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Ironically, one of the reasons that I started writing Puppet code, was so that I could spend more time designing and building, and less time writing documentation. I suppose I’m a victim of my success, because Puppet-Gluster has grown large enough to warrant its own documentation. So I gave in, and put together some documentation. It’s available as markdown , and, also as a pdf . As before, there is an examples/ directory which yo..

Ironically, one of the reasons that I started writing Puppet code, was so that I could spend more time designing and building, and less time writing documentation. I suppose I’m a victim of my success, because Puppet-Gluster has grown large enough to warrant its own documentation. So I gave in, and put together some documentation. It’s available as markdown , and, also as a pdf . As before, there is an examples/ directory which yo..



I think about my English classes almost every day when I sit down to write, and even some days when I don’t. I think about how much I hated them, how I dreaded each pointless class and similarly meaningless assignment, and then I think about the eternal debt of gratitude I owe those three teachers for seeing me through. Permalink.

So after a few months of Chinese holiday delays, my ErgoDox DIY keyboard kit has finally arrived. There are amazing videos of how to assemble the thing on youtube, and thankfully my roommate was an electrical engineering student at CU and lent me his soldering station. I've started the process of soldering extremely tiny surface mounted diodes to the printed circuit boards. All together the project will require over 300 solder joints by m....

To create image thumbnails from a PDF document, run this in a terminal window: $ convert -thumbnail x300 -background white -alpha remove input_file.pdf[0] output_thumbnail.png The parameters to convert do the following things: ParameterEffect-thumbnailSimilar to -resize, but optimized for speed and strips metadata.x300Make the thumbnail 300px tall, and whatever width maintains the aspect ratio.-background whiteSets the t....

Books I read in 2013 - nindalf.com - 12 years ago - eng

I had the opportunity to give my RESTful WeB APIs and MongoDB Go For A Picnic talk at both MongoTorino and NoSQL Day . The folks at PUG Friuli where so nice to record all the NoSQL Day sessions, so here you have it: the full length video of yours truly speaking to a fully packed room crowded with 120 very attentive attendees. Unfortunately audio is horrible and while all MongoTorino talks were in english, NoSQL Day was an italian-o..

Books I read in 2013 - nindalf.com - 12 years ago - eng

This post is rather outdated now, and so the details contained within are no longer valid. Read with caution. I recently came across the rather snazzy looking subscriber count button on the Smashing Magazine website. A quick Google revealed that these are no longer available after MailChimp redesigned their service . Boo! An example of the Smashing Magazine counter: So, a quick look through the coding on this Smashing Magazin..

Not on nginx, but still want your Tumblr blog in a subdirectory? Henrik Nyh has got your back . Have not personally used this, being a fan of nginx, but should at least be a good starting point to get you on your way.

SQL by default isn’t typically friendly to dive into, and especially so if you’re reading someone else’s already created queries. For some reason most people throw out principles we follow in other languages such as commenting and composability just for SQL. I was recently reminded of a key feature in Postgres that most don’t use by @timonk highlighting it in his AWS Re:Invent Redshift talk. The simple feature actually makes SQL both re....

SQL by default isn’t typically friendly to dive into, and especially so if you’re reading someone else’s already created queries. For some reason most people throw out principles we follow in other languages such as commenting and composability just for SQL. I was recently reminded of a key feature in Postgres that most don’t use by @timonk highlighting it in his AWS Re:Invent Redshift talk. The simple feature actually makes SQL both re....

More on the iPad Pro - zacs.site - 12 years ago - eng
I feel like Gene Munster, where just as he perpetually beats upon his iTV drum so, too, do I all too frequently return to the iPad Pro. Since Apple’s iPad event, after receiving my MacBook Pro, and all throughout the ensuing period during which I began to define the different roles this new device and my trusty iPad would fill, this topic and Tim Cook’s comment to that effect have occupied a great deal of my consciousness. Unfortunately..

Rick Knudtson is a co-founder of Flywheel, a WordPress hosting and management company built for designers.


Tumblr will let you run a blog as a sub-domain (blog.domain.com) rather than using their own URL scheme (username.tumblr.com), allowing your blog to appear much more professional and appear directly linked to your domain/website. However, it is argued within the SEO scene that a subdomain is bad practice for maximising your search engine optimisation. This is because subdomains do not always receive the benefits from the root domain they’..

Initial Impressions - zacs.site - 12 years ago - eng
When linking to Shawn Blanc’s excellent iPad Mini and Air review I mentioned Jim and Marco’s altercation on Twitter the day before in passing. Brought on when Marco criticized Jim’s lack of time spent with the Mini preluding an article titled “review”, I found the entire exchange humorous and representative of the pair’s similar personalities. I considered writing this article then at peak relevance, but instead pushed it into Drafts for..

I have always been fascinated by the idea that we can significantly improve our wellbeing by making relatively small changes: exercising, changing our diet, adding some supplements.

People often ask how to do iteration in Puppet . Most Puppet users have a background in imperative programming , and are already very familiar with for loops. Puppet is sometimes confusing at first, because it is actually (or technically, contains) a declarative , domain-specific language . In general, DSL’s aren’t always Turing complete , nor do they need to support loops , but this doesn’t mean you can’t iterate. Until rec..

People often ask how to do iteration in Puppet . Most Puppet users have a background in imperative programming , and are already very familiar with for loops. Puppet is sometimes confusing at first, because it is actually (or technically, contains) a declarative , domain-specific language . In general, DSL’s aren’t always Turing complete , nor do they need to support loops , but this doesn’t mean you can’t iterate. Until rec..

Napkin tower - dimitarsimeonov.com - 12 years ago - eng
I’ve had a few major changes in my life which made me think that there is no singular self. Me today is a very different person than me 5 years ago. Me now thinks about different things in a different language than me 5 years ago. Me now have different goals in life than me 5 years ago. Me now makes much different decisions than me 5 years ago. Me now has experienced some really bitter moments and lost some close people. Once I get slapped ....

Recently I have begun exercising more restrain when deciding whether to publish a link post or not, attempting to decrease the lopsided original content to echo piece ratio by posting more of my own work than others’. I find it somewhat ironic, then, that today’s first link post goes to John Gruber’s linked list item commenting on Ed Dale’s Smart Move Apple . Permalink.

Yesterday afternoon Benedict Evans had something interesting to say regarding a new product-service pairing called Coin, questioning why anyone considered it anything more than a toy. Having never heard of the site, I continued scrolling until coming across Cody Fink’s referral link , at which point my “when in doubt wait until more than one person talks about it before taking the bait” rule kicked in and I opened Coin’s website. Over th..

Shortly after Ole Zorn released Editorial for iPad I adopted a workflow heavily reliant on this and his other — some would say companion — app Pythonista. Employing Editorial for all my writing needs and Pythonista to run a retrofitted version of FirstCrack thus enabling me to post on the go, I read, wrote, and updated my website almost exclusively on my iPad. Although recent months have seen a reversal of that shift in conjunction with my ..

Shawn Blanc posted by far and away the best iPad and iPad Mini first look I have read thus far. I enjoyed the flame war over Jim’s article immensely, Marco’s own “review”  — if it even merits such a designation — had its own humorous high point, but up till now nothing impressed me to the extent that Shawn’s piece did. Permalink.

This was an amazing journey for me, the entire storyline seemed amazingly well thought out. The characters were in depth, and…

Ben Brooks put it quite well when he linked to this article , characterizing it as a “fantastic post from Watts Martin”; I wholeheartedly agree. More often than not I consider Ben to have gone off the deep end some time ago, the result of which we see today in his near-constant advocation for privacy often taken to the extreme . However, Mr. Martin — and, by extension, Ben in his explicit endorsement of this piece — hit the nail on the he..

Clocking Down the Mini - zacs.site - 12 years ago - eng
Yesterday Jason Snell made an interesting tweet regarding Apple’s A7 SoC, presumably after reading the MacRumors article Retina iPad Mini Has 1.3 GHz A7 Processor With 5X the Performance of the Original Mini : “The iPad Air’s processor is running at 1.39GHz; the iPad mini’s is clocked down to 1.27GHz.” Amidst nearly every discussion surrounding the iPad Mini, especially building up to its release earlier today, much of that discourse h..

I had fun this evening working on this with Samuel Reed . Performance and programming language choice is always a hotly debated topic and it's always fascinating the explore. It was truly interesting to see async php code. I know NodeJS is known for it, but PHP really isn't at all. The actual article is here: http://reviewsignal.com/blog/2013/11/13/benchmarking-asyncronous-php-vs-...

NoFlo and GNOME - bergie.iki.fi - 12 years ago - eng
As the readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a Flow-Based Programming implementation for JavaScript in the form of the NoFlo project. The idea of FBP in nutshell is to separate the control flow of software from the actual implementation. Developers build reusable “black box” components that are then connected with each other through a graph that you can define either visually or textually. FBP has been around for quite a whi....

NoFlo and GNOME - bergie.iki.fi - 12 years ago - eng
As the readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a Flow-Based Programming implementation for JavaScript in the form of the NoFlo project. The idea of FBP in nutshell is to separate the control flow of software from the actual implementation. Developers build reusable “black box” components that are then connected with each other through a graph that you can define either visually or textually. FBP has been around for quite a whi....

Cracking my iPhone 4 - zacs.site - 12 years ago - eng
The whole debacle surrounding New York Times writer Catherine Rampell’s article Cracking the Apple Trap holds almost no interest to me. However, after yesterday’s The Talk Show during which John X. Gruber and very special guest Paul X. Kafasis devoted a fair amount of time to ridiculing the entire enterprise, I feel it at least merits some attention. Permalink.

Every Sunday Benedict Evans, whose articles I have linked to numerous times in the past, publishes an excellent newsletter providing insightful observations into the tech and mobile industries’ news to a subscriber base growing at an impressive rate of 1,000 every month . Every week I look forward to the next installment of this thought-provoking newsletter, and Benedict always exceeds my expectations. If you need more convincing than ..

Until recently, when our customers created a campaign, they could choose to target the whole world, the U.S. or create a list of specific countries and U.S. metros (e.g. the San Francisco Bay Area, the Atlanta metro, etc.). Last week, we added the ability to target or exclude countries, metros, regions (e.g. states in the U.S., provinces in Canada,…), cities and postal codes. That meant doing a significant refactor of our geolocation co....

After the 2013 Berlin Marathon sold out in less than four hours, the organizers decided to alter the registration process for 2014. First there was a pre-registration phase followed by a random selection from the pool of registrants to receive a spot. Those who were selected had to register until November 11th, 2013. Any spots that were not confirmed till the 11th would be offered to pre-registered candidates according to the order in which..

We are always looking for ways to share knowledge and learn new things within engineering at Cerner. Whether that be through meetups, lunch & learns, conferences, or DevCon, we have a variety of outlets available to us. Today, we’re announcing a new program we recently launched: Cerner Tech Talks. Cerner Tech Talks brings in great speakers for talks that would be of interest to engineers at Cerner. These talks will be held periodically and ..

Fun with Instaparse - johnj.com - 12 years ago - eng
One of my favorite talks from this month’s excellent Clojure/conj was Carin Meier 's presentation, which combined storytelling, live coding, philosophy, the history of computing, and flying robotic drones. She used the relatively new Instaparse library to create her own language to explore something called “Speech Acts” (which I won’t go into here, but do catch the video of her talk when it goes up). My university work was in physic....

Fun with Instaparse - johnj.com - 12 years ago - eng
One of my favorite talks from this month’s excellent Clojure/conj was Carin Meier 's presentation, which combined storytelling, live coding, philosophy, the history of computing, and flying robotic drones. She used the relatively new Instaparse library to create her own language to explore something called “Speech Acts” (which I won’t go into here, but do catch the video of her talk when it goes up). My university work was in physic....

Fun with Instaparse - johnj.com - 12 years ago - eng
One of my favorite talks from this month’s excellent Clojure/conj was Carin Meier 's presentation, which combined storytelling, live coding, philosophy, the history of computing, and flying robotic drones. She used the relatively new Instaparse library to create her own language to explore something called “Speech Acts” (which I won’t go into here, but do catch the video of her talk when it goes up). My university work was in physic....

In the wake of iOS 7’s release very few developers skipped the godsend of an opportunity to update their apps and charge once more in the process. Unfortunately, interspersed amongst the Tapbots of Apple’s ecosystem who shipped a product rebuilt from the ground up, others instead chose a shallow strategy Ben Brooks quantified quite well in the title of his article linking to Chris’s piece, Let’s make it 2.0 so we can charge for it again. ..

Apache Thrift is pretty awesome - you can build Twisted bindings for your Thrift interface file that work fantastically. There is one thing that took me a while to figure out: I want to restrict clients connecting to the service to a specific set of IP addresses stored in a database. There were thre...

Apache Thrift is pretty awesome - you can build Twisted bindings for your Thrift interface file that work fantastically. There is one thing that took me a while to figure out: I want to restrict clients connecting to the service to a specific set of IP addresses stored in a database. There were thre...

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