Monday, September 3, 2018

My Book

If I were going to write a book in 2018 it would be about microservices and containerization and patterns for success with them. I foresee about 30 chapters and north of 800 pages. Daunting, but someone has to write it.

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

New MacBook Pro

So they gave me a new MacBook Pro

It's been a disaster. First off, it's got a 13 inch screen. That means my screen protector won't fit and needs to be cut down to size. I'll get there eventually, IF I decide to keep the thing.

It's not substantially better than my 3 year old Mac for the stuff I do, and in some ways it's just more difficult.

I make videos, and I record music. I write software and I create demos. I have nearly 450 GB of stuff on my old machine and I doubt they'll let me keep both of them.

We're using CrashPlan as a backup system.  And I think it's swell if you only need to restore file or folder here or there. But we're talking about migrating everything to a new machine. Well, that ain't gonna work. CrashPlan tells me something like 53 days to get stuff moved.

I could go on and on. Eight Do-Overs, wiping the disk and starting over. Clashing usernames. Backup restores overwriting certificates.  And did I mention 53 days to restore from CrashPlan?

Happily after I learned that the new mac didn't have enough cores to run VMWare the way we have it set up, the company replaced the 13 inch with a 15 inch Pro, which has 6 physical core = 12 virtual. So This should be fine.

Here's my new plan. Migrate Nothing. Just install applications and when I need a document from the old machine I'll airdrop it over to the new one.  Use AirDrop to move files over when I need them. If I don't need them in 30 days, I won't migrate them at all.

That said, there are a ton of applications to install.
x KeepassX - copy the databases and keys... should I leave these in the cloud? Just the databases, not the keys.  And they can all be copied to the new machine using AirDrop. First things first.
x Firefox - Setup sync
x Chrome - Login, Sync, GMail - Sync didn't work during one of the tries and actually deleted bookmarks on the old machine. Luckily I had a backup.
x MS-Office

x Reaper - where did I put that key file again?
x Sublime Text - same... ok, I remember where the key file is.
x node.js -
x java 8 -
x eclipse - and the node editing tools, but which node editing tools?
 - I might skip eclipse. I have a hunch that Sublime can do almost everything I want.
 - nah... I went ahead and downloaded eclipse. I had to work to hard to make a jar file doing it by hand, which only goes to demonstrate my sadly verdigrised skills.
x docker and kubernetes and all that related stuff for ICP
x  gotta have brew before we can have kubectl
all the BlueMix CLI stuff - that can wait, we never use it.
x git
x Ah Camtasia, SnagIt and VMWare
 - and then the two humongous VMWare Images that I normally use, those will be AirDropped.

node-red? do we still care?
How about ODM?

x WebEx Plugin - just start webex and let it do its thing.
x Apera Client
x MuseScore
x all the VSTs and their licensing vaults
 and iLok for those SoundToys VSTs
x HandBrake to compress the video files that Camtasia creates
x Gimp
x Box Tools

Print drivers? Those just seemed to work.

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I think the thing that really snagged me was how many documents I had stored locally, and how many of those really need to be in the cloud somewhere. But then what happens when the cloud goes down? If my google password is in a vault on the google cloud and I can't get to it ... well there's a snake eating its own tail.

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Also, the AirDrop strategy has failed me. I copied by pictures from the old machine to the new machine. The Pictures folder has special behavior apparently, and I broke it. So I have to figure that out.

The good folks at Mac Rumors pointed me to the Migration Assistant. We'll see if that helps.

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The Migration Assistant does copy your files, if you don't have too many of them, and it apparently copies them to a new userID, which doesn't do me any good. Since it put a ton of files somewhere I cannot access them I've decided to wipe the disk again and start over.

This time however, I'm not going to encrypt the disk, since corporate policy installs yet another disk encryptor on top of what I've installed. They don't tell you this in the how to install your mac forum. Just learning by doing unimportant stuff.






Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Tangzhong


Tangzhong method of baking.

I'm going to have to look into this more.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Docker Cruft

I've been working on a docker project this weekend. I toy around with docker, and sometimes I have to expound its benefits to customers.

So I have this pet project. I call it subtitler and subtitler-ui. One is a node-red implementation of a file streamer that talks to Watson and gets back speech to text results and formats it into either SRT or VTT format. The second is a UI to drive the backend node-red stuff.

Over the weekend I wanted to dockerize them.

That wasn't too bad. But there were dozens of builds and false starts. I was actually trying to do something that is considered a bad practice in Docker, which is to have both processes running in a single container. I didn't get very far with that, so I left it as two containers.

What amazed me this morning when I went to push to docker hub is how much cruft there was in my docker system.  Dozens and dozens of image files.

There must be a simple way to manage these and clear them out. Do I even need them? I don't know. I should read up more I guess.