The Endgame We live in interesting times. Like many people, I work in an industry that has become absorbed by an existential angst - the robots have invaded, proved surprisingly capable, and it is the stated ambition of the manager class to replace us with them. What is our future? In some ways we have had a pretty good run. I came into the industry at the burst of the dotcom bubble, but the waves…
Risk I do a lot of sports which, when I talk about them with a layperson, provoke horror or eyerolling at the levels of risk they involve, but I don’t feel like I am a reckless person - their perception of the activity is coloured by a lot of misconceptions about the nature of risk. A lot of people conflate risk and consequence - when most people talk about risk, what they often mean is that the…
Implementing Auth on a Websocket with FastAPI. File this under 'technical issues that I was searching for a blog post to solve'. I recently was tasked with adding a Websocket implementation to a FastAPI server. FastAPI supports websockets natively, so I was optimistic that this would be an easy task, but there are a number of caveats that make this tricky. The first is authentication. In their…
Spring Flying Yesterday the flying forecast looked great, and I headed out for the first flight of the season. Due to some last minute plan changes, I was on takeoff at Braunwald an hour before the others which gave me plenty of time to watch the conditions develop and let the gliders flying laps with the local school be wind dummies. There was already cumulus forming, with a low cloudbase around…
Ocean waves, and Shaders Several years ago, I became interested in simulating an ocean surface with waves. At the time, I wrote a blog post about an algorithm from a paper called "Simulating Ocean Water" by Jerry Tessendorf. I spent some time digging into the maths and implementing it in my Rust Raytracer. Recently, on a whim, I decided to revisit the algorithm, but this time in a GLSL shader.…
Vibe Coding As a software developer, the developments in AI, and LLM's have had a large impact on the perception of my field. On the one hand, the maximalist argument promises us that in the implausibly near future, LLM's will outperform humans at writing code, therefore there will be no need for human software developers, and my profession will become extinct. It must be said that the majority of…
Tools, tools, tools One of my guilty pleasures is watching videos about tools on youtube. Like many people who make things, I have an appreciation for the tooling that enables me, and there are endless rabbit-holes of content to fall into. Although I dabble in physical projects, the majority of my professional and hobby projects are more oriented towards programming computers, thus my own tool…
Linters can go to hell Recently when going through some old notes, I found the following rant, which was clearly written in the fires of righteous fury. I think it's worth publishing, unbaudlerized and raw. There exists a common tool in software development called a linter, the only purpose of which is to shout at you if you don’t conform to a long list of stylistic requirements. It is my…
Searching for Songs in a Sea of Hallucination. "But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know" Donald Rumsfeld Sometimes a song or a lyric becomes stuck on the tip of your tongue. Sometimes a fleeting reference drives you on a search into madness. And when you add AI to the mix, then everything is built on lies. I recently read a book, "On the Shores of the…
A Traffic Light Even in a country with as perfect a public transit system as Switzerland, there are good and bad times to leave the house for a tram. Recently I had a friend in town and we decided to do a project day - building a little device to solve this problem seemed like a feasible afternoon's work. The idea was simple - a little traffic light that lived next to the door which showed green…
A New NAS: Eir A few years ago I built my NAS / Homelab , which I named Tyr, following my convention of naming devices on my local network after the Norse pantheon. It rapidly became a critical piece of my personal infrastructure, hosting many docker containers and all of my data. I haven’t had many issues with it, and there isn’t a great reason to upgrade, but, while helping a friend design a…
Another 3D Printer It's winter again, the season of endless grey, where going outside isn't an obvious choice. This winter has been another one without much snow, so even the mountains have lacked their call. This tends to be the season where my attention moves inside, to projects. For over a year, my two 3D printers were out of commission. The Ender 3 was on its last legs before I bought it, and…
Lyngen Expedition 2023 The winter in Switzerland was a warm one, which was great for the people whose war-ravaged gas heating prices were less of a necessity, but disappointing for us snow seekers. We determined that the best thing to do would be to go North, way North, up beyond the Arctic Circle, where the snow lies thick and endless over the frost shattered mountains of Troms. The Lyngen Alps,…
Air Sensors v2 Since making some simple air sensors last year, I've enjoyed having the graphs of temperature and humidity through my house this winter. I wanted to iterate on the designs of the devices, and also to add new sensors. But I found the development process with the Arduino IDE tedious, and as the USB connection didn't work with the ESP32 from my mac, the project ended up on the…
These Old Gloves Sometimes, something won’t let you let it go. These old gloves are more repair than original, but they still perform well at their job, and in their long service, have earned my loyalty. Eight years ago, realizing that the myriad gloves that I had tried up until that point had all left me cold and wet, I decided to invest some money in keeping my hands warm. The Hestra gloves were…
Home Networking For most of my life, I've lived in a small enough apartment that a single wireless router was enough for my needs. But after moving into my current apartment which has thick concrete walls, and a weird enough shape that the signal didn't happily reach all of the areas, it became clear that I would need to step it up. I took it pretty far, and now I have a complicated enough…
Soaring above the ridge, photo courtesy Tom Payne Last flights of the season Yesterday was probably the last flying day of the season and what a way to end the year. A big group of us hiked up the tortuously steep trail from the Naraus lift at Flims to Fil de Cassons, a lovely gentle ridge that the forecast predicted might be soarable. By the time I got there, people were already easily staying up…
ESP32 Air sensors One of the easier projects that I've had on the todo pile for a long time was a temperature and humidity sensor to plot a time series in home-assistant. I had ordered the parts back last winter, but they had sat unused in the workshop waiting for a rainy weekend. Well their time has come, this week I put together a very simple prototype, that measures from the sensor, sends the…
Escaping the FAANG Part 3. - An Update It's been almost a year since I started ordering parts for a homelab server to replace some of my dependence on the rent-seeking cloud vultures of the FAANG . In the intervening period, the little server has already become critical personal infrastructure, but I dropped the ball on documenting my journey as the half-finished blog posts languished and the…
Some Summer Flying Last Sunday I flew at Rigi with some friends. A lot of them had flown there the day before, so I was confident that it would work, so I took off at Staffelhöhe and was easily able to soar and catch thermal bubbles rising up the northern facing cliffs. The north wind was pretty pronounced, which would reinforce the valley wind that headed into the high alps with north…
Processing Insta360 footage and uploading to Youtube as 360° video. I recently got a 360° camera for filming when I paraglide or do other adventures. Because a lot of the time in these activities you are occupied with the task at hand, it's hard to also frame the video - a 360° camera allows you to crop the footage later to make stable video of the activity. But some services like Youtube also now…
Stiegen Fliegen Last weekend with my parents visiting, we headed to the Bernese Oberland for some hiking and adventure. On Saturday, Jacob and I decided to do a Stiegen Fliegen (A 'Klettersteig' or 'Via Ferrata' depending on which side of Europe you come from, followed by a paraglide down to the valley). I've been playing with the 360 camera a bit, here are a few clips from the day - you should be…
Building the Voron 0.1 The seed for the idea to build a 3D printer was already planted in my head when I bought the Ender-3 at the beginning of the year. It may have been there since I saw a Rep-Rap the best part of a decade ago. And Eric, from whom I had bought the Ender 3, had just finished building his replacement, a Voron 2.4 , which he had bootstrapped using the Ender 3. It was a YouTube…
Modern Software: A Metaphor in 1 act. A: I need to nail these two pieces of wood together, do you have a hammer? B: Oh we don’t do it like that anymore. A: You mean I should screw them together instead? B: No no, no need to over-engineer it, I mean we don’t hack things together with a hammer. A: ? B: Well I can walk you through it. A: Ok B: Well the first thing we need to do is setup our…
Paragliding at the Weekend A few weeks ago, I headed up to Jacob’s cabin for a weekend in the mountains. Sadly for health reasons it seems like it will be my only sporting weekend this winter, but we had a great time. We started fairly late on Saturday, but the weather was perfect, and Jacob and I headed up to First for a relaxed paragliding safari. There was a slight tailwind at takeoff and I was…
Playing with the ESP32 With my new spare time recently I started revisiting some of my old electronics projects. Most of what this entails is blowing up LEDs, destroying Arduinos and generally discovering how little I know about the world of microelectronics. As part of an AliExpress order, to replace some of the components that had been lost in the most recent experiments, I had added a few ESP32…
Escaping the FAANG Part 2. - Building a NAS In part 1 , I decided to move away from the predations of FAANG and manage my data myself. To do this I decided to build my own NAS / homelab server. In this installment, I order the parts and build that machine. I should also issue the disclaimer that in this edition we are very much down in the weeds. From a high philosophical goal, we have descended…
The Kindle is dead to me, and other thoughts on ownership I’ve owned a Kindle since the earliest versions and spent thousands of money on books from the Kindle store. In the last few years I have been reading more books on my phone and iPad, but recently I thought reading on the e-ink display would be nice, so I powered on my old Kindle Oasis. I was confronted with a newly redesigned ‘home’ screen…
I got a 3D Printer. I first tried 3D printing back in around 2010 in a now-long-dead maker-space in San Francisco. Back then it was a struggle to get anything reasonable to print with endless calibration and tweaking. I have a friend who had graduated from an old Creality Ender 3 to a Voron that he had printed with it, and offered to sell me the Ender 3. I was curious what had changed in the last…
Escaping the FAANG 1 (Part 1.) Using modern cloud products is like a death by a thousand cuts. Over time, under pressure to prove their value or to justify a promotion, the product managers and designers at these companies tweak away at perfectly functional products and interfaces, removing key features, and disrupting workflows. The engineers, seeking to stay relevant as frameworks come and go,…
Flying up the Jungfrau We took off at the top of Schilthorn, a few steps from the James Bond lair, astride a jagged rocky ridge. There is a torn mat on tangly rocks that is meant to help get away before the cliffs, but it’s still a snaggly nightmare, and I spent a while untangling knots and aborting before I was able to take off. The adrenaline was flowing a bit. I had also packed far too few…
Simulating Ocean Waves Recently I wanted to add ocean water to my raytracer, and after some reading, found that the state of the art in Ocean water simulation is a paper called "Simulating Ocean Water" by Jerry Tessendorf. I spent many evenings working through the paper trying to come up with an implementation. The concept for Tessendorf's algorithm is conceptually very simple, although it takes a…
Forging a Pattern Welded Sgian Dubh Last weekend I attended a knife making course with Ferrum D near Basel. I'd become interested in knife making and blacksmithing after seeing some youtube videos, and decided to book a course. In order to learn as much as possible, I decided to make a pattern welded Sgian Dubh, which would allow me to learn a lot about the forging process, and metallurgy, as well…
Machine learning is a silver bullet, but silver bullets never won a war. I get accused of being a pessimist by a lot of people but I don't think we're less than 10 years away from self driving cars that are good enough to be unleashed upon the roads, and those will be a blood drenched 10 years filled with interesting ethical court cases. At the moment, despite all the hype, Tesla’s cars crash at…
First Flight in Fiesch On Sunday I flew from Fiesch for the first time, attempting to fly XC as far along the valley as possible. I took the 8am train from Zurich with Tom, Oleg, Alex and Steve, which got us to the takeoff at about 12:30. The forecast was for blue thermals all day, with an inversion at 3500m but warm air. Take-off had perfect conditions, a nice gentle breeze as the thermals…
An experimental visualisation of Earths gravity well
Climbing The Owens River Gorge Raw ochre mountains, steep dry and bony desert reaching up for the blue of the sky. From the valley, the high passes and rocky summits fade into the haze, and the long slopes are hidden by rocky foothills. To the East, over the White Mountains, is the lowest point on the continent. To the West, at the top of the imposing rock wall, is the highest. Here in the depths…
Climbing Mt. Blanc This is a rough transcript of a presentation I did at The Sub on 18 th February 2014 I don't know if you've heard of type 2 fun. Type 1 fun is the fun that we're all familiar with - eating ice cream in the sunshine with friends, that sort of deeply pleasant thing. Type 2 fun is when you are hurting, tired, sweaty, kind of regretting life in a lot of ways, the sort of fun where…
A few months ago I started a company with my friend Niall O'Higgins . We incorporated as Frozen Ridge LLC in California. Living in San Francisco, it's almost more common to meet founders than employees, such is the startup culture here. After Yammer I felt it was time to take the plunge myself. Because we're two engineers, we have a lot more possibilities than the average founder. We both have…
Good Business Ideas. Since leaving Yammer, I've spent a month or so away from work. It's been nice to step back and get some perspective on things. One of the things I want to work on over the next few months is to come up with some good business ideas, release a very minimal version, and see if any of them stick. But ideas are cheap, and most of them are bad. One of the things I've been thinking…
Climbing Mt Tyndall Last weekend, some friends and I set out to climb Mount Tyndall in the Eastern Sierras. At 14,018 feet, Tyndall would be the highest I've ever been and I was excited to climb a real Sierran mountain. Tyndall is on the border of Sequoia National park, just north of Whitney, and is one of the 'fourteeners' of California. To even approach it requires a gruelling climb up…
The Bourne Legacy : A Review To review the Bourne Legacy, the newest in the "Trilogy Plus One" Bourne series, you have to understand how seminal the original Bourne movies were. In 2002, when The Bourne Identity came out, the Bond movies, which had previously been the paragons of the genre, had, under Pierce Brosnan, devolved into a self mockery. A gadget for every situation aided the suave…
The Kalalau Trail We hiked the Kalalau trail in March. The hike is widely known for being brutal and dangerous - it winds along the cliff-strewn Na'Pali coast of Kauai. Ke'e to Hanakapie The first 2 miles of the trail are very easy - signs mark the initial section as a good way for tourists to get a taste of the trail and as a result the trail is wide, fairly easy going and busy. We hit it first…
Experiments on the Laser Cutter : Bitbeam I've used the laser cutter at techshop a few times, and one time I ran into @hugs who was working on a robot that played angry birds. He had developed a prototyping material called bitbeam , based off a larger project called gridbeam. It's a meccano like collection of balsa wood, drilled for easy screwing. I thought it would be a fun project so earlier I…
Chaos Code I recently watched a presentation in which the presenter had an environment that let him see changes in code immediately and visually whilst editing. The source code wasn't released, and figuring it would be a nice experiment, I've made a simple live code editor to see the consequences it would have on coding. Looking for a visual example program, I came across a piece of code from a…
Testing Across Browsers with JavaScript and Webdriver I just posted on the Yammer engineering blog about cross-browser testing with node.js and webdriver .
2011 Books I read a lot of books, and this year was no exception. This year my primary reading device was a kindle , and it's amazing how having a portable device rather than a book made reading so much more convenient. 1 Here's the books I read this year, divided into fiction and non-fiction, and roughly ordered by how highly I rate them. The links are amazon affiliate links, so if you decide to…