Edward Vielmetti has been writing the Vacuum weblog since 1999 from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The topics vary widely, with over 2000 entries in the whole collection. In the interest of simplifying the presentation, some parts of this collection are currently offline, and the front page represents primarily current work and not a diversity of interests. The current set of systems that are an area of focus - and the places I draw from for inspiration on each - are as follows. »
Warning: objects in calendar are closer than they appear. I can never keep track of the day of the month, it seems. The watch on my wrist has a day marker, but it wants to have a 31 day month, and when we have 30 or 28 day months the day has to be manually adjusted. On the other hand, I have a keen sense for what day of the week it is. »
Happy new year, and from a technology perspective, also happy leap second. [image: timekeeping for the leap second, from FSM Labs] Here's a complete picture of #leapsecond 2016. pic.twitter.com/DFp6XgnPig — FSMLabs (@FSMLabs) January 1, 2017 As always, when there’s a leap second, people get a chance to debug their timekeeping code. I guess if they happen frequently enough the code will get better exercise and some bugs will be shaken out. »
[screen capture: csysdig running inside Portainer] Run @sysdig CLI tool "csysdig" inside of a @portainerio console window. Nice way to watch @docker and @coreos cc @mckartha pic.twitter.com/hJGiHuJwKs — Edward Vielmetti (@vielmetti) December 29, 2016 The question to be answered is how to manage Docker containers - not just how to get them running, but also how to poke inside them while they are running to see what they are doing and make sure that you can make sense of what is happening while you develop or run in production. »
The Tectonic Summit was a conference in New York City in December 2016, hosted by CoreOS, with the theme Enterprise Kubernetes. Mohan Kartha and Edward Vielmetti went there as a guest of Packet, a bare-metal hosting provider in the city. This report details highlights of the presentations at the event as well as accounts from attendees of what they thought was missing from the presentation and discussions. Kubernetes Kubernetes is an orchestration system that runs on top of a container system like Docker. »
I really should stop writing words for Twitter Inc. and start again writing essays or book chapters. So much telegraphy is tiresome. I enjoy the cadence of a well-formed 140 character sentence. It’s a good width to set your typewriter to for composition. Set it to 132 for writing, leaving 8 characters free as a sequence number in case you drop your card deck and need to sort. “Twitter like COBOL”, writes Tom Brandt; I was thinking more of FORTRAN dusty decks that are too precious to scramble. »
I’m testing out using Opera instead of Chrome as my browser of choice, as recommended by Ernie Smith. So far so good. He notes that Opera is “basically Chrome (same engine) minus the battery drain”. My experience to date bears that out, though it’s in the early stages yet. The first thing I noticed is that memory usage for Opera is way less than for Chrome. That’s a big deal for me because I’m often noticing that this MacBook Air is in the red zone for memory with Chrome. »
“Derp Learning” is a categorization of the mistakes that “deep learning” techniques in artificial intelligence tend to make. It’s a typo, but also a deep insight into how complex systems fail. Some examples to illustrate: Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images, 2014. Nguyen describes “fooling images” that deep neural networks misclassify after being trained with a training set. These images are straightforward to construct and will fool the network with high confidence. »
You’re developing in Docker, and you have a container with a lot of layers when you’re done. How do you make sure that you don’t have security vulnerabilities hiding somewhere inside there, especially if you are running a container that depends on something that depends on something that depends on something else? The first step is to understand your own application, so that you can have some sense for how the dependencies that you have control over are impacted. »
The Cubs won the pennant, and the Buckeyes lost to Penn State. I was able to listen to the radio calls of both of these through recievers connected to sdr.hu. The Cubs radio call was from WMVP-AM, ESPN Chicago 1000. I had some practice listening to them through the Farmington Hills, MI SDR run by KB8SPI. That system is a KiwiSDR with a PA0RDT Mini-Whip, and it tunes from 0-30 Mhz including all of the longwave (broadcast AM) band. »
Yesterday I spent some time with a 96 core ARMv8 server. On day two I figured out a couple more things about that server. First and foremost, the extended path of installing Docker on the server I chronicled yesterday ended up being much easier today. A simple apt-get install docker.io did the right thing to bring Docker 1.12.1 into the system. Don’t do apt-get install docker on Ubuntu; you’ll get “docker - System tray for KDE3/GNOME2 docklet applications” instead. »
I had early access to a 96 core, 128 gigabyte ARMv8 server today. Here’s what I did to get all of the CPUs and all of the memory in use at the same time. The system: a bare-metal hosting company is working on general availability of these ARMv8 (aarch64) servers. I got early access for beta testing. Talk to me if you’d like to know more. The software: These systems boot with Ubuntu 16. »
Chalice is a microframework for Python for AWS Lambda, similar in spirit to Flask. What does that even mean? A framework is a set of libraries and coding conventions that makes development in a specific language for a specific task easier. That usually involves making some simplifying assumptions about the task you are trying to solve, and embedding those assumptions in your code so that you don’t have to spell out quite as much detail to get a task done. »
Duong Dinh Cuong (on Github as cuongquay) has contributed a node for Node-RED that encapsulates the AWS IoT service and allows straightforward communication between the two systems over MQTT. The node, node-red-contrib-aws-iot-hub, includes support for the message-passing part of AWS IoT using MQTT, allowing you to open a channel to the IoT service and publish or subscribe to message topics. The result is easy integration between the two systems. As a part of this process, the node includes support for AWS certificates that have to be installed “just so” to allow AWS to trust Node-RED. »
In the process of looking at embedded radio components, I came across the u-blox SARA-N2, a low power device designed to provide low bandwidth cellular data coverage for Internet of Things devices - “low power consumption and extended coverage” being the operative buzzwords. Speeds are 227 Kbps down and 21 Kbps up, and it’s claimed to be “low power” though no specific power consumption figures are provided. It’s built on NB-IoT standards that are standardized in June 2016 by the 3GPP project and which are codified in their Release 13. »
sdr.hu is the home base for OpenWebRX, a remote spectrum monitoring system written by Andras HA7ILM. The system is designed to allow OpenWebRX servers, running on RTL-SDR or HackRF hardware, to share their radio spectrum and allow remote tuning of the available radio bandwidth. A typical installation will allow up to four remote listeners to independently tune in, and the tuning filters allow the listener to independently control the bandwidth of the receiver. »
The writing prompt is simple scaffolding: write 500 words about what you’re working on right now, so that when someone asks what you do, you have a proof point of it. This is preparation for going to a conference where proof of professional identity is the whole point of the exercise. The thing you say you’re working on should be elaborated on at the top of the page, and any supporting details that don’t fit into the narrative should be omitted. »
I am no longer a prolific blogger, as the last of these posts was a month ago. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of blogging, it’s just that it takes a certain set of devotional habits to keep it going. Devotion like writing without an editor, for an uncertain audience, and without expectation of getting any compensation for it. All perfectly fine reasons to write, but not all that are easy to sustain. »
Coffee and wifi (double espresso over ice) at the “dog park Biggby”, Platt Road at Ellsworth. It’s not an inconvenient location, and the very large south-facing windows are good to know about as the days get shorter. More than 90 degrees outside, and I’m preparing to make dinner. The recipe is for “broccoli Calabrian style” from Martha Rose Shulman. I couldn’t find that exact recipe online, but this Bucatini Con Broccoli Alla Calabrese is close. »
A magnitude 5.6 earthquake rattled oil country in Oklahoma on September 3, 2016 at 7:02 a.m. The quake’s epicenter was eight miles northwest of Pawnee, OK. The USGS maps of the quake are detailed. The Pawnee Nation declared a state of emergency after ordering evacuations of damaged buildings in the area. Historically, the incidence of earthquakes in Oklahoma is low, and there is concern in the state that these earthquakes are of man-made origin. »
I’ve switched themes in this weblog, using Casper from Valère JEANTET who ported it from Ghost to Hugo. The biggest advantage of the theme is that it’s neat and clean and looks like other people’s work. The biggest disadvantage is that I have 80+ pages of paginated weblog going back into the dim mists of time, and this theme doesn’t come out of the box with support for that kind of deep back list in it. »
The task at hand is simple. Whenever a particular airplane is visible overhead, send out a tweet with that notice. Don’t repeat yourself with this announcement more than twice an hour, but try not to have too much lag in reporting. The full stack of hardware and software to do this is not particularly complicated to use once you get it all running, but there are a series of issues and observations along the way that add to the complexity. »
In March 2015 I wrote briefly about plane spotting with dump1090. In short, many airplanes have ADS-B transponders which squawk out their location, airspeed, and current conditions, and you can pick up those transmissions using an inexpensive RTL-SDR tuner stick and a simple antenna. I’ve been looking into this again to see if I can get a better understanding of how it works as well as to take advantage of a year plus of software development. »
Github has changed their pricing strategy to allow individual accounts to have more private repositories. This is a welcome change for accounts like mine. As part of their change, enterprise pricing has increased. I’m told that this will multiply the bills that some companies will see. This post tests a new private repo, and links to Github pricing for future reference. »
Sometimes it’s easier and faster to fill a page by quoting from others. The commonplace book is the annotated scrapbook, carefully collecting bits from other writers with just enough commentary and selection to make them your own. If these were written in this era you’d call it “curation”, though I can only think of that word in the context of “curated meats”, somewhat salty and dry and meant to be preserved for some time. »