Brian Parsons

One of the reasons that this site doesn’t get updated much is that the articles / blog was being powered by outdated software, Blogofile using Mako templates.

Getting around to picking a new engine and template just never made it to the top of my list. We now have AI coding assistants, though. This seemed like maybe a good project for Claude.

I asked Claude to examine the site which was in two different repositories (one for the site, another for the blog), and make a recommendation. I did specify that I would like to write posts in markdown. Claude picked Hugo and even thought the migration would be relatively simple, so I let it take a shot.

Read More...

If you are going to the 2017 NAB Radio show in Austin, please come and see the session that I’ve put together with some help from my Vipology co-horts, “Unlock Higher Ratings and Revenue Through Data”.

I’m really glad to have been engaged by the NAB to help them with content again this year. So that I don’t have to talk for 45 minutes - and you don’t want to hear it all from me anyway - we’ve assembled a panel of high-level experts when it comes to the impact that technology has had on research and media buying.

Read More...

I have been an avid user of the KDE Desktop for over 12 years. Some things about the new Plasma desktop are not immediately obvious.

Overall the new Plasma desktop is fantastic. In some cases, the usual tools are missing. KSnapshot, the screen shot utility, is one of those tools. There are a few different projects that I checked out as a replacement, but I landed on using Spectacle - https://github.com/KDE/spectacle. While I think this is getting rolled into Plasma eventually, for now you may have to install it separately. Most distros have a community package available.

Read More...

This clip from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is a really great overview of the pros and cons of the encryption debate. Hilarious too!

Link: The Encryption Debate

Whenever I am in a building with multiple elevators, I ponder the logic and programming behind how the elevators respond to calls and if it is optimal or not. This simulator is a great way to geek out on this for real…er simulated, at least

Link: Elevator Logic

This doesn’t surprise me, I’ve often wondered why Varnish is so popular when there are better and sometimes even easier solutions out there.

Link: BBC Digital Media Distribution: How we improved throughput by 4x

[PDF] Interesting research report from IBM comparing performance of docker vs KVM. I would have liked to see Xen instead of KVM. Obviously full virtualization has more overhead than containers, but there are decent trade offs to this in terms of flexibility and security. Docker is getting to be quite flexible though, and has some benefits. I don’t know that performance will be the key criteria for picking a side (Containers vs. Virtualization)

Read More...

Dr Who references aside, there is an interesting debate forming over implementing virtualization with containers instead of hypervisors. Many application servers use the container model and while there are some benefits I don’t know that I agree about the concept of delivering more services. There is much duplication in the container model and hypervisors try to reduce that since it is essentially wasteful. Some of the problems with hypervisors, such as hoggy neighbors and “cpu stealing” are not addressed with the container approach.

Read More...

Arch Linux EC2 AMIs have been updated. This release includes a fix for heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160).

If you have browsed my HTML code you see that I have been flapping back and forth on closing void tags in HTML. I am not alone in this conceptual tug-of-war. My thought has been that it is more technically correct to do so, even though it is optional and makes for ugly code prose. This article goes through the history of the concept and where current thinking/standards lie. TL;DR version: Closing them is out of style in HTML5. Your code can be pretty _and_ correct.

Read More...