoloLens 2.

Compared to the HoloLens we first saw demonstrated four years ago, the second version is better in nearly every important way. It’s more comfortable, it has a much larger field of view, and it’s better able to detect real physical objects in the room. It features new components like the Azure Kinect sensor, an ARM processor, eye-tracking sensors, and an entirely different display system.

It has a couple of speakers, the visor flips up, and it can see what your hands are doing more accurately than before. There’s an 8-megapixel front-facing camera for video conferencing, it’s capable of full 6 degrees of tracking, and it also uses USB-C to charge. It is, in short, chock-full of new technology. But after four years, that should be no surprise.


Linux Fsync Issue for Buffered IO and Its Preliminary Fix for PostgreSQL

One of the common fixes applied to all the supported PostgreSQL versions is on – panic instead of retrying after fsync () failure. This fsync failure has been in discussion for a year or two now, so let’s take a look at the implications.

 A fix to the Linux fsync issue for PostgreSQL Buffered IO in all supported versions
PostgreSQL performs two types of IO. Direct IO – though almost never – and the much more commonly performed Buffered IO.

 PostgreSQL uses O_DIRECT when it is writing to WALs (Write-Ahead Logs aka Transaction Logs) only when wal_sync_method is set to : open_datasync or to  open_sync with no archiving or streaming enabled. The default  wal_sync_method may be fdatasync that does not use O_DIRECT. This means, almost all the time in your production database server, you’ll see PostgreSQL using O_SYNC / O_DSYNC while writing to WAL’s. Whereas, writing the modified/dirty buffers to datafiles from shared buffers is always through Buffered IO

 Starting from kernel 4.13, we can now reliably detect such errors during fsync. So, any open file descriptor to a file includes a pointer to the address_space structure, and a new 32-bit value (errseq_t) has been added that is visible to all the processes accessing that file. With the new minor version for all supported PostgreSQL versions, a PANIC is triggered upon such error. This performs a database crash and initiates recovery from the last CHECKPOINT. There is a patch expected to be released in PostgreSQL 12 that works for newer kernel versions and modifies the way PostgreSQL handles the file descriptors. A long term solution to this issue may be Direct IO, but you might see a different approach to this in PG 12.

Some more info that I found in this hackernews comment thread that might interest you:
If you want an overview of the issue, here's a presentation from Tomas Vondra at FOSDEM 2019: https://youtu.be/1VWIGBQLtxo
Or an early recap of the "fsyncgate" issue in textual form: https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/

Related (also listed by Tomas Vondra): Linux's IO errors reporting https://youtu.be/74c19hwY2oE


As always, I will leave you with a pic I took this past week. This one is a pic of some orange roots over a stream

Orange roots over a stream
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Saturday, February 9, 2019

Twid Feb 10 2019: Gemini, Stablecoin, BrightBytes, Turing, world war I restored,githistory

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these



This Week I Learned


Continued reading the book The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by Charles Petzold

Technically this didn't happen this week, but I decided to blog about it this week: After 20+ years in IT .. I finally discovered this...

This Week I Tweeted

Microsoft buys BrightBytes DataSense to bring more data analytics to schools

BrightBytes, based in San Francisco, is an education data-analytics company and has been a Microsoft partner for years. In addition to the DataSense data-integration platform it is selling to Microsoft, BrightBytes will continue to sell its decision-support platform called Clarity which uses machine learning and predictive analytics. 

 Microsoft is planning to integrate DataSense into its Microsoft Education product family. According to Microsoft, DataSense is "the leading IPaaS (integration platform as a service) solution for both education solution providers and school districts across the US."

I don't know much about this company.. but it's the data and analytics that is valuable... companies like this one are getting snapped up left and right


Winklevoss Exchange Gemini Shuts Down Accounts Over Stablecoin Redemptions

In one instance, email correspondence obtained by CoinDesk shows an OTC trader based in Latin America had his account closed after he informed Gemini that he planned to redeem several million dollars of GUSD. (A major cryptocurrency exchange, speaking on condition of anonymity, attested to the desk’s professionalism and reported that it was in good standing.)

So you can deposit money but don't you dare take it out........


Python Developers Survey 2018 Results 

Python usage as a main language is up 5 percentage points from 79% in 2017 when Python Software Foundation conducted its previous survey.

 Half of all Python users also use JavaScript. The 2018 stats are very similar to the 2017 results. The only significant difference is that Bash/Shell has grown from 36% in 2017 to 45% in 2018. Go and SQL have also grown by 2 percentage points each, while many other languages such as C/C++, Java, and C# have lost their share.

 In 2018 we had significantly more respondents specifying they’re involved in DevOps (an increase of 8% compared to 2017). In terms of Python users using Python as their secondary language, DevOps has overtaken web development.

 The use of Python 3 continues to grow rapidly. According to the latest research in 2017, 75% were using Python 3 compared with 25% for Python 2. Use of Python 2 is declining as it’s no longer actively developed, doesn’t get new features, and its maintenance is going to be stopped in 2020.


See all the other interesting fact on the jetbrains site


Githistory
This is pretty cool.. point any public github file here and you can see the last 8  or so commits by scrolling from the top  here is what @BrentOzarULTD  sp_foreachdb changes look like ...

It looks like this

So for any file, just replace github.com in the url with githistory.xyz

For example.. the stuff in red needs to be replaced

https://github.com/BrentOzarULTD/SQL-Server-First-Responder-Kit/blob/dev/sp_foreachdb.sql
https://githistory.xyz/BrentOzarULTD/SQL-Server-First-Responder-Kit/blob/dev/sp_foreachdb.sql

Just hit this link to see it

https://githistory.xyz/BrentOzarULTD/SQL-Server-First-Responder-Kit/blob/dev/sp_foreachdb.sql

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

List of stories set in a future now past

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.
This is a list of fictional stories that, when written, were set in the future, but the future they predicted is now present or past. The list excludes works that were alternate histories, which were composed after the dates they depict. The list also excludes contemporary or near-future works (e.g. set within a year or two), unless it deals with some notable futuristic event as with the 2012 phenomenon. It also excludes works where the future is passively mentioned and not really depicting anything notable about the society, as with an epilogue that just focuses on the fate of the main characters. Entries referencing the current year may be added if their month and day were not specified or have already occurred.

Some from the year 2019... Akira, Blade Runner, Dark Angel



How Peter Jackson’s team made World War I footage look new

“I thought, ‘Can we actually make this 100-year-old footage look like it was shot now?’” Jackson said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. “So it’s sharp, it’s clear, it’s stable, it looks like modern [films].”

 And he had the means to do that: Over the past five years, Jackson tasked Park Road Post (a subsidiary of his production company WingNut Films) with adding color and sound to the archive footage, as well as making the frame rate consistent and similar to what we’d expect from footage shot today. The result is the new documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which he said removes the “barrier between us and the actual people that were being filmed.”

This is some amazingly looking stuff... here is a video so you can see what it looks like






Build 2019 registration opens on February 27th 

Join us in Seattle for Microsoft’s premier event for developers. Come and experience the latest developer tools and technologies. Imagine new ways to create software by getting industry insights into the future of software development. Connect with your community to understand new development trends and innovative ways to code.

Wondering what new stuff they will announce


The Chemical Brothers: Setting Sun (1996)
Haven't heard Setting Sun for a while, it's an excellent running song, I have added it to my running playlist on my phone

Setting Sun is a song by The Chemical Brothers with vocals by Noel Gallagher from the group Oasis. It was released as a single in 1996 from their second album Dig Your Own Hole and reached number one on the UK Singles Chart.





 Took this on my way to the Princeton Junction train station... beautiful morning colors

  Princeton Winter Wonderland
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Monday, February 4, 2019

TWID Feb 3rd 2019, Huawei stealing, billion solar panels, big puzzle, beethoven, kodak

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these



This Week I Learned

Continued with the Getting Started with Docker Swarm Mode Pluralsight course

Started reading the book The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by Charles Petzold


This Week I Tweeted

Huawei is accused of attempting to copycat a T-Mobile robot, and the charges read like a comical spy movie

The US on Monday charged the Chinese phone giant Huawei with trying to steal trade secrets from T-Mobile, among other crimes.
One Justice Department indictment includes internal emails between Huawei's US and Chinese employees who prosecutors said were trying to copy a T-Mobile device-testing robot.
The emails read like a comical spy movie, with one set of employees trying to avoid wrongdoing and another engineer getting caught putting part of the robot into his bag.
Huawei said that it hasn't violated any US laws and that it already settled with T-Mobile in a civil lawsuit.

What the heck is going on here?


How Do You Count Every Solar Panel in the U.S.? Machine Learning and a Billion Satellite Images

The DeepSolar Project, developed by engineers and computer scientists at Stanford University, is a machine learning framework that analyzes a dataset of satellite images in order to identify the size and location of installed solar panels.

 To accurately count the panels, the DeepSolar team used a machine learning algorithm to analyze more than a billion high-resolution satellite images. The algorithm identified what the team believes to be almost every solar power installation across the contiguous 48 states.

 The DeepSolar analysis reached a total of 1.47 million solar installations in the U.S., a much higher number than either of the two most commonly cited estimates.

 “We can use recent advances in machine learning to know where all these assets are, which has been a huge question, and generate insights about where the grid is going and how we can help get it to a more beneficial place,” said Ram Rajagopal, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, who supervised the project with Arun Majumdar, professor of mechanical engineering.

This is cool..but do they really need to use a billion images.. can't they use a subset and come pretty close to the real answer as well?


40x faster hash joiner with vectorized execution

For the past four months, I’ve been working with the incredible SQL Execution team at Cockroach Labs as a backend engineering intern to develop the first prototype of a batched, column-at-a-time execution engine. During this time, I implemented a column-at-a-time hash join operator that outperformed CockroachDB’s existing row-at-a-time hash join by 40x. In this blog post, I’ll be going over the philosophy, challenges, and motivation behind implementing a column-at-a-time SQL operator in general, as well as some specifics about hash join itself.

 In CockroachDB, we use the term “vectorized execution” as a short hand for the batched, column-at-a-time data processing that is discussed throughout this post.

I love it when you see drastic speed improvements like this, I remember one time when we upgraded some hardware to use SSDs and more RAM.. a reporting query that took a minute now finished in less than a second.. I thought the results were wrong because it finished too fast lol


Some cool stuff you might enjoy


Kodak Premium Puzzle Presents: The World's Largest Puzzle 51,300 Pieces 27 Wonders from Around The World 28.5 Foot x 6.25 Foot Jigsaw Puzzle 

That is 8.68 meters wide for the metric people....aka 1 big white shark length



I don't always listen to classical music.. but when I do.. I make sure it's played on an electric guitar, enjoy this piece of Ludwig van Beethoven - Moonlight Sonata ( 3rd Movement ) by Tina S


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Sunday, January 20, 2019

TWID Jan 20th 2019.. ... Crypts of Winterfell, Brexit, re:MARS, remars, myths, trace flags, agile bs

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these

This Week I Learned

Continued with the Getting Started with Docker Swarm Mode Pluralsight course
Finished D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths by Ingri d'Aulaire, Edgar Parin d'Aulaire



This Week I Tweeted

MSSQL Tiger Team:   Let’s talk about trace flags

So why do we even have trace flags to begin with?
Some trace flags are used to enable enhanced debugging features such as additional logging, memory dumps etc. and are used only when you are working with Microsoft Support to provide additional data for troubleshooting. These trace flags are not ones you want to leave turned on in a production system as they may have a negative impact on your workload. An example of one of these flags would be TF 2551 which is used to trigger a filtered memory dump whenever there is an exception or assertion in the SQL Server process. These trace flags are only used for a short period of time and typically only at the recommendation of Microsoft Support, so they will likely always be around.

 Other trace flags are used to alter the behavior of the server in other ways, such as to turn a feature ON or OFF or change the way the database engine manages resources. One example of this type of trace flag is 7752 which was introduced as a knob for something that is default behavior in Azure SQL DB. In a SQL Server (on-prem or IaaS) database that is undergoing recovery and has Query Store (QDS) enabled, user queries will be blocked until all the data required for QDS to start is loaded. This ensures QDS doesn't miss any queries that are executed in that database. In some cases, this can take a long time to complete and you'll see sessions with a wait type of QDS_LOADDB until the QDS becomes available. Turning on TF 7752 makes this process asynchronous so that user queries can proceed while the QDS starts. It's not something we want to make the default behavior in general because it means that some query executions won't be captured by QDS, but it's a tradeoff you might be willing to make in order to reduce the time it takes for a database to become available upon restart or failover. This is the sort of trace flag that we are trying to incorporate into the product in some other way, such as to provide a database-scoped configuration. Moving forward, we hope not to introduce any new trace flags like this, and over time the number of flags of this type should approach zero.

Make sure to read the rest of the post and read the links to the knowledge base articles as well



Broadcast group Discovery shifts jobs from London to Amsterdam

Discovery has become the latest international broadcast group to move European operations to the Netherlands following Britain’s decision to pull out of the EU. Discovery has had a Dutch base since 1989 but has now applied for EU licences for its paid channel portfolio through the Netherlands. 

 This decision ensures continuity of our services for the view across Europe,’ the company said in a statement.


I have seen a lot of these job shifts over the last year because of Brexit, even the company I work for has moved people to Amsterdam from London. This will be very costly for London.


Bullet Journal Progress Walls and Progress Grids

The one thing I like to have in my Bullet Journal is a progress wall or progress grid
What a progress wall can do for you is to visually let you know how long you are from your goal. You can make it look neat and pretty or as in my case a little messy

 Bullet Journal Progress Grid


Detecting Agile BS(from the US Department Of Defense) [pdf] 

Agile is a buzzword of software development, and so all DoD software development projects
are, almost by default, now declared to be “agile.” The purpose of this document is to provide
guidance to DoD program executives and acquisition professionals on how to detect software
projects that are really using agile development versus those that are simply waterfall or spiral
development in agile clothing (“agile-scrum-fall”). 
Pretty cool from the department of Defense


MongoDB removed from RHEL 8 beta due to license

Note that the NoSQL MongoDB database server is not included in RHEL 8.0 Beta because it uses the Server Side Public License (SSPL).

 Didn't AWS roll out their own version as well?
Lego collecting delivers huge and uncorrelated market returns

 A lot of fancy things can be built with Lego sets nowadays. Such as a diversifying portfolio that loads on the Fama-French size factor. Collecting Lego -- yes, the plastic toys made of interlocking bricks that become cars and castles and robots -- returned more than large stocks, bonds and gold in the three decades ending in 2015, says a study by Victoria Dobrynskaya, an assistant professor at Russia’s Higher School of Economics. Aspects of the performance even align with returns sought by owners of smart-beta ETFs.

Man, I wish I still had my space sets from the 70s intact

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Apple Open-Sources FoundationDB Record Layer

Today, we are excited to announce the open source release of the FoundationDB Record Layer!

 From its inception, FoundationDB was designed as a highly scalable key-value store with a simple API. Layers extend the functionality of the database by adding features and data models to allow new storage access patterns. Today we are releasing the FoundationDB Record Layer, which provides relational database semantics on top of FoundationDB. This layer features schema management, indexing facilities, and a rich set of query capabilities. The Record Layer is used in production at Apple to support applications and services for hundreds of millions of users.

Supports ACID transactions


re:MARS, a new AI event for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are behind almost everything we do at Amazon. Some of this work is highly visible, such as autonomous Prime Air delivery drones, eliminating checkout lines at Amazon Go, and making everyday life more convenient for customers with Alexa. But much of what we do with AI and ML happens beneath the surface – from the speed in which we deliver packages, to the broad selection and low prices we’re able to offer customers, to automatic extraction of characters and places from books and videos with X-Ray. This is in addition to the unrivaled breadth and depth of AI and ML services that AWS offers businesses of all sizes. And it’s still day one for AI at Amazon.

Today we are excited to announce we are bringing together some of the brightest leaders across science, academia, and business to explore innovation, scientific advancements, and practical applications of AI and ML. re:MARS, Amazon’s new AI event focused on Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space, will take place June 4-7, 2019 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Business leaders and technical builders will learn, share, and further imagine how these four fields of study will shape the future of AI.

See also here:  https://remars.amazon.com/


Game of Thrones | Season 8 | Official Tease: Crypts of Winterfell (HBO)



We have all been waiting for this... but where are the books??
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