Monthly Archives: April 2020

hardware problem, software engineering

From DVD to .iso in openSUSE in bash

Just a quick note on something I found that was super useful. My new laptop doesn’t have a DVD drive, so I needed to rip an .iso file on one laptop to copy to the other. After some googling, I found https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/385648

The short version is:

<assuming your DVD drive is at /dev/sr0>
> isoinfo -i /dev/sr0 -d
<that gives a bunch of info, look for "Logical block size" and "Volume size">
...
Logical block size is: 2048
Volume size is: 1880567
...
> dd if=/dev/sr0 of=./some-img.iso bs=2k count=1880567

I think there is also a way to get progress out of it using status=progress but I haven’t tried that yet.

construction toys, review

Three builds based on Sūn Wùkōng (the Monkey King)

I first learned about Sūn Wùkōng (孙悟空) through Dragonball Z. The character of Goku is loosely based on him, and I even have a t-shirt with Goku and the characters for Sūn Wùkōng in the background. Recently, I’ve found and built 3 versions in 3 different brick systems. One of which is my first set of “LOZ mini” bricks from their Brick Headz line, so I’ll include a review of the differences in bricks as well.

First, a quick group shot.

3 versions of Monkey
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OpenStack, software engineering

Apache Cassandra, bad assumptions, and unit test shortfalls

This is a story about a problem that took a long time to solve. As in, no one noticed it was a problem for a couple years then it took another year to solve. It involves using the time series database Cassandra, some bad assumptions made by the initial programmers who were more used to relational databases, and a reliance on unit tests that test for a short period of time but miss long term problems. And there is a bonus, somewhat related story at the end.

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software engineering

Basics of Echo Cancellation

There is some cool math and lots of advanced stuff going on in echo cancellation, but for this post I’ll just talk about some basic concepts and what you can do to make it work better if you ever need it.

Back when I worked on a telepresence product I got to play at being an audio engineer. Not that I was really great at it, but I got to work with some engineers who were really, really great at it, which made it fun and educational. So I want to write down a few things to share that I learned that may even be useful to remote workers trying to get the best out of their video conference sessions.

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remote work

Links: More remote working

A couple more links to share related to remote work that came up today.

First up, a youtube video from a friend and coworker – Mightly Mini Monday As I work with him, I can attest he does wear that hoodie a lot. 🙂

Next, a different coworker posted a link to this Gitlab Unfiltered video. It’s a pretty good discussion, as long as you keep it in context that not every company, even in tech, can go full remote. The point that culture should be a first concern over tools is an important one.

Update: I’ll keep adding more related links to this post.

Dos and Dont’s from entrepreneur.com

Remote Work Report from Gitlab (I only skimmed this, but linking so I can go back and read the rest) conducted Jan and Feb 2020 (before COVID-19 changed everything).

Zoom Fatigue article from BBC (Two thoughts: The problems they cited were ones we overcame with HP Halo telepresence. And I don’t think I agree with the idea of not using your camera. Some people will interpret that as an excuse to never use their camera and loose out on all those benefits. In a larger meeting I do usually leave my camera off but that is so I can multitask. Smaller meetings I try to be more connected and participating, and an active camera is part of that.)

Trello has been blogging lots of remote work things. This one about 6 communication mistakes seems accurate enough to post.

(Update July 2020) Post from Slashdot led me to https://hbr.org/2020/07/microsoft-analyzed-data-on-its-newly-remote-workforce