Introspection/Extroversion

Thomas The Tank Engine. The Truth.

kylar — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:11:42 +0000

kylar > Not to mention that Thomas and Friends is all about Race Tensions dumbed down for a 4 year olds.
kylar > You think that the Steam Engines vs the Diesels isn’t about the
pressures of a technological society trying to impose it’s will upon
the established masses, or alternately, about the struggles of Blacks
vs Whites, exemplified by the “Devious Diesel” character, who is the
primary antagonist, and so happens to be BLACK!
person A > What about turbo diesels?
person B > and the helicopter?
person A > Or are they like black irish?
person C > turbo diesels steal performance, i don’t trust them
kylar > The helicopter is representative of the plutocratic conspiracies,
when the rich-dressed ‘Sir Topham Hatt’ is unable to accomplish
something via the trains, (representative of the democratic process),
he uses the helicopter to circumvent any issues, thus proving that
wealth buys power and corrupts the system.
kylar > Man, this started as a joke, but now I wonder.
kylar > >:)

TSSJS: Eugene Ciurana : Mission Critical Enterprise/Cloud Applications Case Study

kylar — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:19:45 +0000

This was easily one of the best talks at TSSJS. Eugene is an excellent speaker, and his content was top-notch. His presenting style has a lot of audience participation, and kept my interest very well.

His talk was on what people tend to define as ‘cloud computing’ today - Software As A Service (SaaS), Platform As A Service (PaaS), then moved into some use-cases that he’s dealt with, including LeapFrog and others.

He spent some time going over some specific companies and what they offer, like Amazon’s S3, and RackSpace, and while not promoting any single one, went over the points that are important to weigh when selecting a Cloud provider (uptime, SLA’s, cost breakdown (Are you charged per day? per CPU? Bandwidth, etc).

He also brought into play some of the specific benefits (both technical AND business) to using a Cloud system instead of building out your own co-lo, and finished with a short Q&A session.

This session could easily have gone twice as long, as there ended up being lots of information that I still could have gotten (and I ended up catching up to him later to discuss some of the points I didn’t get to bring up during the Q&A.)

For anyone in this area, I would definitely recommend seeing this talk or speaker, if at all possible.
Overall Rating: 5/5.

TSSJS: Day 1.

kylar — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:01:28 +0000

I had the fortune to be able to attend The Java ServerSide Symposium this year, a great forum/convention about java server technologies. Some of the speakers that I had the fortune to see were:

Eugene Ciurana: Mission-Critical Cloud/Enterprise Hybrid Deployments
Dan Diephouse: RESTful SOA with Mule
Andrew Lombardi: Architecting Applications Using Apache Wicket
Jason Whaley: Rapid Large-Scale SOA - Connected Products at Leapfrog Enterprises
Heath Kesler: Navigating the SOA Mine Field: Optimized Application Architectures
Josh Long: Enterprise Application Integration, and Spring
Rod Johnson: Spring & The Death Of App Servers.
Jeremy Deane: Resource Oriented Architecture Protocol (ROAP)
Neal Ford: On The Lam From The Furniture Police
Bill Burke: Scaling RESTful Services with JAX-RS

Most of these I’ll be breaking out into individual entries, but generally, the quality of content this year was very high.

One of the things I like most about TSSJS, as opposed to most of the other conferences/symposiums I attend (as an attendee or blogger), is that most of the presenters are talking from a real-world experience, having architected, refactored or built a real-world product or solution, instead of just talking about some open source project that other people use, or working on theoretical things. This is something that is really applicable to me, given that most of the work I do is in the ‘real world’ :)

Facebook Chat

kylar — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:37:16 +0000

Tom
Slacker
Spending time on facebook
10:35amAnna
ya and im not gettin paid for it like you
10:35amTom
That’s cause you made bad choices about life. Spending time going to college and such.
If you had a slacker attitude early in life, it would have carried you over to now.
but NOOOO you had to work hard and excel.

IM & Truthiness.

kylar — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:35:17 +0000

Tom 10:26:17AM “Dear Cisco HR, Today I was offended by two employee’s disgusting public display of affection in an elevator. They were kissing and groping each other in a way that I can only describe as obscene, and I was nauseated and offended to my very core. As a large vendor of Cisco products, I would hope that your company and employees would show more restraint and operate in a business like manner when customers, vendors or other employees are present. I can only say that I’m very disappointed in your company’s lack of professional conduct.”
> cc: John Chambers
bimmergeekca 10:28:03AM umm dude
> who do you think was cupping my ass when i was kissing tanya?
Tom 10:28:34AM Pedro the lunch cart guy.
> He’s been telling you he’s John Chambers for months.
bimmergeekca 10:30:13AM you believe what you want to believe. its what you do. you are immune to fact and reason
Tom 10:32:29AM I like to think of it as being unfettered by truth. You live in a boring world where things have to be logical, factual, reasonable. I have no such constraints. I can be creative, unrestrained by reality and reason. Most things, I don’t need to PROVE they’re true - I KNOW they’re true. it’s called ‘Truthiness’. George W and I have it.
> O’Shea is over here too, btw.
> Join us.
bimmergeekca 10:33:51AM tell him i say hi
Tom 10:34:03AM He already knows.

I’ve been working on my music…. man.

kylar — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:59:15 +0000

Over the last couple months I’ve become more interested in working on my guitar stuff. For the last 10 years or so I’ve been playing through the exact same stuff: an american standard strat, or a washburn electric (KC-40) straight into a multi-effects unit, a Boss GT-6 and direct into the PA. Very little mess, no fuss. And it was pretty good. That’s the problem. As I’ve come to realize recently, (slowly, actually, over the course of the last 6 months or so: “great is the enemy of good”). And so I decided that I didn’t want to have good tone anymore. I wanted *GREAT* tone. So I set out on my quest. I started using my tube amp again (Fender HotRod) - great clean tone. Great reverb. Horrible crunch. I looked at two people who had tone I liked. Dave Matsumura and a friend of mine, Steve garber. I talked to them about what they used. Dave pointed me to Fulltone pedals, and they were great. Steve talked to me about delays. I went to guitar showcase and tried different stuff. I read forums about what people liked. Then I tried stuff. And more stuff. Aaron loaned me some pedals. Andy Loaned me a crybaby. Try this. Try that. This guitar. That guitar. The fulltone stuff blew me away. The Crybaby wah didn’t. Andy says “Try a VOX.” Someone points me to H20 pedals. I got a bonus this fall and bought the ones I really liked. Then asked for one at christmas. Swapped some tubes on my Hot Rod to get more power tube saturation. Finally I’m getting to where I like my tone. I’m not satisfied yet, since I want to shape the sound a little more. Anyways, here’s where I ended up:

Pedal Board

I’ll use these to show you what is what(B = Bottom, T = Top, number = from left, so T1 = top left, B5=Bottom right (Vox Wah).

T1: Canuck Custom A/B Box (Green)
T2: Boss DD-3 Digital Delay (white)
T3: Ibanez SoundTank Chorus (black)
T4: DOD/Digitech Stereo Flanger (GFX75) (green)
T5: DOD Compressor/Sustainer (FX80-B) (orange)
B1: Fender Amp Footswitch (Channel, Drive/More Drive)
B2: Fulltone Fulldrive-2 (blue)
B3: Fulltone OCD (white)
B4: Passive Volume Pedal (black)
B5: Vox 847 Wah (black/silver)

My signal flow goes as follows: Guitar->B5->B4->T5->B3->B2->T4->T3->T2->T1->Amp

Dreams…

kylar — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Very strange dreams last night. I was at a fairgrounds somewhere (might have been San Jose), and there was this massive convention of conventions… there were dozens, or hundreds of huge buildings (like the size of a convention hall) and in each one was a different type of convention. Also, in one of the buildings they were holding the NFL draft. Some of my family was there - my sister had a table at the ‘Crafts’ convention and was selling some kind of tchotchkes. I was there as the interim general manager for the New York Jets, and spent some time with Brett Favre, talking about whether he would come back. He told me “I’m willing, but my legs don’t have what they used to.” I agreed, but told him that his arm was the important thing, and I’d go get the best defensive line and wide receiver to play with him. Later in the dream, I was wandering around, but someone sidetracked me and made me a better offer: to become the GM and Coach of Tampa Bay Bucs. “Of Course!” I thought, then started to make plans on how I could get Favre over there. Bear in mind that I’m not really a huge football fan, although I love listening to John Madden on the radio in the morning.

Ahh, code.

kylar — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 18:53:01 +0000

Found this in my codebase today. It might have even been me who wrote it:

boolean delorted = kid.delete();//a nod to Coach-Z

A/B Box

kylar — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 18:35:52 +0000

Last night I built an A/B box for my guitar setup (to switch between two signal paths, usually effects->Amp A/Amp B or Guitar -> Signal Path/Tuner. It was a first little foray to see if I could do something like this. It worked out pretty well - I got a diagram from www.fulltone.com and pretty much copied it - I got most of the parts from pedalparts - although with the exception of the 3pdt switch you could get them all at frys for about $15. if it’s not plugged in to power, the LED’s don’t work, but for some reason, the power seems to add a tiny bit of noise. I’m not sure why yet.

Technical Books, Languages, and Project Euler

kylar — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 20:06:54 +0000

First things first:
Hi. How have you been? Ok, Honestly, I don’t care.

Moving on.

I just got some new tech books: Programming Erlang (semi-work related), Programming Pearls (2nd edition) and Beautiful Code.

I started working on Programming Erlang but stopped a few chapters into it. For someone that has thought exclusively in OO for the last 10 years or so, trying to remember that = is a pattern matching operator is f’d up.

Anyways, a couple weeks ago I started to do Project Euler to learn a bit of python, and plowed my way through a bunch of the first problems (20-30) - they were mostly easy, even though my math stops at grade 12 - a few I ran into constraints issues where I actually had to think my way through the problem, or, even more rarely, find a mathematical explanation of the problem in order to write an algorithm. (the two triangle problems caused this. )

Python is a pretty cool language, very easy to learn.

Anyways, I had originally started this post with the desire to write a list of books I can’t do without, but I kinda got sidetracked. By Work.