We took three days during the autumn school break to visit Mesa Verde. Ana and I visited last when we were newly married.
I won’t be posting many pictures of the ruins in the park—others have far better pictures than ours.
Thursday: Dead Horse Point
We first stopped at Dead Horse Point. The air was a little dusty:
We ate in Moab at Zax; I had the Beef Hobo—recommended.
I gave a presentation this week about JSON Schema and OpenAPI.
Here are the slides for the presentation; here is the source code used in the presentation.
Video expertly recorded and edited by Doran Barton:
I gave a presentation last week at Bluehost about using functional programming techniques to overcome some of the common quandaries in procedural codebases.
Here’s the blurb:
Functional programming is the oldest but least well known of the three major programming paradigms. While it has a reputation for inscrutability, many of its tenets can be applied to both procedural and object-oriented paradigms to reduce complexity and create cleaner code. In this workshop we’ll get a taste of functional programming in Perl and apply the techniques we learn to refactoring and removing common procedural anti-patterns.
I regularly pull photos off of my iPhone and store them in my Synology for safe keeping (I also protect against the nuclear option by backing up my Synology to AWS Glacier).
This has worked well for me (except I’m still looking for something to help with organization—drop me a line if you have recommendations) but tonight I came across a new problem.
I wanted to put a Live Photo back on my phone after having archived it. I found the original photo, but when you pull them off, Live Photos become two separate files.
Scott, James C.. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
The book has been expertly reviewed here (and less so here), so I will not add my own incompetent review to the pile.
I will offer instead some of my highlights and notes I took while reading it. This is a book with a somewhat narrow focus on “authoritarian high-modernism” (a wonderful phrase) in the context of states, but just a little bit of contemplation goes a long way to form an expansive reconsideration of authority in almost any social organization.
Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM) allows you to back up a machine running Apple OS X via Time Machine to a Synology NAS device. This lets you back up many computers running OS X to a single NAS.
OS X support for NAS devices has improved in recent years. Time Machine attempts to mount the NAS volume, mount the sparsebundle file, then backup into the sparsebundle.
The problem
It seemed to work for a few months after I set it up, but in the last half of 2016 I started seeing corrupted backup messages from OS X:
I gave a presentation about Kubernetes (using a Mojolicious Perl application as the example). Here are the sources and here are the slides.
As usual, Doran Barton put together an expert recording:
Here is a link to my SOLID MVC in Perl presentation slides, and here is a link to the Perl sources used. I’ll post the recording here as soon as it’s available.
Photo by Robert Lukeman via Unsplash.
The last time I used Evernote on my Mac was Evernote 4.3.1 (circa 2012 I believe). I had accumulated over 5000 notes. In an act of supreme cleverness, instead of actually archiving those notes in the Evernote enex format, I just backed up my entire home directory, knowing that all my notes were safely stored somewhere in the ~/Library hierarchy.
When I finally got enough gumption on my new laptop to install Evernote, I found that the latest version could not read the native 4.3.1 format from the ~/Library hierarchy. Doom.