I sometimes have the feeling that salaried programmers shy away from fixing or extending open source code due to some combination of the following: They don’t think it’s part of their job. Their employer doesn’t think it’s part of their job, and/or does not have the necessary legal infrastructure and will. They’ve been frustrated in the past with rejected or ignored patch requests. They are…
Balena is a software company that specializes in creating solutions for the IoT space. Their flagship product balenaCloud is a fleet management platform that solves a lot of the pain points in an IoT deployment, namely host OS updates, application deployment workflows, and making scaling more manageable. The cloud product is free for up to 10 devices and a single user, making it suitable for a…
At Chameleon, I help develop and operate a series of OpenStack cloud deployments, which have been modded to serve as a powerful general-purpose testbed for Computer Science research. Currently Chameleon is deployed at three separate host institutions and provides over six thousand CS researchers with bare metal access to a diverse range of state-of-the-art hardware configurations.
I learned recently that not only is it possible to add custom Quartz filters to Mac OS X, it’s very easy. Quartz is a 2D graphics library that sits behind the scenes on macOS. I’m not sure how much it’s used for these days, but at some point a nice developer made it possible to create simple Quartz filters via the ColorSync Utility app. The app has some pre-defined options for common needs and it…
The Lighthouse (2019)
I use Mozilla Thunderbird to view mail on my work Office365 account (mostly because the web interface only supports top-posting presently, and several mailing lists I participate in rightly denounce this practice). Overall it gets the job done, despite having a very primitive search capability in comparison to the Outlook web app. However, there is one issue I had, which was very difficult to…
I’m currently learning and discovering more about the film medium. One of the more interesting realizations I’ve had in the process is just how much attention goes into constructing individual shots. Before I had assumed that much of this was set design and making sure actors were positioned such that the viewer could always suss out the action in the scene without much trouble. I’ve since…