The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I'm really happy that Yale decided to rename the building after Grace Hopper. Big influence on computer science.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/11/514747243/yale-renames-calhoun-college-over-namesakes-ties-to-slavery-and-white-supremacy

I've been woking on upgrading an app from Spring Boot 1.2.4 to 1.2.8. It seems that the app wouldn't work with any version past 1.2.5 and that turned out to be an issue with Jackson serialization. Back references were not working as expected. I ended up punting on it and making a new class to represent incoming post data and then transforming that into a valid entity. Things are going smoothly now.

I setup a water cooling kit and new case for my desktop PC in January. It's an xspc setup with a alphacool waterblock for the AMD R9 Fury Nitro card. It's running as low as 22C idle and 55C under heavy load (Overwatch) with the gpu. CPU load seems to keep it in the 40s.

The best part is that unlike those self contained loops for CPUs, this is actually quieter. It's often quieter than my mac mini. That thing is loud when the fans spin up!

My testing shows it runs around 20db with overwatch going (and audio muted)

I'm experimenting with spring data elasticsearch. I've managed to use an embedded instance with the just journal site and at work I've got it running in a cluster.

I'm a big fan so far. It's not my first time using elasticsearch, but it certainly makes it easier to query.

Some of the crashing problems I was experiencing with Overwatch have been fixed. Updated NVIDIA drivers have helped some and I also found that the cooler on my CPU was starting to go. I replaced it with a water cooler and have fought a bit with the fan placement on the radiator, but at this point it's pretty stable.

The game is quite fun to play and I think blizzard needs to put out some more information to users about their network setup to minimize lag

1. Make sure your router/firewall supports UPNP and that it is configured correctly. This seems to make a big difference in game play.
2. Priority queues. Blizzard recommends against them, but I've found that setting up priority queues with game traffic getting priority as well as ACKs in pfsense helped a lot with my lag issues.
3. powerline networking hardware can cause serious lag for this game if you have any connection issues. Sometimes, I find that playing over wifi is actually more reliable despite the fact it's slower on my network.

Can't get enough overwatch. It's an amazing game despite the bugs.

A few years ago, I had to write a bunch of management scripts that setup and maintained ssh tunnels for executing commands and running symmetric ds over protected connections.

Today, I happened to stumble on a ton of different tools to issue commands to multiple servers at the same time. For example, pssh. A little googling could have saved me a lot of time.

Upon reading that Apple was killing support for the original iPad Mini with the upcoming iOS 10 update, I decided to start researching tablets. So far, I've learned the following:

iPad Pro models seem to be the air replacements. They start at $599 so they're a bit too expensive for my taste. I've also looked into higher end Android devices and found the Pixel C to be the most interesting, but again it has a pretty hefty price tag attached to it.

Some of the PC manufacturers like Lenovo and HP offer Android devices, but they're relatively low end devices with slower CPUs and inferior cameras. A 200 dollar tablet sounds nice until you go to use it.

Sony seems to be pulling out of the device market so I'm ignoring the xperia line as I don't think they're going to be around.

I think I'm going to wait and see if apple does a refresh or if there are more high end android devices. I'd probably pull the trigger on the Pixel C if it had 64GB of space for the low end price.

I managed to get it running a little better why tweaking the pfsense configuration with the list of ports

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/300479

I've had a lot of lag problems with Overwatch. It's quite often that I will think I killed someone only to have the game's lag algorithm "correct" their movement in such a way that I don't even have the person in the same room with me.

I've been trying to figure out if there is anything about my network setup making it worse. I suspect others share in my frustration with the game. It's quite fun, but I'm not sure it's worth the headache.

Just released a new version of my blogging site. It's the first serious update in a few years. I'm still migrating it to Spring Boot, but so far it's going pretty well.
I've finally got it running without the need for root, as a self contained jar file, and moved to thymeleaf for templates.
It was the project that I learned Java on back in 2003. It's moved from CVS to Git and Sourceforge to Github. It's transitioned from Servlets and JSP to Maverick with XSLT templates and now to Spring 4/ Spring Boot.

I've been working on migrating foolishgames.com over to PostgreSQL from MySQL. I've been using MySQL since I worked at USOL.com ~2000. While I still appreciate the simplicity of administration and use of MySQL, several things have bugged me about it's direction since Oracle bought it.

First, the shared library requires threads in C now. This means that half the time I can't get the Perl bindings to work and it's often a pain with my C programs too.

I feel that they're only take it so far so it doesn't compete with Oracle. PostgreSQL on the other hand, has been adding all sorts of neat features like better replication, JSON data types, and rewriting how the engine allocates memory. There's really movement in that camp.

Working on Just Journal 2.0

Trying to build QT5 for the hell of it.  It's pretty crazy how their build system works.  I think it thinks it's running on Linux.  Ugh.  

Decided to try out the new .NET 4.5 JJ client. Still needs some work.

So far I'm loving Windows 8. My first impressions of the consumer preview were not that high, but it's surprisingly polished for a new windows release.

The new MySQL blows. 

Caryn's going on a business trip on Sunday. I'm trying to get some paperwork straightened out with my employer. Then there's the painters and getting the house ready for the next set of rooms. Tigress is doing better, but I'll be feeding her solo next week. So much going on.

Many people remember Steve Jobs as a visionary, the driving force of Apple, Inc.'s success in the last decade.  He was also the owner of Pixar that transformed a small animation studio into a blockbuster success and sold it to Disney.  He sat on the boards of Apple, Inc. and Disney.  He had successes and failures.  NeXT Computer was a computer manufacturer that made workstations for schools and businesses in the early 90s.  They made some of the first computers with decent graphical user interfaces, networking, and MACH kernels.  Steve sold NeXT Software (the hardware business failed) to Apple around 1997 and became the head of a company he founded once more. 

The world wide web was created on a NeXT computer.  The first website, web browser and web server all ran on a NeXT cube!  Steve brought us the iMac, Mac OS X, iPad, Iphone, iTunes (well they bought this from a former apple employee), and the reinvention of how users consume content.  Good or bad, this has affected all of us.

Steve didn't do these things alone.  Many other talented people helped him.  He sold the ideas to all of us.

I started my BSD project because of Steve Jobs.  NeXT (and OS X) was an idea that computers could be powerful, stable and easy to use.  The last six years  of my life, I've spent trying to build something like OS X but for people who couldn't afford the Apple preimum.  As I've learned, he had to charge that much to be successful. 

Just finished mounting the other hard drive in ds9.  Next time I build a rack mount server, I need to remember to buy hot swap bays.  This project took 5 hours and it should have been quick.