Rui Carmo
August 21^st 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

This is not your father's Microsoft ※

This is noteworthy because it manages to capture some of the complexity of the multifaceted culture change the company is going through. Being submerged in several aspects of internal culture (which is by no means even or uniform), I can attest to it being a work in progress.

The changes are not evenly distributed yet (and the subsidiary model dampens propagation of change, with various regional and local eddies), but they’re happening.

Rui Carmo
August 20^th 2018, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Computer Vision in Three Lines of Code plus a bunch more lines ※

I love this kind of simple, straightforward solution, especially when it’s written out in a comprehensive fashion.

(I haven’t posted anything about my own machine learning endeavors because they reek of work and are generally fairly uninteresting problems with much simpler business solutions than dialing tech up to 11, but I intend to link to juicy nuggets like this one from now on–I’ve been doing that mostly on LinkedIn, but it’s an audience that values flashiness above substance…)

Rui Carmo
August 20^th 2018, in the afternoon · 3 min read

Stuff That I'm Looking forward to (or not)

Even as I lie deep in the holiday zone, blissfully abstracted from just about everything work-related (although I still get the the odd 10AM call from less lucky folks), I find myself wistfully pondering what I might actually enjoy going back to this Fall from a purely technical perspective.

Given that I’m willfully self-restrained to using mosh and vim to edit drafts while caked sand sloughs away from my ankles at roughly the same speed these bits are squirted across the ether, a lot of what’s on my mind is related to personal tech (and a lot more I simply cannot write about at all), but here are some of the highlights for your continued amusement:

Elementary OS 5.0, because I like the current iteration quite a bit and would like to entertain the notion that I might be able to use it exclusively some day–on what are effectively purely academic grounds, for sure, but one has to entertain options. Possible pitfalls: some initial flakiness on the battered hardware I intend to use it on, and a continued sadness for it not being available on ARM in any shape or fashion.
iOS 12 and watchOS 5¹, largely because I expect to upgrade from an iPhone 6 to an improved/more sensible X (remember, kids, never buy the first iteration of an Apple product if you can help it). Extremely likely pitfalls: I am going to be very annoyed at the lack of Touch ID (which I still believe to be a better fit for me than Face ID), which is sure to be outweighed by having a phone that launches Twitter in less than 15 seconds again.
The Windows 10 Fall Update (whatever they’re calling it now), solely because it will bring along some much-needed fixes for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (which is the bit I use the most). Corporate Kool-Aid is slowly percolating from my bloodstream as various varieties of chilled beverages seep in, so I can but hope that Windows Update stops being so much of a nuisance as it’s been lately (I’ve had it recently force reboot my machine during an all-nighter when we were preparing a major customer deliverable, and the scars are still there in my psyche).
Visual Studio Code native support for WSL binaries (git, python, pyenv and many others). This has progressed unevenly over the past year, but I have hope that will eventually get sorted out, because as it is, the only platform I can really enjoy working on is still (ironically) macOS, and that kind of defeats the purpose of both pieces of software. In all honesty, I would love to have that be the default cloud dev stack, because it makes so much sense it hurts when you get paper cuts from the tottering stack of workarounds you have to go through to have portions of it working.
Go modules, because the current gibbering insanity that is Go dependency management needs to stop and I want a sane way to do version pinning as well as vendoring (and getting rid of GOPATH is just icing on the cake).

Until these come to pass, I intend to spend some time (un)evenly split between figuring out how to realign my hobby compass to compensate for the rather blistering pace things are getting to and delivering my best impression of a corporate hamster on a treadmill. Many of my usual hobbies have suffered throughout these past three years, and I need to get some less-used neural pathways firing again before something shorts out.

Other stuff (including the usual garden variety product roadmaps, personal goals and family endeavors) are rolling on, the only worthwhile comment being that the Kubernetes juggernaut is still remarkably alive and shows no signs of letting up–it is experiencing some growth pains (people are finally starting to realize it doesn’t exclude proper governance, due processes and a functioning brain in all involved), but with luck we might finally have a (borderline) sane way to deploy properly component-based applications in the cloud.

What no one tooting those particular horns seems to be able to convey to the unwashed masses, however, is that developers need something simpler than a thirteen-page checklist to sign on, and that means building even more tooling to simplify things.

I’m not overly keen on Mojave, to be honest. I will upgrade in due time (and will be sorely disappointed if it doesn’t support FileVault on Fusion drives), but (sadly) it won’t have much of an impact on my daily affairs. I also remain unfazed by news of an updated Mini–that ship has sailed as far as I’m concerned. ↩︎

Rui Carmo
August 8^th 2018, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Anki Vector is smart enough to just hang out ※

We have a Cozmo, and it is easily the best tech toy ever. Vector seems like a lot of fun too, and does away with the need to run most of its brains on a sidecar (which is effectively what the iPad app does).

I just hope Anki isn’t shoving its brains onto the cloud without enough security, because I want one.

Rui Carmo
August 7^th 2018, in the morning · 1 min read

Climate Changes

As it turned out, the last week was a lot busier than anticipated, even considering the sweltering heat. Climate change is here, and it’s ugly, with a 4AM break on a balcony last week turning into an eerie (and noisy, and hot, and humid) echo of Jurassic Park, clocking in at well over 39C.

Rui Carmo
August 7^th 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

Hello World on z/OS ※

I read through this in a state of eerie fascination, because it is still the way a lot of computing is done in some places. Not ones I want to be, but certainly some that want to move to the cloud.

It’s going to be painful as hell.

Rui Carmo
July 24^th 2018, in the morning

Sunshine

an inner garden in the Expo residential district — A welcome break during lunch.

Rui Carmo
July 23^rd 2018, at breakfast

Glimpse

a side street in the bar district — A glimpse during an unplanned foray into Bairro Alto.

Rui Carmo
July 22^nd 2018, at late afternoon · 3 min read

Asyncio and Azure Table Storage

I’m counting on a grueling work week starting tomorrow, so I put away all my work gear late Friday evening and decided to improve my mood by reading a bit, catching up on TV (Final Space is great fun, by the way) and polishing some of my projects, starting with an old nemesis, an RSS feed topic analyzer.

Rui Carmo
July 21^st 2018, at late afternoon · 1 min read

LinkedIn: The Game ※

This is simply glorious:

“For those unfamiliar, LinkedIn is a 2D, turn-based MMORPG that sets itself apart from its competitors by placing players not in a fantasy world of orcs and goblins, but in the treacherous world of business. Players can choose from dozens of character classes (i.e., Entrepreneurs, Social Media Mavens, Finance Wizards) each with their own skill sets and special moves (Power Lunch; Signal Boost; Invoice Dodge). They gain “experience” by networking, obtaining endorsements from other users, and posting inspirational quotes from Elon Musk.“

Rui Carmo
July 21^st 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

Code Prediction with a Neural Network ※

This is very neat, and reminds me that I need to spend less time messing around with Azure internals and more time building useful stuff on top of it.

Rui Carmo
July 21^st 2018, at dawn · 1 min read

Anatomy of a Butterfly (Keyboard) ※

A little more detail on how the new membrane protects the butterfly mechanism, with empirical testing (and more closeup photos).

I’m a bit sad that this can’t be retrofitted onto the older models – I might have to consider selling mine and upgrading.

Rui Carmo
July 18^th 2018, in the morning

Glimmers

a tiled water-filled trench glimmering in the sunshine — Glimmers of sunshine above weathered tiles.

Rui Carmo
July 18^th 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

macOS VPN architecture ※

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I went down a similar path and would have loved to have this handy. Good thing someone else dug deeper, even though I have no immediate need for it now.

Rui Carmo
July 17^th 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

MacBook Pro 13" 2018 Keyboard Teardown ※

I’ve been mulling this new “quieter” keyboard, and it still seems like a stopgap measure to me.

The mechanism doesn’t stop being prone to failure just because it’s sheathed in silicone (and I suspect that membrane isn’t going to age well, either).

Rui Carmo
July 15^th 2018, in the afternoon · 2 min read

Keeping Tabs On Links

I have a long week ahead of me for various reasons (one of which is the need to spend some time in a US timezone to follow an internal event remotely), so I decided to clean up a bunch of things, including following up on last week’s upgrade.

Rui Carmo
July 13^th 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

Apple’s new 2018 MacBook Pros ※

Nice to see there are incremental updates again, but (like many other folk) I’m more curious about the keyboard improvements and whether it’s more reliable now. The new screen and beefier CPUs seem nice, though.

Rui Carmo
July 10^th 2018, at night · 1 min read

Microsoft’s Surface Go ※

This is, as usual, pretty neat hardware. The CPU doesn’t seem to be very beefy and the entry-level configuration is a bit tight (and doesn’t include the keyboard), but I quite like the idea of a smaller version of the Pro (which has been my main work PC for a bit).

Let’s wait and see how it performs, and how long it will take for local SKUs to ship…

Rui Carmo
July 8^th 2018, at lunchtime · 3 min read

The Third Python

It’s been a harrowing couple of weeks as a bunch of work-related stuff unraveled and needed to be put back in its appointed place, but I managed to find some time to tinker around this weekend and get some personal stuff done, including upgrading this website from the ground up (beginning with the usual seamless Ubuntu upgrade to 18.04, which I’ve been testing for a couple of months¹).

Rui Carmo
June 26^th 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

Two Keyboards at a Bar ※

Michael Lopp on the MacBook keyboard fracas, kicking it out of the park.