Dan Tanner's mostly technical blog. Any hyperbole expressed here is 100% true.
Wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world? That's the sound of a guitar pickup affected by a horrendous amount of interference, and this made recording guitars in my home studio nearly impossible. I finally fixed the issue after what seemed like forever, and the root cause was not at all obvious to me. It doesn't help that the internet is filled with gobs of misinformation. The problem is…
I take vocal lessons, and one of the skills is controlling volume at different pitches. Our brains can make us think we're at one volume when we're actually at another, so it can help to have a decibel meter for reference. I was gonna buy something like this: I used Claude to do some research with this prompt: I want a standalone dB level meter I can use in my home studio to show me a rolling time…
To: Corporate Communications From: Board of Directors Date: January 20, 2025 Subject: Communication Guide on Remote Software Resources Welcome! If you're reading this, you're a corporate leader looking to maximize shareholder value . The recent pandemic has resulted in an unfortunate incident regarding human resource management. What was intended to be a temporary location adjustment to preserve…
This is a list of the gear and software I use for my indoor cycling setup. I'm an old amateur that will ride indoor in the winter when I'm too lazy to ski or ride my fat bike. It's still a chore for me because I find it pretty boring, but it's easy to hop on and get a decent workout in without much setup time. Gear # Thing Name Price Notes Bike My road bike - I don't ride my road bike in the…
A caution against annotation-based web frameworks # Context Original problems solved by the Spring Framework "Helps me configure my application" "Reduces application server vendor lock-in" "Helps me manage my large monolithic app" "Reduces dependency management issues" "Provides a productive MVC pattern" "Helps me package my application more easily" "Helps me unit test my code more easily"…
Since the arrival of Java 17, I've heard a few people wonder "Does Kotlin still make sense, or should I just use Java?" My opinion: Kotlin is still a far better language, and some of its critical design features will never be matched in Java. Null Safety and Immutability # Kotlin lets you write elegant null-safe code, and forces you to be explicit about null-safety. For example, consider this data…
Overview # This article summarizes what I think of as essential homeowner tools for people interested in basic maintenance and improvements. With the amount of information available online today, it's easier than ever to learn. For example, I love Project Farm . Unfortunately there's also a lot of incomplete and just plain bad information out there. So this my attempt to condense twenty years of…
I built a basic but extensible monitoring tool to help people watch their systems. It's called Chaperone , and it's open-sourced on github . It's simple and powerful, letting you execute arbitrary scripts to determine health. Why? # A couple years ago, a bright colleague of mine whipped up a quick and elegant solution to watch and alert on a bunch of things running in our apps. We didn't want a…
The Student # I have a niece in her first year at a local university. She's never done any programming before, and thinking of becoming an actuary. That means she should learn at least a little bit of programming in a tool like R or Python , right? Those seem like good high-level languages in 2019 that are also applicable in that field. The Phone Call # A few weeks ago I got a call from her Dad…
I recently finished spending a year collecting and comparing forecasts from four different providers for seven different locations across the US. Background # Why Did I Do It? # The petty rage of a first world problem. My phone said there was a 0% chance of rain today, but it rained. More than once. This made me curious about what the forecast data actually looked like, and how different provider…
There's a great family camp my family has attended over the years. We spend a week on a beautiful lake with good friends, pawn our children off for a few hours each day, and disconnect from the world. It started as a tiny little family camp decades ago, and is now so popular there's a lottery system held each winter to determine who gets in for the summer. The lottery process has some major flaws…
I've been carrying water on my frame using a custom solution the last couple seasons. I originally googled for a solution and didn't find anything commercially available, but found lots of helpful posts in various forums explaining what folks have done. It's worked really well, so thought I'd share a bundle of details in case anyone else is interested. If you know of an existing commercial…
tl;dr; markdown files + file syncing + built-in OS file searching = easy organized notes I've been doing more devops work the last couple years, which requires a broader and shallow level of knowledge vs. writing code in one or two languages for months at a time. Because of the dozens of tools I need to juggle, because I forget things, and because I forget things, keeping good notes is essential.…
Every developer should be comfortable with curl . For the same reason that you should at least be conversational in tools like sed, awk, and vi, you should be able to quickly type in something like like curl -v localhost:8080 to see what's going on. It's available on just about every unix-based box for a good reason. Like its man page states, the number of features will make your head spin. That's…
The idea for this post started last week when a gifted teammate, whose experience lies outside JVM languages, asked me if it was still worth it to write Groovy over Java. Good question... For the last five years, when it comes to writing for the JVM, it's been mostly Groovy for me. Crap, it's been almost ten years. dan feels his bones creaking... When I first saw Venkat Subramaniam gliding through…
This is a super quick history and primer for those familiar with java, but unfamiliar with Joda-Time . Java’s original date and time handling had some issues that could make it cumbersome and error-prone to work with. Then came the Joda-Time library, which is a fantastic replacement for pretty much everything date and time related. It’s intuitive, clean, fully-featured, and performant. Starting…
Ever wonder if you could modify a Grails datasource while the app is running? Probably not, and that's totally fine...most people don't need to. We had a couple reasons though: During a disaster recovery situation where a non-clustered database goes down, you want to point all the apps at a failover database. By default this means you have to update the config and restart all the apps. On a…
Yesterday I was doing some Groovy code cleanup with the wonderful CodeNarc static analysis tool. One of the violations it found was UnnecessaryCollectCall . The summary of the rule is " Some method calls to Object.collect(Closure) can be replaced with the spread operator. " e.g. Replace things.collect { it.name } with things*.name , or even things.name if what you're after is a property. But when…
A few months ago, I promised Maria that I would get her and Daniela a playhouse for their birthdays. I was originally going to buy them a little Step2 playhouse, which would've been totally fine. But my good friend Rob, a skilled woodworker, convinced me that building a playhouse was the way to go. I was a little tentative about the idea, since I hadn't built a real structure before on my own, but…
Though the biggest domain name purchases are probably long-gone since the initial dot-com boom, they still remain a valued property. They'll never be as valuable as real land of course, since we can always create more of them, as opposed to things like lake-front property. The recent mad rush for facebook profile names reminded me of this new global scale of gold rush activity. And yes, I'm a…