Perhaps I’ve been spoilt, but most of the speakers at the technical meetups and con­fer­ences that I go to have something to say and say it well. I’ve also been to hundreds of Toast­mas­ters meetings and I’ve heard many speakers at all levels.

I went to a tech meetup tonight and I sat through two bad hour-long pre­sen­ta­tions. The first speaker should have eliminated the first 20 minutes of his talk, a self-indulgent ramble about various other projects that he had attempted, which shed no light on his main topic. He could easily have eliminated another 15 minutes from the rest of his talk and it would have been the better …continue.

Brigadier-General Sir Harry Flashman, celebrated Victorian soldier, winner of the Victoria Cross, survivor of the charge of the Light Brigade, the battle of Little Big Horn, and the raid on Harper’s Ferry, reveals himself in this frank memoir published long after his death to be “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady.”

The central conceit of the fictional Flashman Papers is that Flashy, writing frankly in his old age about his remarkable set of adventures, is perfectly willing to put himself …continue.

[Pre­vi­ous­ly published at the now defunct MetaBrite Dev Blog.]

I attended DockerCon 2016 in Seattle over the last two days and I learned a lot. It was a well-run conference with an en­thu­si­as­tic audience.

I’m astounded at the growth of Docker. Three-and-a-quarter years ago, Docker was revealed to the public for the first time, in a five-minute lightning talk at PyCon 2013. In January 2016, Docker Hub had received 1.6 billion image pulls; by this month, that number had jumped to over 4 billion pulls! DockerCon had over 4,000 attendees and nearly 100 exhibitors, who clearly believe there’s a multi-billion dollar market for containers. DataDog concurs, in a report on Docker adoption.

I complained yesterday about my dif­fi­cul­ties in deploying Docker containers on AWS. I have since succeeded in getting my app to deploy on Elas­ticBeanstalk, though I have not quite ironed out all the problems.

I found several problems:

• I had to revert from a Multi-Container Docker en­vi­ron­ment to a Single-Container Docker en­vi­ron­ment because ECS wasn’t starting in the multi-container en­vi­ron­ment. That meant I had to revert to a v1 Dockerrun.aws.json.
• I had to ensure that the Instance Profile had the Ama­zonEC2­Con­tain­erReg­istryRead­On­ly policy attached, so that I could pull from the EC2 Container Repository.

I complained a few weeks ago about how hard it was to deploy Docker containers on AWS.

This week has been nothing but container-related frus­tra­tion. We have two apps running in Kubernetes clusters on top of AWS. This is not a well-supported scenario and we have a fragile script that spends a lot of time sitting in polling loops, waiting for various things to happen like DNS updates taking effect, the new cluster being available, and so on. One of the apps has decided to stop deploying. I do not know why.

I’ve been trying to get a new app deployed on ECS, the EC2 Container Service. The way to deploy an …continue.

Nick Behrends wakes up after a party at a drug dealer’s house on Ibiza with a gun in his hand, no memory of the last few hours, and a roomful of dead people. He goes on the run, and soon encounters a Russian hitman who’s looking for his abducted 12-year-old daughter.

Pre­dictable plot, cardboard characters.

As I wrote last week, we had one more rehearsal to go before our 2016 Reading of Ulysses for Bloomsday. That was tonight. Mostly we worked out seating and other logistics. We are in­ter­cut­ting two different chapters, with the readers playing different roles in each chapter, so it’s a small but satisfying ac­com­plish­ment to have a seating arrange­ment that works for both chapters.

I wrote this last night on Facebook:

Even 25 years after coming out as bisexual, I still censor myself and still check myself about coming out yet again. Even though Seattle is about as safe as it gets and most people here are queer-friendly, it’s reflexive. And even in Seattle, queer bashings happen. We came very close to an even bigger tragedy in a gay nightclub in Seattle on New Year’s Eve 2013, when an arsonist lit a fire in Neighbours while 750 people were present. The fire was promptly detected and put out, no-one was injured, and the per­pe­tra­tor is in prison.

I became aware of my sexuality in a very different …continue.

I spent the last 90 minutes reading Facebook, and my feed has been absolutely over­whelmed with Orlando-related posts, be they grieving, discussing homophobia, calling for gun control, or reacting to reactions. I’ve never seen such a skewed set of posts. Some of it is surely Facebook catering to what it knows are my interests, but it seems like the vast majority of my friends and the pages that I follow can talk of nothing else. Even Trump/Clinton/Sanders articles, except as they pertain to this, have tem­porar­i­ly dis­ap­peared.

So far, I have seen nothing useful from Republican politi­cians regarding gun control or homophobia.

I woke up this morning to news of another American massacre: a lone gunman had murdered 50 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, and injured another 53 people. It was the worst mass shooting in US history and also the worst hate crime.

I put it out of my head for the afternoon while I attended an old friend’s wedding, but it’s been at the forefront of my mind ever since.

Only in America could we put up with massacre after massacre, yet not find the political will to do anything meaningful about gun violence. Craven politi­cians in thrall to the NRA mouth platitudes, but will not make any …continue.