While setting up this new blog, I discovered that Blogger already had an "A Just Machine" blog (which is why my blogspot.com URL has dashes in it.) It's a Canadian political blog that has not updated since 2007, and for whatever reason it drops the spaces in the name. Not sure what Steely Dan has to do with being a Conservative in Canada, but it is what it is.
I doubt that anyone who reads either blog (assuming anyone reads either one, of course) will confuse the two, but just in case you came here looking for some Tory snark from the late Aughts, here's the blog you want: ajustmachine.blogspot.com.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Moving Day
I've decided to keep the blog going but move to Blogger from my generic web-hosting provider. Nothing against them, they have been great, but I can't justify even the small amount I am paying them when I am only using the service to host a Wordpress installation. When I'm ready to start building actual web apps they will be the first place I will go.
I had to do a lot of finagling with my registrar to try to get the old domain name to point to the new blog, and it will be at least an hour before I know whether everything is set up correctly. For now ajustmachine.com pulls up a Google 404 page. I guess the fact that Google is responding is a somewhat hopeful sign.
Update: www.ajustmachine.com now points to this blog, but the bare domain name does not. It may take a while longer for the A records to propagate (look at me, dropping hard-core DNS terminology.)
Update 2: looks like I missed the setting that auto-redirects the bare domain name to the www address. Now ajustmachine.com works, too. Hooray!
I had to do a lot of finagling with my registrar to try to get the old domain name to point to the new blog, and it will be at least an hour before I know whether everything is set up correctly. For now ajustmachine.com pulls up a Google 404 page. I guess the fact that Google is responding is a somewhat hopeful sign.
Update: www.ajustmachine.com now points to this blog, but the bare domain name does not. It may take a while longer for the A records to propagate (look at me, dropping hard-core DNS terminology.)
Update 2: looks like I missed the setting that auto-redirects the bare domain name to the www address. Now ajustmachine.com works, too. Hooray!
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Tempus fugit
I got a call from my registrar yesterday saying that the domain for this site had just auto-renewed. I didn't realize it had been a year already.
When I registered this domain, I gave myself a year to do something with it, like blogging on a regular basis, or launching a small web app or two. As it stands it took me 6 months to get around to writing my first blog post, and since then I've made 8 posts including this one. As for web apps, I'm still working through the same Rails tutorial, so nothing much on that front either.
If I had gotten a single non-spam comment, or other indication that anyone was reading this blog, I might keep going. As it stands, I think I'm going to shut the whole thing down for now.
When I registered this domain, I gave myself a year to do something with it, like blogging on a regular basis, or launching a small web app or two. As it stands it took me 6 months to get around to writing my first blog post, and since then I've made 8 posts including this one. As for web apps, I'm still working through the same Rails tutorial, so nothing much on that front either.
If I had gotten a single non-spam comment, or other indication that anyone was reading this blog, I might keep going. As it stands, I think I'm going to shut the whole thing down for now.
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Like rain on your wedding day
I listened to part of a Diane Rehm interview with Barry Manilow on my way to and from getting lunch yesterday.
Like many pop singers, he records songs he wrote himself, and songs written by others.
In the written-by-others category: "I Write the Songs."
Admittedly, the "I" in the song is supposed to be Music incarnate, not Barry Manilow, but still...
Like many pop singers, he records songs he wrote himself, and songs written by others.
In the written-by-others category: "I Write the Songs."
Admittedly, the "I" in the song is supposed to be Music incarnate, not Barry Manilow, but still...
Saturday, June 15, 2013
My weed trimmer is the reincarnation of Zorro
Either that, or Lord Voldemort.
Kids, this is why you shouldn't trim weeds in shorts.
Hat tip to my younger son, who came up with the Harry Potter reference when he saw the marks.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
In which I become perhaps a bit too excited...
...because John Scalzi is in town tonight! I'm heading out in just a few minutes.
This is, I believe, the first time he has been here since I started reading him, several years ago. I've got my copies of OMW, Redshirts, and THD ready to go, the last two purchased from Quail Ridge, of course.
Yes, I did buy paper copies of two books I already have on my Kindle. How's that for fandom?
My son (who is reading over my shoulder) says I should follow up the last sentence with "BOOSH!" Too much?
This is, I believe, the first time he has been here since I started reading him, several years ago. I've got my copies of OMW, Redshirts, and THD ready to go, the last two purchased from Quail Ridge, of course.
Yes, I did buy paper copies of two books I already have on my Kindle. How's that for fandom?
My son (who is reading over my shoulder) says I should follow up the last sentence with "BOOSH!" Too much?
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Speaking of Stargate: Universe...
As I mentioned in my post on John Scalzi's The Human Division, upon finding out the book ended on a semi-cliffhanger, with several narrative threads left unresolved, my mind jumped immediately to Stargate: Universe due to Scalzi's association with that show, and because it, too, ended with a goodly number of loose ends.
Happily, there will be a next season for THD. As for SG:U, even if the writers and producers had wrapped everything up at the end, I still would have been miffed just because it was ending. Although I did not like the second season as much as the first, it was still pretty good. And I really, really liked the first season, especially the early episodes.
The third part of the series premiere hit so many of the right hard-SF notes for me, in fact, that I think that the goodwill from that one episode helped keep me watching until the end, even if later episodes were not quite as strong.
What made it so much better than most television SF? Here's a comparison:
Typical SF TV problem: The ship, which looks inside and out like a luxury car just off the showroom floor, crewed with happy, competent, highly-trained people, is being attacked by a mysterious energy being from the depths of space!
SG:U problem: The ship is thousands of years old and is falling apart. The "crew" is a band of soldiers and civilians who got dumped on board by unexpected events. Oh, and the technology is alien, so almost nobody aboard knows (or can figure out) how it works. They are able to figure out one thing: the CO2 scrubbers are failing, and once the scrubbers fail, these folks are all going to die, slowly.
Typical SF TV fix: We can reverse the polarity of the bogonic field to create a beam of quuxons that will drive the creature away!
SG:U fix: We need lime. Not limes, lime. Calcium oxide. There's a possible source nearby. It's a desert planet that makes Tatooine look like a Sandals resort. Since we don't have any vehicles, hopefully there's some within walking distance. Otherwise, we're back to the "everybody dies" part.
Typical SF TV resolution: At a shouted command from the charismatic commanding officer, a crew member taps meaningfully on a touchscreen to implement the critical polarity reversal, just in time!
SG:U resolution: Crew members trudge through the hot sand with chemistry kits, stopping to periodically perform titration experiments to find the right kind of lime. They go past the deadline, and only make it back because one of them, a civilian, risks losing a limb or even dying in order to delay a countdown.
Seriously, I almost cried when I saw the actors swirling sand around in a freaking Erlenmeyer flask in order to save the day. Here it was, late 2009, and somebody had finally made an sf TV show that felt like the stuff from the 50's that I had read as a kid. Plus, it made all those times I had watched stuff drip out of a pipette in high school and college seem so much more meaningful.
There was something of a downhill slide after that (The communication stones. Dear Lord, the communication stones.) It wasn't as much of a space opera as other SF shows, but it got to be a lot more of a soap opera than those shows, which is just as bad. I still miss that show, though. It definitely ended too soon.
Happily, there will be a next season for THD. As for SG:U, even if the writers and producers had wrapped everything up at the end, I still would have been miffed just because it was ending. Although I did not like the second season as much as the first, it was still pretty good. And I really, really liked the first season, especially the early episodes.
The third part of the series premiere hit so many of the right hard-SF notes for me, in fact, that I think that the goodwill from that one episode helped keep me watching until the end, even if later episodes were not quite as strong.
What made it so much better than most television SF? Here's a comparison:
Typical SF TV problem: The ship, which looks inside and out like a luxury car just off the showroom floor, crewed with happy, competent, highly-trained people, is being attacked by a mysterious energy being from the depths of space!
SG:U problem: The ship is thousands of years old and is falling apart. The "crew" is a band of soldiers and civilians who got dumped on board by unexpected events. Oh, and the technology is alien, so almost nobody aboard knows (or can figure out) how it works. They are able to figure out one thing: the CO2 scrubbers are failing, and once the scrubbers fail, these folks are all going to die, slowly.
Typical SF TV fix: We can reverse the polarity of the bogonic field to create a beam of quuxons that will drive the creature away!
SG:U fix: We need lime. Not limes, lime. Calcium oxide. There's a possible source nearby. It's a desert planet that makes Tatooine look like a Sandals resort. Since we don't have any vehicles, hopefully there's some within walking distance. Otherwise, we're back to the "everybody dies" part.
Typical SF TV resolution: At a shouted command from the charismatic commanding officer, a crew member taps meaningfully on a touchscreen to implement the critical polarity reversal, just in time!
SG:U resolution: Crew members trudge through the hot sand with chemistry kits, stopping to periodically perform titration experiments to find the right kind of lime. They go past the deadline, and only make it back because one of them, a civilian, risks losing a limb or even dying in order to delay a countdown.
Seriously, I almost cried when I saw the actors swirling sand around in a freaking Erlenmeyer flask in order to save the day. Here it was, late 2009, and somebody had finally made an sf TV show that felt like the stuff from the 50's that I had read as a kid. Plus, it made all those times I had watched stuff drip out of a pipette in high school and college seem so much more meaningful.
There was something of a downhill slide after that (The communication stones. Dear Lord, the communication stones.) It wasn't as much of a space opera as other SF shows, but it got to be a lot more of a soap opera than those shows, which is just as bad. I still miss that show, though. It definitely ended too soon.
Thoughts on The Human Division
Note: I originally wrote this post April 10, right after episode 13 came out, but once I published it, I realized I had not expressed my thoughts very clearly. I meant to revise it and re-post it that week, but something came up, and then something else, and so on. So, not as timely as I had originally intended, but here it is.
I had planned to write something about John Scalzi's The Human Division as I was reading it, but I never got around to it when the first few episodes were released. Since then, my thoughts about it have gone through several changes, so a few weeks back I decided to wait until it was finished to actually put my thoughts down.
The short version is that I enjoyed the book just as much as the other recent Old Man's War books (the original book and The Ghost Brigades are still my favorites, though.) I definitely enjoyed the main story line (especially the final episode), but also thought most of the other stories were good, too. Some of them, though, didn't really make sense to me, either as "episodes," or as short stories, or as either one. I was a bit nervous about the major plot threads left dangling at the end of the final episode, since I couldn't help but think of what happened to SG:U, but as it turns out there will be a second season, so hopefully some of those will get tied up. I appreciated the serialized format; it was fun to get a new episode every week, just like a TV show.
The longer version:
I really liked the short story "After the Coup" that Scalzi had published online, so I was looking forward to a whole set of stories featuring Hart Schmidt and Harry Wilson. At the time I read "Coup", I vaguely remembered Wilson from Old Man's War, but he as a minor character. The best part about THD, for me, was getting to know Wilson better and seeing him act like a classic sci-fi character, equally at home in a lab or a bar fight.
I also liked episode 8, "The Sound of Rebellion." It was a "side" story apart from the main Wilson/Schmidt/Abumwe story line. This story reminded me of something that I often forget when reading stories about CDF soldiers: inside, they're old, with an entire 75-year life behind them when they join up. Seeing Lt. Lee use aspects of her past life as a musician (and what an interesting contrast that is to her current life as a soldier!) to get out of the predicament in which she finds herself made for a great story.
However, two of the episodes did not really work for me: "Walk the Plank" and "A Voice in the Wilderness." Each story in THD, as I understand it, was intended to be a stand-alone piece, like a weekly TV episode, in addition to carrying the overall story forward. Neither of these seemed quite right to me, either as short stories or TV-style episodes.
I can't see "A Voice in the Wilderness" fitting in as part of a THD TV series, although maybe as part of an anthology show like The Twilight Zone it could work. All the other stories just fit together better to my mind.
While I could see "Walk the Plank" being made as a cool found-footage-style episode that does fit in with the other ones story-wise, it's a little thin to stand on its own. I picture the characters in the TV version of "We Only Need the Heads" standing around the lab and listening to excerpts of it, to help them (and the audience) figure out what happened to the wildcat colony.
As prose, those two episodes have reversed positions; "Walk" works even less for me as a standalone story than as a TV episode. However, just as I could see "Voice" working as part of an anthology TV series, I can also envision it working as a separate OMW short story. It's more "Judge Sn Goes Golfing" than "After the Coup," but that's fine by me.
It's entirely possible, even probable, that I've missed the point in some way, or maybe several ways. I don't think it really matters, though. The quibbles I have with some of the choices Scalzi made are just that, minor little points. Overall, the experience was great. I'm really looking forward to the next season.
I had planned to write something about John Scalzi's The Human Division as I was reading it, but I never got around to it when the first few episodes were released. Since then, my thoughts about it have gone through several changes, so a few weeks back I decided to wait until it was finished to actually put my thoughts down.
The short version is that I enjoyed the book just as much as the other recent Old Man's War books (the original book and The Ghost Brigades are still my favorites, though.) I definitely enjoyed the main story line (especially the final episode), but also thought most of the other stories were good, too. Some of them, though, didn't really make sense to me, either as "episodes," or as short stories, or as either one. I was a bit nervous about the major plot threads left dangling at the end of the final episode, since I couldn't help but think of what happened to SG:U, but as it turns out there will be a second season, so hopefully some of those will get tied up. I appreciated the serialized format; it was fun to get a new episode every week, just like a TV show.
The longer version:
I really liked the short story "After the Coup" that Scalzi had published online, so I was looking forward to a whole set of stories featuring Hart Schmidt and Harry Wilson. At the time I read "Coup", I vaguely remembered Wilson from Old Man's War, but he as a minor character. The best part about THD, for me, was getting to know Wilson better and seeing him act like a classic sci-fi character, equally at home in a lab or a bar fight.
I also liked episode 8, "The Sound of Rebellion." It was a "side" story apart from the main Wilson/Schmidt/Abumwe story line. This story reminded me of something that I often forget when reading stories about CDF soldiers: inside, they're old, with an entire 75-year life behind them when they join up. Seeing Lt. Lee use aspects of her past life as a musician (and what an interesting contrast that is to her current life as a soldier!) to get out of the predicament in which she finds herself made for a great story.
However, two of the episodes did not really work for me: "Walk the Plank" and "A Voice in the Wilderness." Each story in THD, as I understand it, was intended to be a stand-alone piece, like a weekly TV episode, in addition to carrying the overall story forward. Neither of these seemed quite right to me, either as short stories or TV-style episodes.
I can't see "A Voice in the Wilderness" fitting in as part of a THD TV series, although maybe as part of an anthology show like The Twilight Zone it could work. All the other stories just fit together better to my mind.
While I could see "Walk the Plank" being made as a cool found-footage-style episode that does fit in with the other ones story-wise, it's a little thin to stand on its own. I picture the characters in the TV version of "We Only Need the Heads" standing around the lab and listening to excerpts of it, to help them (and the audience) figure out what happened to the wildcat colony.
As prose, those two episodes have reversed positions; "Walk" works even less for me as a standalone story than as a TV episode. However, just as I could see "Voice" working as part of an anthology TV series, I can also envision it working as a separate OMW short story. It's more "Judge Sn Goes Golfing" than "After the Coup," but that's fine by me.
It's entirely possible, even probable, that I've missed the point in some way, or maybe several ways. I don't think it really matters, though. The quibbles I have with some of the choices Scalzi made are just that, minor little points. Overall, the experience was great. I'm really looking forward to the next season.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Oh dark hundred
I've been fighting a cold since Wednesday, and took most of yesterday off to get some rest, after failing (despite the NyQuil) to get much sleep in the wee hours of Thursday morning. Last night, I was feeling a lot better, so I went to bed without taking anything.
...
Now here it is, the wee hours of Friday morning, and I'm back to square one.
Having taken the medication I should have taken last night, and needing something to do while I wait for it to kick in, I thought, "Hey, I'll get back to work on the Rails tutorial I am working through." Plus type out a blog post! You're welcome.
I had been working on the tutorial in my Ubuntu environment (I dual-boot using Wubi), but constantly having to restart my laptop to switch between Linux and Windows was getting old. So I decided to use VirtualBox to set up a virtual Debian machine and avoid that particular headache.
As I was doing that, I realized how far things had come since I first started working with Linux. Obviously the software itself is better, but the very fact that I could decide, on a whim, to set up a Linux machine and, through the magic of virtualization, have it basically appear out of thin air in a matter of an hour or so was pretty freakin' cool to me. The first few times I tinkered with Linux, it required a dedicated machine, or at least a dedicated partition on a hard drive, and lots and lots of trial and error to get it to work. (This was, of course, back when my PC had a hard drive with about half the storage that I now have as RAM.) If nothing else, knowing at all times that I could just blow the VM away and start again was very liberating, compared to worrying that I was going to bork the only computer in the house and have to spend hours recovering from backups, if I even had them.
Hard-core techies may be blasé about this stuff; as an occasional dabbler I know I am late to the party on just about everything tech. Having said that, maybe I have more of a sense of wonder about these things precisely because I am not immersed in it day-to-day. When you use something, then go away for a while and come back, you really experience the scope of the improvements in a way that you might miss if you're constantly absorbing incremental changes.
That so much of this stuff is free-as-in-beer (and often as-in-speech as well) is just icing on the cake. It just keeps getting easier and easier to get the tools needed to become a developer in a particular area. When I started out back in the late 90's, FOSS was growing rapidly, but it still seemed to me that you had to spend a good bit of money (at least, a good bit given my income at the time), and time as well, to even dip your toe in the pool. Now, I feel like I can get away with spending almost nothing and still learn first-class tools and technologies. Once I had my (free!) copy of Debian running in a (free!) VirtualBox VM, I was able to use (free!) git to pull my tutorial code down from my (free!) GitHub repository and have it up and running in a matter of minutes. Of course, I then realized the code in GitHub was about a chapter in the (free!) tutorial behind where I had actually gotten, but that was easily rectified.
I know that nothing is really free, and the ride may come to a stop one day. From where I stand, though, it's a great time to be a geek!
...
Now here it is, the wee hours of Friday morning, and I'm back to square one.
Having taken the medication I should have taken last night, and needing something to do while I wait for it to kick in, I thought, "Hey, I'll get back to work on the Rails tutorial I am working through." Plus type out a blog post! You're welcome.
I had been working on the tutorial in my Ubuntu environment (I dual-boot using Wubi), but constantly having to restart my laptop to switch between Linux and Windows was getting old. So I decided to use VirtualBox to set up a virtual Debian machine and avoid that particular headache.
As I was doing that, I realized how far things had come since I first started working with Linux. Obviously the software itself is better, but the very fact that I could decide, on a whim, to set up a Linux machine and, through the magic of virtualization, have it basically appear out of thin air in a matter of an hour or so was pretty freakin' cool to me. The first few times I tinkered with Linux, it required a dedicated machine, or at least a dedicated partition on a hard drive, and lots and lots of trial and error to get it to work. (This was, of course, back when my PC had a hard drive with about half the storage that I now have as RAM.) If nothing else, knowing at all times that I could just blow the VM away and start again was very liberating, compared to worrying that I was going to bork the only computer in the house and have to spend hours recovering from backups, if I even had them.
Hard-core techies may be blasé about this stuff; as an occasional dabbler I know I am late to the party on just about everything tech. Having said that, maybe I have more of a sense of wonder about these things precisely because I am not immersed in it day-to-day. When you use something, then go away for a while and come back, you really experience the scope of the improvements in a way that you might miss if you're constantly absorbing incremental changes.
That so much of this stuff is free-as-in-beer (and often as-in-speech as well) is just icing on the cake. It just keeps getting easier and easier to get the tools needed to become a developer in a particular area. When I started out back in the late 90's, FOSS was growing rapidly, but it still seemed to me that you had to spend a good bit of money (at least, a good bit given my income at the time), and time as well, to even dip your toe in the pool. Now, I feel like I can get away with spending almost nothing and still learn first-class tools and technologies. Once I had my (free!) copy of Debian running in a (free!) VirtualBox VM, I was able to use (free!) git to pull my tutorial code down from my (free!) GitHub repository and have it up and running in a matter of minutes. Of course, I then realized the code in GitHub was about a chapter in the (free!) tutorial behind where I had actually gotten, but that was easily rectified.
I know that nothing is really free, and the ride may come to a stop one day. From where I stand, though, it's a great time to be a geek!
Saturday, February 23, 2013
The "L" word
Towards the end of last year, I was on a conference call, discussing a system that I had a hand in building several years back. I hadn't had much interaction with the customers who used it since it went into production. I know it works pretty well, since I hardly ever have to do anything to keep it running. We were getting some other folks up to speed on what the system did. The customer who used the system the most was doing a demo, and I have to admit I wasn't paying that much attention.
That is, until she started saying things like "and this is the part of the program I love" and "[feature] is great, it saves me a lot of work."
My ears perked up at that. Love? I support several different systems at work, some built in-house, some from third parties, and a few that are a mixture. In most cases, the people who use these systems would describe them (on good days, at least) with words like "okay" or "fine." I had never heard anyone use the "L" word to describe a program they used at work!
When I first thought of launching this site, I thought it would be cool to reference one of my favorite Donald Fagen songs. I was fully invested in the cynicism and sarcasm inherent in that song, and that lyric in particular. Maybe my experience isn't universal, but in the IT shops I've been in (and many others that I have heard about), it's easy to get jaded about technology. If you don't snort in derision at the idea of "a just machine to make big decisions," then you must be new here.
So for me, hearing my customer sound so cheerful and positive about what I considered a fairly ho-hum system was a revelation. No, this system didn't "make big decisions." We hadn't built the next Google. But it made her job easier, and that, to me, was something. The experience reminded me of why I got into IT in the first place. A system I helped build not only made the company work more efficiently, it actually made somebody's life - at work, at least - a little bit better. And let's face it, with the amount of time most of us spend at work, making that experience more tolerable is a decent accomplishment, in my book.
So, although I decided to keep the site name (I had already paid for the domain name, after all), I decided to approach what I write about with less jaded cynicism, and with a more positive attitude. Less like The Daily WTF, and more like Hacker News. I'm going to concentrate on making myself better, because that helps me and helps the people I work with. And when it seems like nothing is going right, and the best I can hope for is for things to be a little less worse, I'll try to remember that day that someone told me, albeit indirectly, that what I do matters.
That is, until she started saying things like "and this is the part of the program I love" and "[feature] is great, it saves me a lot of work."
My ears perked up at that. Love? I support several different systems at work, some built in-house, some from third parties, and a few that are a mixture. In most cases, the people who use these systems would describe them (on good days, at least) with words like "okay" or "fine." I had never heard anyone use the "L" word to describe a program they used at work!
When I first thought of launching this site, I thought it would be cool to reference one of my favorite Donald Fagen songs. I was fully invested in the cynicism and sarcasm inherent in that song, and that lyric in particular. Maybe my experience isn't universal, but in the IT shops I've been in (and many others that I have heard about), it's easy to get jaded about technology. If you don't snort in derision at the idea of "a just machine to make big decisions," then you must be new here.
So for me, hearing my customer sound so cheerful and positive about what I considered a fairly ho-hum system was a revelation. No, this system didn't "make big decisions." We hadn't built the next Google. But it made her job easier, and that, to me, was something. The experience reminded me of why I got into IT in the first place. A system I helped build not only made the company work more efficiently, it actually made somebody's life - at work, at least - a little bit better. And let's face it, with the amount of time most of us spend at work, making that experience more tolerable is a decent accomplishment, in my book.
So, although I decided to keep the site name (I had already paid for the domain name, after all), I decided to approach what I write about with less jaded cynicism, and with a more positive attitude. Less like The Daily WTF, and more like Hacker News. I'm going to concentrate on making myself better, because that helps me and helps the people I work with. And when it seems like nothing is going right, and the best I can hope for is for things to be a little less worse, I'll try to remember that day that someone told me, albeit indirectly, that what I do matters.
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