Recent content on karlgrz
2025 was the first year in quite some time where I released original music. It felt really nice to get that out into the universe so we can start working on new stuff. I’m incredibly proud of that album and if you haven’t checked it out yet I’d love for you to give it a spin at one of the links below (or wherever you listen to music.) We’re still in a beautiful death metal…
Hi! I’m a software engineer for Oneleet. I’ve found myself enjoying go, python, rust, c#, erlang, and java these days. Reach out to me through the following avenues: Mastodon: @karlgrz@mastodon.social Twitter: @karl_grz Email: karl [at] karlgrz [dot] com Github: karlgrz Outside of coding, I write and record some music, sometimes it ends up on SoundCloud. I’m in a few bands, some…
“2024.” What can we say? Lot of life events happened, and music got me through them all. Continuing the trend of recent memory, we are in a thriving death metal revival and I am here for it. last.fm On to my favorites… 35.) Vemod - The Deepening Youtube Music | Spotify Clean guitar and clean singing throughout. Incredibly well done arrangements. The first track was a very slow…
2023 was a really tough year. Like always, music is a great distraction when life throws you curveballs. Another year continuing the upward trend of bombastic death metal records, and I am here for it. Seems like there was a hole in my last.fm scrobbles from mid December to mid January. They changed up how their auth works across a few apps and I guess I didn’t notice. last.fm Music I…
Lots of really great records came out last year. It seems I’ve pared my listening down even more than I did last year. I’ve been playing more guitar and writing riffs more than listening to new music in my free time, I suppose. As usual, kind of a wide array of sounds in my tops again. last.fm To my favorites… 36.) Revocation - Netherheaven Youtube Music | Spotify Blasted me in…
Another weird year. I spent more time on practicing guitar and working on other stuff than listening to music, apparently, as my volume is down about 40% from last year. Guess I was focusing on other things. Anyway, 2021 was a great year for metal, yet again, and there was tons of new releases that made it fun to continue discovering music. last.fm And now, on to my favorites of the year…
“2020”. What a fucking year. Countless personal hardships encountered by everyone around the globe. I was no exception to this theme, in countless ways. Like all times of struggle, music is something that has always helped me to keep my head above water when all hope seems lost. It’s the one constant in a sea of tumultuous waves and upheavals where we have no control over except…
2019 my consumption went down compared to previous years. I played even more guitar than last year, that’s probably why I didn’t listen as much. According to last.fm, I still listened to a lot. I also released an EP with Tides Cult. There’s 35 records instead of 25 because there were just too many good ones, I guess. I make the rules! Albums I released in 2019 Tides Cult - Your…
2018 I consumed about as much as 2017, I think. Played even more guitar than last year. According to last.fm that is confirmed. I also released an EP and a single with two different bands, hopefully there will be more in 2019. Albums I released in 2018 Uncouth - Ego Depletion Google Play | Spotify | Bandcamp About Thieves - Bridging the Old and the New Google Play | Spotify | Bandcamp
2017 I feel like I listened to less new stuff than last year. I also think I went to more live shows and played more guitar so who knows? According to last.fm I did still consume quite a bit, these were my favorites. Albums I released in 2017 Uncouth - Tree of Woe And now, on to my favorites of the year… 25.) The Contortionist - Clairvoyant Their best yet, in my opinion.
2016 was just as musically fruitful as 2015 was. According to last.fm, I, once again, listened to a shit load of records this year. Some staples, many new faces, many incredible records! Let’s get it on! 25.) Deftones - Gore I’ve been a giant fanboy for these guys since Adrenaline. This is one of my most listened to albums from last year, and I thought it was excellent. Chino can do no…
Recently, I’ve been using vim within tmux for a lot of my development. It’s been a very good experience on Ubuntu 16.04 in gnome-terminal. However, the colors were not identical within tmux as they are in standalone vim. Obviously, this really bothers you after a while. Well, not a while. Pretty much immediately, haha. But I put up with it to forego shaving that yak in order to…
2015 will go down as another legendary year of hard rock and metal album releases this decade. According to last.fm, I listened to a shit load of records this year. My number 1 and number 2 entries this year were the closest they’ve ever been. Let’s get it on! 25.) Indian Handcrafts - Creeps I had heard the first track off this record on a whim from a soundcloud recommendation, and I…
Tonight I was chatting with someone interested in buying a Dell XPS 15 versus a Macbook Pro. Having used the XPS 15 for almost a year now I had a lot of good things to say about it. There’s a few things I had to do in order to get it even closer to the perfect dev machine (still not quite there, but nothing is). I figured I would jot them down in case I forget anything in the future.
In the beginning… For the past few years I’ve used KeePass as my password management solution, both for personal and work related credentials. It’s a great product. When I moved from PC to OS X and eventually Linux I used KeepassX and the Android client, KeePassDroid, with great success. I stored my .kdbx database in DropBox for easy syncing between my many machines and devices.…
I’ve been running Ubuntu Desktop on my desktop machine at home for a few years now (I put together a great system in January 2014). Just recently, in November 2014, I switched my work laptop from a retina MacBook Pro to a Dell XPS 15 (High DPI w/ touchscreen: amazon.com ) running Ubuntu Desktop 14.04. For some reason, I prefer Linux to OS X, I guess I’m weird, heh. The screen on this…
Another year down, another year where my only post is about my favorite records. Fitting. This year didn’t have nearly the volume of great records that was bestowed upon us in 2013, but there was still an abundance of quality stuff to go around. There’s quite a few surprises in here. Get on with it! Spoiler alert: I’m still looking for a contender to Yellow & Green for…
I listened to quite a lot of new music this year. Lots of metal, a bit of hip-hop, a ton of retro / psychedelic stuff. A lot of REALLY BAD garbage. These are all the albums that stuck with me somehow. Mostly, these are the albums I played more than once. Overall, I’d say 2013 was one of the best musical outputs of any year this century (so far). Here’s my favorites…
I’ve started playing around with a Raspberry Pi recently. It’s pretty slick, but there are a few gotchas I’ve run into, particularly regarding wifi. I’m using a Model B Raspberry Pi which came with a USB wifi dongle, since my TV and router are not in the same room. With raspbmc, it asks for your ssid and passphrase, but with an image like raspian, you have to configure the…
At Mediafly we have been using Puppet for a lot of our configuration management. While it does the job, it’s a little opinionated and a little more complex than I’d like. I’ve been using Salt a lot lately outside of work and I love the simplicity. I’ll save my opinions for another post, but I guess if I’m writing about it that means I enjoy using it, right? In…
One of the things that makes distributed systems development somewhat of a challenge is interacting with all the remote APIs that your system requires to function properly. I find this a challenge when developing on the train (as I spend over 2 hours a day on one). 4G LTE is great and all, but there are dead zones and dropouts that make some API calls annoyingly long to respond. Lately I’ve…
This is one of my favorite things about LINQ in C#. This code: var nonBlank = false; foreach (var byteval in arrayOfBytes) { if (byteval <= 0) continue; nonBlank = true; break; } Becomes this code: var nonBlank = arrayOfBytes.Any(byteval => byteval > 0);
We have a small monitoring Flask web app using SQLAlchemy that we use to keep an eye on the status of some jobs in our processing pipeline. Yesterday we noticed that our DB was getting nailed everytime we refreshed the main status screen, which does NOT show the stack trace (which can be VERY large for big jobs). We needed a way to only pull those fields when they were displayed, but at the same…
Off and on for the past couple of months I’ve been working on a side project using flask, zeromq, and the remix api by echo nest. If you take a look online, there are a lot of excellent guides to introduce you to flask, but not many that dive into something more complex or closer to something that an engineer in more distributed services would need to put together. I’ve seen some great…
So I’ve been working on a little side project web app to get familiar with both flask (a python web microframework) and zeromq (the socket library that acts as a concurrency framework), along with remix from echonest. There was this exchange with Brad from devmynd tonight on twitter. Coupled with the promise of tons of rain from our friendly neighborhood meteorologist, I was inspired to…
I was having trouble running a .NET 4.0, MVC3 web application locally on IIS after building in VS2012. The unit tests would pass, all projects would build successfully, and it would even run from Cassini, but something was just not working properly on IIS. This project SPECIFICALLY references MVC3 assemblies that are included in a packages folder in the project, so I didn’t think it was MVC,…
These, in my opinion, are the best 10 records I heard from 2012. It was pretty easy this year. Here we go. 10.) Torche - Harmonicraft I didn’t listen to this record (and, to be quite honest, never listened to anything of theirs) until a couple weeks ago. I stumbled upon this one after looking through all the releases of 2012. I’m really glad I did. These guys fit in well in my library,…
I had the unfortunate annoyance of trying to get Ubuntu Desktop 12.10 Guest Additions working on VirtualBox 4.24, which have a strong desire to NOT install linux kernel headers. Here’s the steps. Don’t be annoyed. I hope this finds you quickly. I’m like you. I like my VM to scale when I change dimensions of the window, I like to copy/paste between the host/guest, and I expect…
Using RabbitMQ on Amazon EC2 is an easy, performant way to operate a service oriented application. It’s pretty trivial to set up and once you do, you can usually forget about it and go about your day. Until Amazon has an EC2 outage. And your bus goes down. And you don’t have a plan for getting back up quickly. Fail. Fail. Fail. Fortunately, since version 2.6.0 (I believe…I could…
Which one of these gets me ImgBurn? All I want to do is burn a DVD. Why is this so hard?
It has been AGES since I’ve put anything down on paper. I remember when I was at least writing something here (…anything) that my communication skills only improved. I can tell in the past year my skills have deteriorated a bit as I have not been required to write as much. This must be remedied, and I’ve found a great candidate that I think both is personally applicable and…
Recently I spent some time investigating the Google Data .NET Client library. Specifically, I was interested in the YouTube Data API. What I wanted to do was programmatically upload a video file to my YouTube account. I ran into a couple of (minor) speed bumps along the way, and noticed there were a few things that weren’t as clear as they should have been. Hopefully I can clarify the…
Today I started a new chapter in my life. Today was my first day as a Senior Software Engineer for Mediafly in Chicago, IL! I don’t believe I’m at liberty to discuss details of the underlying architecture out of my respect to my colleagues, but in short I will be working on a C# content distribution system that allows users to receive audio & video content anywhere (there are mobile…
So, in the theme of the holidays (and, coincidentally, jockin’ Kyle’s style), here’s my top 10 albums of 2009. These are in no particular order, and represent only the albums I’ve actually picked up and listened to. While I like to think I listen to a lot of albums, I know I’ve not listened to all of them. And here we go… Crack the Skye - Mastodon Wow. This…
One of the greatest shredders to ever pick up an axe, Dimebag Darrell of Pantera and DamagePlan fame, was shot and killed onstage in Columbus, Ohio 5 years ago today in a heinous act, along with others that tried to stop the killer, and the killer himself. Today, appreciate the people around you. Appreciate life. Appreciate music. I’ll be blasting Pantera all day in memory of one of the…
As of October 26th, 2009, I am a new homeowner! It’s been a pretty rough couple of weeks getting things set up. The home I purchased is in Elgin, IL, a suburb of Chicago about 20 minutes from my office. Myself and my girlfriend, Karen, are currently living there. We got the whole house painted (there were some VERY BRIGHT yellows all over that place…) and mostly furnished, and now the…
I just received this in the mail this morning! The Griffin PowerJolt Dual Universal gives you not one, but TWO USB ports in your car’s 12 volt accessory socket! I find myself taking hour long car trips a lot, which equates to two hours of total drive time. Since I use an iPod for all of my musical goodness in my car, if I start the trip with a low charge it might not make it.
I’ve been testing out Opera Mini Beta 5 on my Blackberry Storm for about a week now, and I’m ready to ditch both the Blackberry default browser and Opera Mini 4. This build is FAST, and has really good tab support which works great on the nice Storm screen. It is integrating with the rest of my Blackberry links (any time I would see a “Get Link” button before, now I see…
Today I began work on designing my first Blackberry smartphone application. I plan on documenting all the happenings here. Stay tuned for something interesting, whether it’s good or bad.
I hate writing documentation. Loathe it like I loathe Oprah (need a seperate post for all the ranting involved in that one…). But it is necessary. Writing a piece of software without documentation is like having a movie that is just the ending. How’d you get to this point? Where do I start? How did all this come about? Why are you doing this? Documentation aims to answer all these…
A short while ago I came to a realization that the ice:dataExporter component that I was using to export table data from my ICEFaces application was not behaving exactly how I liked it. I noticed that when I would refresh the table (which worked great on the UI) and then re-export the file, I would get the SAME data in my output workbook. After some Googling and stackoverflowing, I came up with a…
This might not be news to everyone (or anyone…) but the kind folks over at Lifehacker have put together a great post that streamlines how to set up permanent tabs in Firefox and some other goodies for GMail & Google Reader. I’ve been using this set up for only about an hour or so and I am already kicking myself for not installing Better GMail 2 & Better GReader 2 before today…
Here’s the scenario: Your user has this web application that runs a data process. Say, power through a 2GB file and run some processing on each record. Fairly straightforward back end logic, maybe aggregate a column on the file and write the total to a SQL database somewhere. Whatever. Let’s say this process takes upwards of 45 minutes - 1 hour to complete, depending on the input file.…
Last week was a greatly productive week, in my opinion. I continued developing a new internal web application for our clients (a glorified query tool for analyzing their data warehouse). I originally wrote this application using a different set of components, and I was, to put it lightly, “un-impressed” with the reliability of the suite. So I decided to re-write the application using…
These images are being used for the following Stack Overflow question: Dynamically generate ice:commandButton components
I’ve come across many instances in the past where I have needed to duplicate permissions for a single user or role on SQL Server 2005 (usually when trying to version control permissions for a department or group of users, for example). This was a tedious task that I used to dread when I first started commanding more of the DBA responsibilities. I’ve been using a couple of scripts to…
Sometimes when running tomcat inside eclipse there are processes that throw OutOfMemory errors (creating an extremely large Excel file, for instance) that are not thrown on our production servers. By default, Eclipse runs tomcat with 64MB of maximum memory, even if you set up Eclipse to use more memory by editing the eclipse.ini file (I have mine set to 1024, and tomcat still runs at 64MB).…
This evening I wanted to put a little effort into enabling syntax highlighting for code in my posts here on Blogger. The process started innocently enough, but there were a few trip ups along the way, so I decided to share them here. I chose to use syntaxhighlighter, which is hosted on Google Code. It is an all JavaScript solution to syntax highlighting that seems to play nicely with Blogger.
I’ve been putting this off for such a long time. I remember back to a time that was not too long ago, before I had completed my undergraduate studies. I distinctly recall feeling like I had enough things running around inside my head to fill an entire library of novels. I remember imagining vast wastelands spanning half a globe, creatures from the dark void of space, and entire civilizations…