Notices by zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social), page 15

zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Jun-2018 19:20:09 EDT zak storer 🎡
in reply to
- Brandon Hall
@bthall Do you know vim keybindings?

In conversation Friday, 29-Jun-2018 19:20:09 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Jun-2018 17:48:51 EDT zak storer 🎡
in reply to
- Aurélien Grosdidier ✅
@alatitude77 I saw this on hackernews today.

In conversation Friday, 29-Jun-2018 17:48:51 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Aurélien Grosdidier ✅ (alatitude77@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Jun-2018 17:10:04 EDT Aurélien Grosdidier ✅

#Internet is losing its #memory: Cerf https://www.itnews.com.au/news/internet-is-losing-its-memory-cerf-495854
In conversation Friday, 29-Jun-2018 17:10:04 EDT from mastodon.social permalink Repeated by zacts
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  Internet is losing its memory: Cerf
  
  from iTnews
  
  History is not a 404.
Brandon Hall (bthall@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Jun-2018 15:44:04 EDT Brandon Hall

California’s GDPR-Lite Bill is Signed Into law https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/06/29/californias-gdpr-lite-bill-is-signed-into-law/ #policy #law #regulation
In conversation Friday, 29-Jun-2018 15:44:04 EDT from mastodon.social permalink Repeated by zacts
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1. Invalid filename.
  
  California's GDPR-Lite Bill is Signed Into law | The Digital Reader
  
  from The Digital Reader
  
  California just passed a law that is going to cause a lot of binge-drinking (and possibly mass resignations) at US tech companies in the near future. Assembly Bill AB-375, appropriately referred to GDPR-Lite, was signed by the governor of California Thursday. (You can read the text of the bill here.) It is intended to forestall a ballot initiative that would have given consumers even more control over the data collected by tech companies. It's too early to say how this bill will play out in practice, but according to the bill's intro, its goals include: grant a consumer a right to request a business to disclose the categories and specific pieces of personal information that it collects about the consumer, the categories of sources from which that information is collected, the business purposes for collecting or selling the information, and the categories of 3rd parties with which the information is shared. require a business to make disclosures about the information and the purposes for which it is used. grant a consumer the right to request deletion of personal information and would require the business to delete upon receipt of a verified request, as specified. grant a consumer a right to request that [...]
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Jun-2018 12:43:35 EDT zak storer 🎡

I just love this Thelonious Monk on the jazz radio this AM. Monks Mood.

In conversation Friday, 29-Jun-2018 12:43:35 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Jun-2018 10:06:58 EDT zak storer 🎡

https://psmag.com/education/for-all-the-benefits-of-studying-mathematics-some-critics-see-a-dark-side <-- Philosophy of Mathematics Education
In conversation Friday, 29-Jun-2018 10:06:58 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
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1. Invalid filename.
  
  For All the Benefits of Studying Mathematics, Some Critics See a Dark Side
  
  from Pacific Standard
  
  Could the objective assurance in correct answers mandated in mathematics education teach students to be similarly calculating and assured when it comes to daily moral conundrums?
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 29-Jun-2018 00:17:52 EDT zak storer 🎡

The moon is pretty this evening.

In conversation Friday, 29-Jun-2018 00:17:52 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 22:13:55 EDT zak storer 🎡

Brain freeze!

In conversation Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 22:13:55 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
Shawn Webb (lattera@bsd.network)'s status on Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 18:42:55 EDT Shawn Webb

#Gentoo #Linux is not having a good day: https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-announce/message/dc23d48d2258e1ed91599a8091167002
"All Gentoo code hosted on github should for the moment be considered compromised."

In conversation Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 18:42:55 EDT from bsd.network permalink Repeated by zacts
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 14:51:19 EDT zak storer 🎡
- copyright respecter
@kai Lol!

In conversation Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 14:51:19 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 14:51:03 EDT zak storer 🎡
- Karen C🥨👵🏻🌲🏖️
@gamehawk That's a good point. There are great venues other than written material for news. I think that my main gripe was towards things like Google news and FaceBook.

In conversation Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 14:51:03 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 12:29:11 EDT zak storer 🎡

Note: I'm not against social media. I think that intelligent social media on free platforms can bring about important discussion on key social issues. The issue is the patterns of lazy thinking that FaceBook and Twitter have constructed via the design of their UI and systems.

In conversation Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 12:29:11 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 12:27:44 EDT zak storer 🎡

We are in a society, it seems, that doesn't _read_ anymore. We don't do any deep reading of quality news and literature. We don't think anymore. Mainstream social media does this for us. We then obtain confirmation bias via the reactions and Like buttons fed back at us, and we form a false sense of opinions. Our society, ethics, democracy, and human rights are at risk unless we as a society decide to not be quite so lazy. We need to resist the urge for lazy thinking and reasoning.

In conversation Thursday, 28-Jun-2018 12:27:44 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 26-Jun-2018 12:36:03 EDT zak storer 🎡

I really am going to try to go two weeks fully late 1800's style tech-free (no cell phone or even electric lights. I'll have to have a nice sleep cycle for this). I'm thinking beginning early August after this semester is over. I just want to see how it goes.

In conversation Tuesday, 26-Jun-2018 12:36:03 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 30-May-2018 12:59:20 EDT zak storer 🎡
- Brandon Hall
@bthall Coca-cola

In conversation Wednesday, 30-May-2018 12:59:20 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-Feb-2018 00:21:43 EST zak storer 🎡
- Brandon Hall
@bthall I love this word lately: ultracrepidarian - a person who expresses opinions on matters outside the scope of their knowledge or expertise.

In conversation Thursday, 01-Feb-2018 00:21:43 EST from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Jan-2018 11:52:33 EST zak storer 🎡
- Brandon Hall
- lnxw48a1
@bthall @lnxw48a1 "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." <-- http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm

In conversation Wednesday, 24-Jan-2018 11:52:33 EST from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Dec-2017 20:56:55 EST zak storer 🎡

https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/12/18/project-management-as-code-with-graphviz/ <--- life/project management with Graphviz.
In conversation Tuesday, 19-Dec-2017 20:56:55 EST from mastodon.social permalink
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1. Invalid filename.
  
  Project Management as Code with Graphviz
  
  By zwischenzugs from zwischenzugs
  tl;dr
  
  My team and I have been using graphviz and git to perform project management tasks.
  
  It has numerous benefits, including:
  
  Asynchronous project updates (ie fewer meetings)
  
  Improved updates for users
  
  Visualisation of complexity of project for stakeholders and team
  
  Assumptions challenged. Progress can be measured using git itself (eg log)
  
  HackerNews Discussion here
  
  Background
  
  Recently I’ve had to take on some project management tasks, managing engineering for a relatively large-scale project in a large enterprise covering a wide variety of use cases and demands.
  
  One of the biggest challenges was how to express the dependencies that needed to be overcome to get the business outcomes the stakeholders wanted. Cries of ‘we just want x’ were answered by me with varying degrees of quality repeatedly, and generally left the stakeholders unsatisfied.
  
  Being a software engineer – and not a project manager – by background or training, I naturally used graphviz instead to create dependency diagrams, and git to manage them.
  
  The examples here are in source here and I welcome PRs and are based on the ‘project’ of preparing for a holiday.
  
  Simple
  
  We start with a simple graph with a couple of dependencies:
  
  digraph G { "Enjoy Holiday" -> "Book tickets" "Enjoy Holiday" -> "Pack suitcase night before" "Pack suitcase night before" -> "Buy guide book" "Pack suitcase night before" -> "Buy electric converter" }
  
  The emboldening is mine for illustration; the file is plain text.
  
  This file can be saved as simple.gv (.gv is for ‘graphviz’) and will generate this graph as a .png if you run dot -Tpng simple.gv > simple.png:
  
  Looking closer at simple.gv:
  
  digraph – Tells graphviz that this is a directed graph, ie the relationships have a direction, indicated by the -> arrows. The arrow can be read as ‘depends on’.
  
  Enjoy Holiday is the name of a node. Whenever this node is referenced in future it is the ‘same’ node. In the case of Pack suitcase the night before you can see that two nodes depend on it, and it depends on one. These relationships are expressed through the arrows in the file.
  
  The dot program is part of the graphviz package. Other commands include neato, circo and others. Check man dot to read more about them.
  
  This shows how easy it is to create a simple graph from a text file easily stored in git.
  
  Layouts
  
  That top-down layout can be a bit restrictive to some eyes. If so, you can change the layout by using another command in the graphviz package. For example, running neato -Tpng simple.gv > simple.png produces this graph:
  
  Note how:
  
  Enjoy holiday is now nearer the ‘centre’ of the graph
  
  The nodes are overlapping (we’ll deal with this later)
  
  The arrows have shortened (we’ll deal with this later too)
  
  If you’re fussy about your diagrams you can spend a lot of time fiddling with them like this, so it’s useful to get a feel for what the different commands do.
  
  Colours
  
  We can get more project information into a node by colorizing the nodes. I do this with a simple scheme of:
  
  green = done
  
  orange = in progress
  
  red = not started
  
  Here’s an updated .gv file:
  
  digraph G { "EH" [label="Enjoy Holiday",color="red"] "BT" [label="Book tickets",color="green"] "PSNB" [label="Pack suitcase night before",color="red"] "BGB" [label="Buy guide book",color="orange"] "BEC" [label="Buy electric converter",color="orange"] "EH" -> "BT" "EH" -> "PSNB" "PSNB" -> "BGB" "PSNB" -> "BEC" }
  
  Running the command
  
  dot -Tpng simple_colors.gv > simple_colors.png
  
  on this results in this graph:
  
  Two things have changed here. Referring to the full description of the node can get tiresome, so ‘Enjoy holiday’ has been referenced with ‘EH’, and associated with a ‘label’, and ‘color’.
  
  "EH" [label="Enjoy Holiday",color="red"]
  
  The nodes are defined in this way at the top, and then referred to with their relationships at the end. All sorts of attributes are available.
  
  Nodes
  
  Similarly, you can change the attributes of nodes in the graph, and their relationships in code.
  
  I find that with a complex graph with some text in each node, a rectangular node makes for better layouts. Also, I like to specify the distance between nodes, and prevent them from overlapping (two ‘problems’ we saw before).
  
  digraph G { ranksep=2.0 nodesep=2.0 overlap="false" node [color="black", shape="rectangle"] "EH" [label="Enjoy Holiday",color="red"] "BT" [label="Book tickets",color="green"] "PSNB" [label="Pack suitcase night before",color="red"] "BGB" [label="Buy guide book",color="orange"] "BEC" [label="Buy electric converter",color="orange"] "EH" -> "BT" "EH" -> "PSNB" "PSNB" -> "BGB" "PSNB" -> "BEC" }
  
  By adding the ranksep and nodesep attributes, we can influence the layout of the graph by specifying the distance between nodes in their rank in the hierarchy, and separation between them. Similarly, overlap prevents the problem we saw earlier with overlapping nodes.
  
  The node line specifies the characteristics of the nodes – in this case rectangular and black by default.
  
  Running the same dot command as above results in this graph:
  
  which is arguably uglier than previous ones, but these changes help us as the graphs become more complex.
  
  More Complex Graphs
  
  Compiling this more complex graph with dot:
  
  digraph G { ranksep=2.0 nodesep=2.0 overlap="false" node [color="black", shape="rectangle"] "EH" [label="ENJOY HOLIDAY\nWe want to have a good time",color="red"] "BTOW" [label="Book time off\nCheck with boss that time off is OK, put in system",color="red"] "BFR" [label="Book fancy restaurant\nThe one overlooking the river",color="red"] "BPB" [label="Buy phrase book\nThey don't speak English, so need to know how to book",color="red"] "BT" [label="Book tickets\nDo this using Expedia",color="green"] "PSNB" [label="Pack suitcase night before\nSuitcase in understairs cupboard",color="red"] "BGB" [label="Buy guide book\nIdeally the Time Out one",color="orange"] "BEC" [label="Buy electric converter\nDon't want to get ripped off at airport",color="orange"] "GTS" [label="Go to the shops\nNeed to go to town",color="orange"] "GCG" [label="Get cash (GBP)\nAbout 200 quid",color="green"] "GCD" [label="Get cash (DOLLARS)\nFrom bureau de change under arches",color="orange"] "EH" -> "BT" "EH" -> "BFR" "EH" -> "BTOW" "BFR" -> "BPB" "BPB" -> "GTS" "BPB" -> "GCG" "EH" -> "PSNB" "EH" -> "GCD" "PSNB" -> "BGB" "BGB" -> "GTS" "PSNB" -> "BEC" "BGB" -> "GCG" "BEC" -> "GCG" }
  
  gives this graph:
  
  And with neato:
  
  You can see the graphs look quite different depending on which layout engine/binary you use. Some may suit your purpose better than others.
  
  Project Planning with PRs
  
  Now that you have a feel for graphing as code, you can check these into git and share them with your team. In our team, each node represents a JIRA ticket, and shows its ID and summary.
  
  A big benefit of this is that project updates can be asynchronous. Like many people, I work with engineers across the world, and their ability to communicate updates by this method reduces communication friction considerably.
  
  For example, the other day we had a graph representing our next phase of work that was looking too heavy for one sprint. Rather than calling a meeting and go over each line item, I just asked him to update the graph file and raise a PR for me to review.
  
  We then workshopped the changes over the PR, and only discussed a couple of points over the phone. Fewer meetings, and more content-rich discussions.
  
  Surface Assumptions
  
  Beyond fewer and more effective meetings, another benefit is the objective recording of assumptions within the team. Surprisingly often, I have discovered hidden dependencies through this method that had either not been fully understood or discussed.
  
  It’s also surfaced further items of work required to reach the solution, which has resulted in more and more clear tickets being raised that relate to the target solution. The discipline of coding these up helps force these into the open.
  
  Happier Stakeholders
  
  While inside the team, the understanding of what needs to happen is clearer, stakeholders clamouring for updates are clearer on what’s blocking the outcomes they want.
  
  Another benefit is an increased confidence in the process. There’s a document that’s readily comprehensible they can dig into if they want to find out more. But the fact that there’s a transparent graph of dependencies usually suffices to persuade people that things are under control.
  
  Alternate Views
  
  Finally, here are some alternate views of the same graph. We’ve already seen dot and neato. Here are the others. I’m not going to explain them technically as I’ve read the man page definitions and am none the wiser. They use words like ‘outerplanar’ and ‘force-directed’. Graph rendering is a complicated affair.
  
  circo
  
  fdp
  
  twopi
  
  patchwork
  
  Code
  
  Is here.
  
  If you know more than me about graphviz and have any improvements/interesting tweaks/suggestions then please contribute.
  
  Author is currently working on the second edition of Docker in Practice
  
  Get 39% off with the code: 39miell2
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 02-Dec-2017 15:04:08 EST zak storer 🎡
- Brandon Hall
@bthall So, perhaps with your background in a Philosophy major turned Economics major, you could provide this kind of holistic perspective to your approach of Economics.

In conversation Saturday, 02-Dec-2017 15:04:08 EST from mastodon.social permalink
zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 16-Oct-2017 20:59:54 EDT zak storer 🎡
in reply to
- ∑ XahLee
@xahlee Nice Xah Lee! I love the piano, and I always find it fascinating the different sounds that you can get out of acoustics that you can't so much get from digital pianos. Like, here is a clip of me trying to get some sounds out of a piano (Warning: this is abstract music, so not for everyone, but it gets fast and into some abstrakt jazz): https://soundcloud.com/zachary-storer/undefined-ocean-1 <--- If you like abstract jazz piano then just stick with it through the middle, and it gets more involved. Otherwise, skim parts.
In conversation Monday, 16-Oct-2017 20:59:54 EDT from mastodon.social permalink
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1. Invalid filename.
  
  Undefined Ocean #1
  
  from SoundCloud
  
  solo piano. no overdubbing. original improvised composition.

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Notices by zak storer 🎡 (zacts@mastodon.social), page 15