Self-Amusement Park

Starting a new project

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0800

A long time ago, I was an amateur aviator: in the late 80’s, I learned to fly and got my instrument rating, bought an airplane, and flew it around the country a few times. I even volunteered at AirVenture, the big Experimental Aircraft Association convention and fly-in in Oshkosh, Wisconsin: my friend Andy and I provided computer support to the homebuilt judging group for almost a decade. I got to see a lot of great homebuilt airplanes, but didn’t want to build one myself; I just wanted to fly the plane I had.

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A Christmas Tradition, from 1985 & 1986

Thu, 23 Dec 2021 17:50:00 -0800

Continuing the tradition I started thirteen years ago, here are my Dad’s thirteenth and fourteenth “obscure” Christmas cards, from 1985 (left) & 1986 (right).

You get two this year, because I somehow forgot to post one last year. Again. I blame the pandemic.

(The 1985 image is slightly corrupted at the bottom, but nothing important is missing; the crates at the bottom are labeled “Food for Europe”. Also, that’s an actual wide rubber band around the 1986 card.)

Previously: 1983/1984 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973

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A Christmas Tradition, from 1983 & 1984

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 17:50:00 -0800

Continuing the tradition I started eleven years ago, here are my Dad’s eleventh and twelfth “obscure” Christmas cards, from 1983 (left) & 1984 (right).

You get two this year, because I somehow forgot to post one last year.

(The images are slightly corrupted at the bottom, but nothing important is missing.)

Previously: 1982 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973

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What I did over the weekend

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 17:11:00 -0700

TL;DR: I had a heart attack; looks like I’m gonna be fine.

Updated 8/29: TL;DR: I’m home, feeling fine; more details added, too.

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A Christmas Tradition, from 1982

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 17:13:20 -0800

Continuing the tradition I started nine years ago, here’s my Dad’s tenth “obscure” Christmas card, from 1982.

The image is corrupted at the bottom, but the damaged portion contains a hint: his name, “John F. Stearns”, has the first S in Stearns replaced by a treble clef.

Previously: 1981 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973

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How I Spent My Twitter Vacation

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 11:31:23 -0800

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’ve been taking a vacation from Twitter for the last month. Just after October first, I noticed that my timeline was almost entirely bad (and/or fake) news: Trump, Weinstein, white supremacy, etc.; it had ceased to be a way to keep up to date with the fun things my friends were doing.

Further, it had become a “time sponge”: whenever I had an unoccupied moment (which I have a lot of, given my continuing funemployment), I’d whip out my phone and catch up on Twitter.

So I decided to take a break, and uninstalled the Twitter app from my devices; here’s what I learned:

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A Christmas Tradition, from 1981

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 13:25:20 -0800

Continuing the tradition started eight years ago, here’s my Dad’s ninth “obscure” Christmas card, from 1981.

No, I didn’t recognize all three of the ladies’ names at the time, but I still got the message!

Previously: 1980 1979 1978 1977 1976 1975 1974 1973

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Profiling a Slow Elixir Test

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 21:19:04 -0800

I noticed that a couple of tests in my current Elixir project were a little slow, so I set out to find a way to profile them… I quickly found this this helpful blog post (thanks, Joseph Kain!), and tried out ExProf — but afterward, like Joseph said, “At this point I was a little confused by the results.”

So I kept reading Joseph’s post, wherein he tried out Erlang’s fprof. This looked better (as he says) because fprof supports display of call chains, providing a lot more useful context. Better still, I found his followup post that taught me about how recent versions of Elixir come with a Mix task (mix profile.fprof) for profiling that produces friendlier output.

The Mix task didn’t give me an easy way to wrap a slow test, though: it’s good for measuring an easily-isolatable bit of code like a single function, but sometimes tests involve setup that’s harder to isolate… so I cooked up this little macro and dropped it into my project’s test/test_helper.exs:

defmodule FProf do
  defmacro profile(do: block) do
    content = quote do
      Mix.Tasks.Profile.Fprof.profile(fn -> unquote(block) end,
        warmup: false, sort: "acc", callers: true)
    end
    Code.compile_quoted(content)
  end
end

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A Nerves tidbit

Sun, 02 Oct 2016 13:24:04 -0700

I’ve been working on learning the Elixir programming language for the last several months, and after returning from ElixirConf a few weeks ago, I was inspired to try a small project with Nerves, a platform for building Elixir applications on small devices like the Raspberry Pi.

Nerves provides a toolchain for building on the Mac which results in it writing a bootable microSD card that I boot in the Pi to try out my code. There’s a lot of complexity in what Nerves is doing for me, but one little bit (not Nerves’ fault!) annoyed me: I had to enter my login password every few minutes when Nerves wanted to write to the microSD card.

I just found a way around this. The build command I use, every time I want to make a change, is this (I’ve broken it onto multiple lines for clarity) –

(cd apps/project &&              # switch into my app
MIX_ENV=prod mix firmware &&     # build the disk image

(until [ -d /Volumes/BOOT ];     # wait for me to reinsert the card
 do sleep 1;
done) &&

sudo chmod go+rw /dev/rdisk2 &&  # Make the raw disk image writable

MIX_ENV=prod mix firmware.burn -d /dev/rdisk2 &&  # write to the SD card

sync &&                          # flush changes - I'm paranoid
sleep 1)

That sudo chmod command is the point of this post: without it, every time I did a new build, I had to enter my password, because Nerves invokes a tool called fwup to write the image, and fwup uses authopen to get authenticated access to the raw file. This permissions fix has to be done every time the microSD card is reinserted. (I’ve already set up my /etc/sudoers file to allow me to use sudo without entering my password each time.)

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Decades

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 17:00:04 -0700

This Friday is the 35th anniversary of my start at Apple. I landed there in a summer intern job as an 18-year old, with a few years of Apple II hacking and a little community college under my belt; I didn’t even know it was an intern job until HR asked why I was still there in November, but my bosses Bob Martin & Taylor Pohlman smoothed things over, and I got to stay (Thanks, Bob & Taylor!).

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