User: anders
daily task/chore tracker (seinfeld style)
password manager app w/ riak backend (GPG encrypt text going in)
checklist builder app:
- start from a template
- make “instance”, customize, add/remove
- simple UI to go through it
commandline tool for PMT
“Don’t be afraid of making mistakes; just be afraid of not learning from them.” - Thomas Edison
go-based BDD/acceptance testing tool. gherkin syntax + selenium.
done as web app. one database of scenarios, one database of rules for processing those rules.
tickler app: textbox and date picker. enter some text, pick a date. when that date comes up, it emails the text back to you. (ie, based on GTD tickler file)
Got our ABN AMRO chip and pin debit cards, which come with USB 2-factor auth devices. Of course, it’s a little anticlimactic since there’s no money in my account yet (have to do an international wire transfer next week to top it up).
- steek = sting, bite
- partij = party
- steekpartij = knifing
The Invention of Concurrent Programming
Nice paper that summarizes the historical papers related to concurrency models.
Antifragile 2015
interesting looking conference on June 2-5 in london
http://www.simplecpu.com/cpu.html
fun interactive CPU component lesson
Well, OK, then.
Went in to the bank with Phoenix when she opened her account to see if they could just attach me to it as well somehow. Sure enough, the woman opening her account said that as long as I had a BSN, there was no reason I couldn’t open my own account, despite what we’d been told earlier. So now we both have Dutch bank accounts and are just waiting to get our chip and pin cards in the mail (along with hardware two-factor authentication devices!).
She also handles insurance and we figured out that (not surprisingly) the insurance that we’d had to take out before we could rent our apartment (Dutch law) was overpriced. Not surprising since we had very few options to pick through that we could get from the US before we had our completed residence permits, BSNs or domestic bank accounts. We’re stuck for a year, but then we can switch to a plan that’s about a quarter the price.
lokalebasen/go-env
pull down environment variables from etcd and run a process with them
Crash-only software: More than meets the eye [LWN.net]
“only way to stop is to crash. only way to start is to recover”
Signals and Microinteractions for Smartwatches
Not interested so much in smartwatches, but the explanations of UX terminology are good.
Keys to SRE
Talk by Google’s SRE Czar.
- 50% dev/maintenance ratio
- at least 5% of support tickets need to go directly to developers
- SRE’s are free to leave any project at any time
- in an outage: minimize impact + prevent recurrence
My Philosophy on Alerting - Google Docs
Writeup from a Google SRE on alerting/monitoring. Very well thought out.
Pages should be urgent, important, actionable, and real.
- emphasis on reducing noise levels
- emphasis on end-to-end, black box, symptom-based alerting rather than the cause (I assume there is still enough monitoring/metrics in place to quickly diagnose the cause from the symptom)
- a daily report can be a good channel for non-critical, but time-sensitive alerts, particularly on causes, (disk getting relatively full, unusually large numbers of slow queries, etc)
- “Every alert should be tracked through a workflow system.” not just dumped into an IRC channel or email list.
This is good for thinking about Hound. Overall, a lot of effort has gone into making all of Hound’s alerts be “urgent, important, actionable, and real” but some fall short. Eg, quite a few currently exist that aren’t really actionable (eg, monitoring of various LITO services, Wardenclyffe -> PCP failures), that we have because we’d just rather know when something we depend on fails before our users.
Things to consider adding to Hound based on this:
- dependency chain: link symptoms to causes so we can silence the symptom alerts when we know the cause
- different alert targets. So we can set up alerts that only go to the people who can actually act on them, rather than dump everything to ccnmtl-sysadmin and train people to ignore a lot of them (“somebody else’s problem”).