In recent years, nordic ice skaters have been using the Sentinel 2 satellite imagery that is captured every few days to remotely scout for fresh ice that isn’t covered with snow. This has been a fabulous tool for identifying conditions before heading out on the ice. Have you ever been…
As someone with wide, flat, and square feet I’ve always found challenges finding shoes that fit. Lately I’ve been shifting to wide barefoot-style shoes for daily wear to help prevent too-narrow shoes from pressing my big toe joint into an even more exaggerated bunion. When it comes to rock climbing…
Background Since 2014, my team at Middlebury has been using the “ELK” stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, & Kibana) to aggregate and analyze our application, webserver, PHP, and CDN logs. Over the years I’ve built dashboards and visualizations that allow us to monitor application health and performance, drilling into problem areas and…
I recently launched several major new features for Curvature, my program that generates maps of the twistiest roads world-wide. I’ve had these in the works for several years and finally found the time to wrap them up.
How can we compare grow-lights when they don’t have consistent performance measurements advertised? Might electricity draw be sufficient?
Where to eat in Middlebury? A long running topic of discussion with my colleagues is: “Where should we eat for lunch?” Our small rural town has a pretty vibrant dining scene for its population with between 40-50 establishments that serve food or drink. This number is just large enough to…
Drupal 8 has a great Plugin API that not only allows one to write plugins that modify Drupal core’s behavior, but also to define your own pluggable system that you and others can plug into as well. The Plugin API documentation has a number of examples that cover many common…
By now many folks have seen Geoff Boeing’s really neat charts of street orientation that highlight how “gridded” (or not) the layout of city streets are: US Cities World Cities Since Geoff was kind enough to provide a full open-source tool-chain, I decided to tweak it to chart the orientations…
Several years after creating Curvature –my program that analyzes road-geometry and builds maps of twisty roads– it now has a dedicated site of its own: roadcurvature.com The new site is written to help non-techies understand how to use the curvature files with step-by-step instructions and a lot less jargon than…
As a software developer or system admin have you ever encountered regular expressions that are just a bit too hard to understand? Kind of frustrating, right? As a rule, regular expressions are often relatively easy to write, but pretty hard to read even if you know what they are supposed…
