Sunday, March 29, 2020

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.



Saturday, March 28, 2020

Cases, Tests, Hospitalizations



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




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.

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

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.