Olivier Forget

Last night’s blog post on Home Automation took a lot of work to close up. I started writing before dinner then tried to polish it off quickly after our meal and episode 1 of Waco. My goal was to finish quickly because I’ve learned that going to bed late, especially if I stay up in front of the computer with my mind engaged, is bad for my sleep and for the next day’s productivity.

I’m intrigued by home automation but I haven’t taken the plunge yet. Here are some thoughts on where I stand. Internet of 💩 I follow @internetofshit on twitter for a daily dish of how internet connected devices fail their users in absurd and painful (and sometimes expensive) ways. Generally speaking, devices that connect to the manufacturer’s servers are iffy. Servers go down or companies pivot or go out of business. Others may just want to push their newest offerings by sabotaging their older products.

Today is my day off for the week. Unlike many people being at home all the time is normal for me. I’m used to it. Over the years I’ve learned techniques and patterns that make this life work well. How many years you ask? Thirteen years. In the Spring of 2007 I stepped out of my cubicle at the small aerospace engineering office that no longer employed me, and have not been back to a “place of work” since.

I was working on a project today and found myself struggling to keep a mental model of the architecture. The project has been growing for many months and it’s gotten a bit hairy, particularly since I am constantly rethinking how it needs to be put together. The code itself is fairly readable since Go lends itself well to that, but the high level view is not always clear in my head.

I’m finding myself in need of a protocol to communicate between two processes, and I can’t find what I want. The two processes will communicate over a Unix Socket in a peer-to-peer fashion. This is a very straightforward situation that I thought I would be able to handle trivially. It is, of course, very easy for two processes to exchange bytes over a unix socket. The web is full of tutorials on writing various “Hello World” and echo services over unix sockets.

There is a situation developing on the World-Wide-Web that runs completely against its ethos. I am talking about the growing number of news websites that require that you are signed-in, and possibly a paying member to read their articles. From the web peruser’s point of view, it’s a terrible experience. You might be reading your feed on social media and decide to click on a link to read the actual article (instead of just piling on in the replies) but then, bam:

I checked Twitter briefly last night before going to sleep. Bit of a mistake. I saw something I did not like and it caused me to spend some time feeling uncomfortable as I was trying to sleep. I’m talking about Elon Musk suddenly aligning fully with the “Freedom” protesters. Let’s backtrack a bit in case this gets read at some future date. We Are In A Pandemic It’s 2020, we’re in the middle of a pandemic courtesy of the COVID19 virus.

I came across a post on Mastodon with the hashtag “#100daysToOffload”. Having seen a lot of #100DaysOfCode posts on Twitter, I was wondering what this “offloading” was all about. The Challenge 100 Days To Offload is a challenge to post in your personal blog every day for 100 days. Hahahaha like that’s going to happen. I set up this Hugo thing over a year ago because I wanted a place to recall my experience seeing a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch.

I love taking notes. It might be the only effective way for my brain to work. Regardless of the technology involved I always gravitate towards a blank slate of some kind and spill thoughts onto the medium. I used to buy paper notebooks and filled them with barely readable words and other scratches. There were arrows, diagrams, and strike-throughs on every page, and exclamation points inside triangles for when I really meant it.

I flew to Florida to witness in person the awesome power of the Falcon Heavy. My viewing location for the launch of Arabsat 6a was Banana Creek within the Kennedy Space Center, also known as “Feel The Heat” in KSC’s launch viewing nomenclature. It is 3.9 miles due West of the launch pad, as close as one can be for such a launch. I do not want my recollection of this experience to become clouded with time, so here are my notes.