For the last little while I have been hosting this blog on GitHub Pages,
generated using Jekyll. All that is well and good except
GitHub Pages doesn’t properly support the jekyll-tagging plugin. Therefore
tags on this site have been broken since the migration, until I found ]this
blog post](http://longqian.me/2017/02/09/github-jekyll-tag/) by Long
Qian.
One of the little applications which I built earlier this year ended up more useful than I originally anticipated. Useful enough to have hit its first performance bottleneck! Performance problems I generally grumble “nice problem to have” which profiling and refactoring, but in this case I know what the performance problem was, but lacked the appropriate solution.
With a clean air and a good bit of weather out in the big blue room, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and continue some of my AIDS/LifeCycle training outdoors for a change. If you have never been to Sonoma county, you may not be familiar with some of its absolutely fabulous hills, valleys, and vistas. This past weekend I joined the numerous cyclists out there charging about on our beautiful county roads.
In the development of service-oriented applications we often will use the
phrase “source of truth” when referring to data and its ownership. The
expectation being that there is generally a single source of truth in the
system. Take DNS for example, we generally trust that a nameserver somewhere
out there is acting as the single source of truth for a single domain, such as
brokenco.de. Without this guarantee, much of our experience on the internet
would break down. For the software we write, increasingly GitHub has become the
source of truth for the source code itself. So much so that systems have been
built on top of GitHub which further wed the software ecosystem to a single
source of truth, such as Golang’s dependency definition conventions.
We have finally arrived at that most special day on the calendar, one I am sure you have been eagerly waiting for: Tyler Day!. This year’s Tyler Day is not much different than in years past, it has fallen on a Tuesday. It always seems to be a Tuesday. Festivities in the Northern Hemisphere are met, as per usual, with the cold transition from autumn to winter. And to most in the United States, Tyler Day is that last reminder to go to the grocery store to prepare for Thanksgiving.
The impact of HIV/AIDS on the world is difficult to overlook, perhaps more so in the San Francisco bay area where the epidemic decimated the gay community in the 80’s and 90’s. While not directly affected, I have supported AIDS-related organizations and legislation in San Francisco and California at large ever since I moved here over a decade ago. This year I will be trying something of a slightly different color: AIDS/LifeCycle. An event which brings thousands of cyclists, roadies, and supporters together to ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles, raising millions of dollars in the process. This year, rather than donating to friends’ fundraising activities, I will be joining them!.
Within the last two years the air above Santa Rosa has become thick with ash, acrid, and severely unhealthy. A year ago the immensely destructive Tubbs Fire bore down on northern Santa Rosa obliterating thousands of homes. For days afterwards the skies were filled with the smoke and ash from the epic destruction.
Whenever possible, I typically send much of my traffic through the
Tor network, including traffic to some services
which I operate for myself, such as a secure shell server. When I am traveling
or otherwise not on my home network, I use one of Tor’s more fun features:
Onion Services (formerly
known as Hidden Services). Onion Services can be identified by the *.onion
top-level domain and allow the server’s location to be anonymous/concealed
just like the client.
One year ago today, I watched the Sonoma county fires pour over Shiloh ridge towards the Fountaingrove neighborhood. I wrote about the experience, and subsequent evacuation in “Watching fire come down the mountain”. The response across Sonoma county to the fires was as monumental as the fires themselves, and for my part, I spent the next two weeks working with old and new friends to build and support Sonoma Fire Info to strive to get as much accurate information to our fellow residents as possible.
Santa Rosa is a wonderful city located within Sonoma county, and I have been encouraging just about anybody who will listen to come visit since I moved here some years ago. Glossing over a bunch of details, one year ago today the fires began, which tore into Santa Rosa. In reaction to that, a few of my friends and I, along with a number of other hackers and volunteers created Sonoma Fire Info. Some time after the fires were contained, a few of us set out to create something in response to rebuild in a different way, something would help invigorate the area we know and love, we created Startup Sonoma County