Archive of posts from 2021

Humans and Improvised Weapons: A Response to a Writing Prompt 2021 December 25
Humans and safety is a long history, because as they say if you make something idiot proof they will invent a better idiot. Just about any piece of industrial equipment can become a weapon when misused. Most other species in the galaxy weren’t that creative to misuse or find the failure points in their technology. We took a different path than humans did. Finding solutions that were safer from the get go, that a culture of safety was not needed.
Exporting the AWS ReInvent Calendar to iCal 2021 November 23
I went to AWS Reinvent this year, and I wanted my registered events to show up on my personal calendar. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t implement an iCal export for your registered events. So I took these steps to get them.
Programming Practice Sites I Like 2021 November 15
I’m not a huge fan of hacker rank and it’s use in our industry. I find the problems to be boring and repetitive, so I’m listing out some of my preferred practice sites as a couple of alternatives with more fun and more interesting problems. I will concede that hacker rank does have excellent SQL practice though. They are the only ones I found with some really good problems and a variety in engines. Enough of that though, let’s jump into some of the ones I like better.
My Great Granddad's Chicken Recipe 2021 September 26
- cooking
- meat
- recipe
- smoking
My great granddad used to make chicken similar to this using a basting mixture. This is his recipe with some modifications by me to get more browning out of it. He poured it over with a whiskey bottle and a speed pour, I use a mug and a brush to be more efficient with the liquid. He did it with chicken quarters, but I prefer using a spatch-cocked chicken. He also used a different vinegar than I do.
TIL my site is a JAMStack site. 2021 September 10
Today I learned that my site which has been basically the same since 2016 is a JAMStack site. Although it was coined in 2015 by Netlify, it seems to have become really popular in the past 2 years as a term. I’m told it’s more of a theoretical framework than anything else. JAMStack stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.
A Review of "Extraterrestrial" by Avi Loeb 2021 September 01
- books
- non-fiction
- reviews
- space
I’ve been listening to “Extraterrestrial” by Avi Loeb published in January 2021. It is a decent book with some flaws in it’s presentation and dialogue. It’s about what is believed to be the first extra solar object found called “Oumuamua” and how it’s weird properties might indicate that was made by intelligent extraterrestrial life. It also covers a fair bit of the author’s academic career which seem to be very successful based on how many committees he’s on, and some of the issues he sees with the academic community and how funding is allocated.
Search Suggestions on My Website 2021 July 27
I previously talked about the search engine I recently added to my blog, and this is an extension to that previous post. Here I will discuss how I added a simple search suggestion option. It works for my website with the limited vocabulary and time to return results, but if I was working on a larger site I might try to make it smarter. So here’s how I implemented it.
The Problem with Regex Search and Replace in Java 2021 July 15
- java
- programming
- regex
I had an issue where I needed to support search and replace of certain quoted strings in various scripts which take the form of $(VARNAME). There’s a minor issue with Java where if the replaced by string contains certain characters where it will quit with an unhelpful message like “IndexNotFound: Match group 5 not found” or something similar. This is how to resolve that error, and the importance of escaping things.
Adding Search to My Static Blog Using AWS Lambda and SQLite 2021 July 09
I always wanted to have search on my site, but it’s statically hosted, so I can’t have any dynamic content on it. I recently resolved that by creating a little tiny lambda function on AWS that queries a SQLite database hosted on S3. Here I’ll walk you through how I created the back-end for it, and in some later posts I’ll include details on calculating the cost.
Visiting the NYC Fire Fighter Museum 2021 July 06
- reviews
- travel
I was in New York City for 4th of July this year. I actually discovered a pretty cool museum when I saw this firefighting boat docked near Little Island, which had great views of New Jersey. I searched for Fire Boat tours, but there was none to be found. However I did find a firefighter museum which was really cool. So I went because it was raining a little bit outside and just a little bit dreary out.
A Blender Muddled Julep Inspired Strawberry Cocktail 2021 June 05
- cocktails
- cooking
- drinks
- rum
- whiskey
So I had some inspiration with some fresh strawberries and some homegrown mint, so I decided to try to make a blender muddled cocktail. Blender muddling is a technique described in “Liquid Intelligence” by Dave Arnold. It’s designed to maximize flavor extraction while minimizing oxidation. I think this is really simple and flavorful cocktail. This recipe I have described will serve 3 people.
Using a Bash Script to Generate Random Fake Data To Insert Into DynamoDB 2021 March 30
I’ve been studying for my developer associate certification on Amazon Web Services. I’ve been practicing with the various streaming solutions like SQS and Kinesis lately. I’ve wanted to branch into using DynamoDB and capturing changes. To do that I needed to generate a lot of take data.
I Cooked a Leg of Lamb on my Smoker. 2021 March 26
- cooking
- meat
- smoking
I made a glazed leg of lamb on the smoker. These are the pictures of how I served it, and the procedure of how I cooked it.
Converting a JavaScript array of strings to numbers, and the problem with `Array.map` 2021 March 15
JavaScript has a very weird type system with how strings can sometimes be converted to numbers. It’s a very cool feature but can cause a lot of pain because adding 1 doesn’t always do what you think it should due to type-juggling. So you might think there’s an easy and relatively foot-gun free to convert an array of strings to numbers. You would be wrong, well maybe not at least if you don’t use the functional language stuff in JavaScript or just do an in-place update or your array, but that’s besides the point.
A Brief and Painless Introduction To Bash 2021 January 27
- awk
- bash
- curl
- grep
- grep
- presentation
- shell
- tutorial
- xargs
A pretty decent introduction to Bash for pipelines and interactive use.
Adding `pylint` to your Github Actions flow 2021 January 21
Recently, I’ve been doing more CICD work, so I wanted to practice adding some of that to my personal projects. I’ve also taken a liking to pylint, so I decided to have Github Actions automatically check my code quality on push for my log-analysis repository. This is how I added that linting to my workflow.
Finding Jekyll Posts to Update With Cover Images 2021 January 10
- bash
- grep
- jekyll
- notes
- refactor-code
- shell
- snippet
- tutorial
I recently updated my site to make use of cover images on the post listing. I wanted to make sure that I got all of the posts that need to be updated. I used grep to find posts which had an image in them, but no cover attribute in their front-matter.
PyGame FFT Audio Visualizations 2021 January 07
This tutorial is to write a very simple audio visualizer using PyGame, PyAudio, and Numpy. The visualization uses the frequency domain of some input sound, and display a bar graph of the frequency domain as the audio plays. The audio source is the computer line-in or microphone.

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