I am still recovering from the fairly challenging logistical project of saving a Lucent 5ESS. This is a whale of a project and I am still in a state of disbelief that I have gotten to this point. Thanks to my wife, brother, and a few friends for their help …

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At the Netflix vendor summit I gave a talk about FreeBSD on PowerNV, the bare metal firmware of POWER8 and POWER9.

PDF slides

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A fallacy in software development and management thereof is the idea that software developers are fungible.

This is not intuitive for folks to reason about because programming does entail at a fundamental level accounting and bookkeeping. Put this into a container, grab this lock in this order, call this function …

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Consider the table saw. If you are not familiar with woodworking, this is a type of shop saw. A circular blade comes out from a table surface. It can be adjusted with a decent amount of precision to make cuts of a specified depth and angle.

One might naively think …

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Somehow I've managed to mostly not care about UEFI until now. On my new laptop, I decided I should give it a go. There are some small benefits, nothing life changing, but booting multiple OSes is a lot easier especially if they are UEFI native, and you get a nice …

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Do one thing per day. Make that thing meaningful. Commit a bugfix. Land a feature. Close a sale. Apply security patches. Write a blog post.

Do this and you will be more productive than most people.

Don't just go to meetings, and especially don't just "work". If you are currently …

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I spent some time converting my Wordpress blog over to Pelican. Overall, it wasn't effortless and required quite a lot of manual clean up of links and images. But, I'm a pack rat and want to preserve my writings even if they are dated or silly now, so I pressed …

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The fine folks over at ServeTheHome have done a fantastic job documenting the Dell C6100. This is a rather interesting system because:

1. It packs quite a bit of compute power into 2U for colocation
2. They are surprisingly cheap on the secondary markets

I'll lead you over to the ServeTheHome blog …

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On the Play! Framework mailing lists I've seen reference to the sample Computer Database as a canonical example of paginating data. It's a good start but it's pretty specific to one data type. Follow along and we'll make a more general utility.

If we think abstractly about paginating a web …

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One of the interesting things about Scala is how well it composes. This is the primary "Scalable" in Scalable Language. I'm writing this up to share my experience and track my progression in a partially contrived but interesting example.

So I'm playing around with Plivo, which is a telecoms IaaS …

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