Retinopathy causing, Heart Disease inducing, irreversible liver, kidney damaging medication approved for emergency use

FDA approves emergency use of chloroquine. The fools!  Even the paper recommending consideration has repeated, emphatic warnings about the "ethical implications" of killing patients with the treatment.  Why not Remdesivir?

Another crutch for the insanely complex YAML in Kubernetes

If you are starting to use Helm Charts to create your complex, long kubernetes configurations and you stumbled across Helmfile to accelerate your adoption, these added training wheels for helmfile are helpful.

using deprek8 and ConfTest to prevent regressing to old APIs

Tyler Auerbach explains a simple application of the deprek8 Open Policy Agent tool for verifying you have not regressed your APIs to older versions.  I have personally needed this test once and did not have it.

Tracing and Observability

Sanjay Nair takes us on a journey through the concepts of tracing through the lens of the OpenTracing standard and the zipkin implementation of distributed tracing.  Light on some important concepts but a decent, quick intro.

Message Passing Middleware Resurection

In the olden days of the 1980s, "middleware," including messaging middleware was all the rage.  BEA systems, Vitria Systems, Tibco, and a slew of others competed to sell horizontally-scaled messaging middleware to the largest enterprises.  eBay's "Business Events Service" (BES) bus  is a 1980's based publish/subscribe system based on Oracle and Vitria middleware.  There are still many advantages of message-passing middleware system patterns over our current RESTful stateless HTTPS fashion.  A few modern, containerized versions of those venerable systems are coming back into vogue.  One such system is NATS.io.  Malta-based consultant R.I. Pienaar has written a great 5-part series on how NATS.io is applied in his "choria" puppet orchestration system.  What is old is new again!

Galaxy's Edge 7: Turning Point by Jason

This part of the ongoing saga is light on "magic," heavy on close-combat, and more fun, 4/5 stars.

xenophobia, nationalism on the rise

The Guardian is reporting a new wave of Chinese government official policy of Xenophobia to blame all wrongs on foreign devils.  The Global Village is in decline.

"the focus on foreigners – surprising given that 90% of imported cases were Chinese passport holders, according to the country's foreign ministry – is the leadership's attempt to shore up its image."

And volunteers are needed to shore up labor shortages in farms to complete the harvest in Israel under continued rocket fire from Gaza.

Cases, Tests, Hospitalizations

https://covid-19.direct/US

Here is another good source of data to track the contagion.  Drill down to your county. 

I am waiting for a tracker with a variable radius from a lat-long (geographical location) as we had in the 1960's for H-Bomb blast, damage, and radiation damage.

'Murican Makers making medical makeshift magic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=036UAwQ6PZw

Home made open source $100 respirator from parts you get at a local hardware store. Youtube Video

Yankee ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit, open source, and a gofundme page.  Awesome!

Surface Transmission

Johns Hopkins has published an interesting guide to which surfaces are more or less effective at transmission and how to maintain safe near-sterile techniques while handling fabrics, cardboard, plastics.

At-Home Workout by Ellie Woods

These ideas seem safe simple, low-impact, and flexible for time.

The Far Shore of Time by Frederik Pohl

Does not hold up very well, unfortunately.  Interesting story but very dated and contrived, 2/5 Stars.

American Butt Ball is 3,400 years old

An odd form of MesoAmerican soccer portrayed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvQjgC9sIY

is over 3,400 years old.  American Butt Ball  is not as old as the American baseball game aka protoball portrayed in the epic of Gilgamesh, of course.

The Year's Best Science Fiction (1986) edited by Frederik Pohl

Some of the stories are dated and do not hold up; others are fine, 3/5 stars.

The Singularity Trap by Dennis E Taylor

I loved the Bobiverse books and this story does not disappoint.  The nanotech capabilities and limitations were poorly defined so parts of the story were a little too deus est machina, (contrived) but the characters and story line were great, 4/5 Stars.

Prisoner of Darkness, Galaxy's Edge book 6 by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole

I am not enjoying how the story line is shifting away from space opera towards fantasy but the close combat is still great, 3/5 Stars.

Asymptomatic Transmission?

The role of delayed and asymptomatic transmission is still unclear with errors larger than our results.  Massive testing is needed to understand what is really happening.

effective COVID-19 therapy

I feel compelled to contribute to the noise, sorry!  ArsTech put out this fantastic, approachable write-up on how we shall treat the virus.  This peer reviewed paper on using malaria medications is getting lots of attention right now. Go Remisdir; go Chloroquine!

Dry cough - do I have COVID-19?

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-symptom-progression-11-03-2020.pdf 

If you do not have fever within a day of your cough, you are 88% likely to have some other problem.

 

3D model: how Remdesivir binds to SARS-CoV-2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKLLKP7pk0o

On March 6, when Gilead Sciences announced clinical trials of their anti-viral medication Remdesivir, I bought shares in their stock (and yes, it is up).  Coincidentally, one of my children had an assignment at University to model how the medication (Remdesivir) binds to SARS-CoV-2.

Here is the video.

iter8 for A/B testing using istio, k8s

This approach to enable canary testing and A/B testing  looks very interesting.

interfaces in open infrastructure around kubernetes

Katie Gamanji takes us on a journey through the evolution of the open source tools ecosystem surrounding kubernetes, its past, present, and possible futures.

testing network code in a CI framework

If you have ever seen any of the Cloudflare talks about how Cloudflare hacked nginx and saved the Internet, you will have some idea of how difficult and complicated edge security policy really is.  Anomalies are legion and enormous.  The "bad actors" are brilliant, talented, persistent, and have huge resources available for attack.  How can the rest of us hope to defend ourselves and keep complicated network security policies from causing major outage or failing their primary purpose of defense?

Here, with step-by-step examples and demonstrations is one approach, using Calico.  However, the examples are simple and straightforward.  The real world is much-more complex.

early insights into our serverless and no-ops future

O'Reilly's serverless survey is not very very scientific.  And all respondents are self-selected serverless enthusiasts.  But there are some good cautionary data about what is not working well.

DevSecOps analysis by Guy Podjarny

Guy writes an interesting analysis about how security concerns that were formerly specialized within a security team as companies like eBay have are getting pushed into the Developer function as modern cloud-native companies are organizing.

Monday starts on Saturday by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

I enjoyed this one for many reasons.  It is a real "slice of life" of Soviet era Leningrad and therefore immersive.  It has great aphorisms and clever fantasy.  But all of the humor and most of the whimsey is lost on me.  3/5 stars.

Sword of the Legion (Galaxy's Edge Book 5) by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole

Still ok, but I am starting not to like this series as it gets further into telekinesis, bad physics, and terrible "AI" robotics.  Good story, characters, close-combat. 3/5 stars.

Platforms and Developers' "Cognitive Load"

Many "platform" teams should read and think about the concepts behind this dev-ops talk about Kubernetes and the complexity of foundational components that are not true platforms. It's a good talk and an interesting example.

Bazel, github shell action, and immutable infrastructure

Filip Nikolovski writes up how he tuned the performance of his Bazel continuous integration (CI) pipeline.  It's interesting that the newest and best containerized systems still fall into terribly inefficient execution patterns unless we manually tune them.

What do our "isolation" attempts do to the spread of COVID-19?

As I speculated from the variables in the equation, isolation prolongs the pandemic by several weeks -- it slows the spread but does not stop it.  We hope it drastically decreases the amplitude, assuming isolation continues for several weeks.

Also in the 2020-03-10 COVID-19 update on ArsTech:  

"public health experts were critical of the moves, calling some of them draconian and ineffective. For instance, quarantines, which can clumsily round up the sick with the healthy, may not prevent the spread of disease—which we certainly saw on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, quarantined in Japan. And travel restrictions in our highly-connected world are inevitably leaky."

". . .a new non-peer-reviewed, unpublished study, an international team of researchers estimated that without the measures, the number of cases in mainland China would have been 67-times higher. And if officials had begun implementing them just one week earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent. If they had implemented them three weeks earlier, cases would have been reduced by 95 percent.

". . . in a Twitter thread March 10, one of the coauthors of that study, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, noted that as community spread increases, social distancing—however painful—becomes essential to slowing and minimizing the impact."

Brennendes Geheimnis von Stefan Zweig

Ich habe diesen Roman wirklich genossen. Die Geschichte ist einfach, aber die Psychologie ist zeitlos. 5/5 Sterne.

Great North Road by Peter F Hamilton

Really fantastic story and great "space opera" awe, wonder, 5/5 stars.