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Boeing 737 MAX MCAS Nonsense
Southwest Airlines MAX8 Parking Lot at Chicago Midway Airport (MDW) Disasters and manias of our time: Fukushima p-hacking in the social sciences SF Transbay Terminal welding and materials failures...
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Announcement: check_s3_encryption.sh Linux Utility Available
Announcing a new SRE utility I wrote called check_s3_encryption.sh to report and optionally encrypt any AWS S3 unencrypted buckets: it can be run from the command line or a crontab it’s useful for IT...
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RedisConf 2019
RedisLabs presented another well-organized, strong technical conference this year. Once again it was held at Pier 27 in SF. The conference theme this year was, “Redis, Database for the Instant...
View ArticleInternational Committee To Review Boeing 737 MAX
Wow, you don’t often see two organizations destroy their brand globally at the same time – way to go, Boeing and FAA! My prediction is that Boeing CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, will be fired over this, and...
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Getting Started in Computer Programming
From time to time, people ask me how to get started in the career of computer programming. If you like solving puzzles and have the ability to focus for hours at a time, then you’re a good candidate to...
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Las Vegas 2019 Trip
While on vacation in Las Vegas last week, I saw the Blue Man Group, Hershey’s Chocolate World and went on a once-in-a-lifetime tour of the Hoover Dam. I booked the tour through Grayline Tours, and saw...
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Party City is Facing a Helium Shortage
I’ve read about possible helium shortages for years, but this is the first time I’ve heard of actual impact. (Helium is a strategically important element used in MRI machines and scientific...
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Buckethead Shrine
Buckethead is the greatest electric guitarist and composer of all time. I became a Buckethead in 2019 – it’s never too late! Buckethead Shreds: Soothsayer Live @ Gothic 9-28-2012 Analysis (One of the...
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Amazon SF Loft: Observability for Startups
Luke Demi from Coinbase (YC) gave a talk on “Observability for Startups” tonite at the AWS Loft at 525 Market Street. He talked about their odyssey through the years to monitor their infrastructure,...
View ArticleHadoop Has No Business Model
I had a chance to talk to a Big Data sales manager 5 years ago. He said, “Hadoop is a tough sale on the East Coast. Hoping Spark will help.” Now, MapR is facing insolvency and Cloudera/Hortonworks...
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Microsoft Revives Flight Simulator
Stoked to hear that Microsoft is working on a release of Flight Simulator 2020, for the Xbox and PC (Windows 10). Besides being one of the top-selling games of all time, I got my IFR airplane rating on...
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PSA: Migrating SSD Between MacBook Pro Computers
PSA: It’s possible to move a MacBook Pro notebook SSD drive to another similar model of the same year, with two exceptions: 1) the new computer needs the firmware for that filesystem version. For...
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Wake Vortex Reduction Trials Go Live at Vienna Airport
Very interesting trial of ground-based plates to reduce wingtip vortices near Vienna airport. If this works, airports can reduce in-trail distance, allowing more landings and takeoffs per hour. The...
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Protected: Instrumental Music Market Analysis
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View ArticleCheap Macbook Pro Replacement Notebooks
Dropped your Macbook Pro, etc. and need a cheap replacement? Don’t want to spend $3,000 on a new one? Replacing the display screen at the Apple Store or a 3rd party repair service is in the $600 – $800...
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PSA: Running Mac OS X csrutil Without a Recovery OS Partition
This blog post contains my notes for advanced users (Mac OS software developers and IT staff), not end-users. Starting with Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11), some low-level system operations, like setting...
View ArticleVery Good Article on Boeing 737 MAX Fiasco
New Republic has a very good recent article on the Boeing 737 MAX, titled “Crash Course.” Overall, the article appeared to be written by a non-expert journalist. For example, airline accidents in...
View ArticleMigrating Sqlite Databases to MySQL
Recently I had to migrate a relatively simple (no FKs or views) Grafana 4 database of about 20 tables and 80,000 rows from sqlite3 to mysql5.6. Below are some notes I made on the 3 methods I tried....
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