I’ve been wearing a surgical boot since my heel surgery six weeks ago. The first month I spent getting around on a knee walker or crutches. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been walking more and more, but always wearing the boot. The doctor told me today that I could start weaning myself off the boot, but not to rush it.

I wore shoes on my right foot tonight for the first time. I tried on a Doc Marten shoe but found it too stiff. It rubbed against the scar at the back of my heel. A pair of sneakers were more com­fort­able. I’ll bring the right sneaker to work …continue.

An Or­dered­Dict is a Python dict which remembers insertion order. When iterating over an Or­dered­Dict, items are returned in that order. Ordinary dicts return their items in an un­spec­i­fied order.

Ironically, most of the ways of con­struct­ing an ini­tial­ized Or­dered­Dict end up breaking the ordering in Python 2.x and in Python 3.5 and below. Specif­i­cal­ly, using keyword arguments or passing a dict (mapping) will not retain the insertion order of the source code.

Python 2.7.13 (default, Dec 18 2016, 07:03:39)
>>> from collections import OrderedDict

>>> odict = OrderedDict()
>>> odict['one'] = 1
>>> odict['two'] = 2
>>> odict['three'] = 3
>>> odict['four'] = 4
>>> odict['five'] = 5
>>> odict.items()
[('one', 1), ('two', 2), ('three', 3), ('four', 

Joey Perrone is very surprised to find herself thrown off a cruise ship on her second wedding an­niver­sary. After a night of swimming, she washes up on a small Florida island in the company of a pre­ma­ture­ly retired in­ves­ti­ga­tor. Joey persuades Mick Stranahan not to report the attempted murder, but instead to in­ves­ti­gate and torment her worthless husband, Chaz, who turns out to be a biostitute for a major polluter of the Everglades, as well as a relentless pussyhound, an inept killer, and an all-round shitheel.

Hiaasen has a lot of …continue.

When I learned HTML tables back in the 90s, at some point I discovered the <thead> element for grouping the <th> column headers. What I missed was there should be a <tr> element between the two. In other words, a well-formed HTML table with a header looks like this:

<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>Name</th>
            <th>Value</th>
            <th>Date</th>
        </tr>
 

The Italian Job movie is worth your time. One of the quin­tes­sen­tial movies of the Swinging Sixties, its British sen­si­bil­i­ty wears well, almost 50 years on. The humour still works. And it’s probably the best ad­ver­tise­ment that the Mini ever had.

Charlie Croker (Michael Caine) has inherited a plan to rip off $4 million in gold bullion from Fiat in Turin. He and the lads are going to help the balance of payments by bringing the loot back from the Common Market. (They’re proto-Eu­roskep­tics.) And they’re going to do it by causing the mother …continue.

A jealous husband engages a private detective-cum-killer for hire (Simon Pegg) to follow his wife. Upon proof of her infidelity, he orders a hit, which triggers a comedy of errors and double crosses, which ultimately leaves most of the cast dead at each other’s hands.

There’s not much to like about this Australian noirish comedy. It’s bloody but not that funny. The characters are thinly drawn and unengaging. They’re a far cry from Tarantino’s gonzo mo­tor­mouths or the Coen Brother’s quirky killers.

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

A collection of mis­cel­la­neous tips on using Pipelines in Jenkins 2.0.

#6 in a series on Jenkins Pipelines

withCredentials([
    [$class: 'StringBinding', credentialsId: 'GPG_SECRET', variable: 'GPG_SECRET'],
    [$class: 'AmazonWebServicesCredentialsBinding',
     credentialsId: '0defaced-cafe-f00d-badd-0000000ff1ce',
     accessKeyVariable: 'AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID',
     secretKeyVariable: 'AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY']
]) 

Tiffany Aching is now the overworked and overly re­spon­si­ble Witch of the Chalk. People everywhere are fearing and dis­trust­ing witches more. When her patient, the ailing Baron dies, she is blamed. Other troubles multiply. Eventually she realizes that the Cunning Man, a long-dead witchfind­er, is seeping poison into people’s hearts. Aided by the trou­ble­mak­ing Nac Mac Feegle, she defeats him.

Rec­om­mend­ed.

I Shall Wear Midnight follows The Wee Free Men, A Hat Full of Sky, and Win­ter­smith.

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

Jenkins Pipelines are written in a Groovy DSL. This is a good choice but there are surprises.

#5 in a series on Jenkins Pipelines

I uploaded some pre­sen­ta­tions to Speak­erDeck.com tonight.

Here are various pre­sen­ta­tions of mine at Speak­erDeck.com and SlideShare.net:

• LKRhash: the design of a scalable hashtable. I spoke about this at NWCPP (video) in June 2012.
• Software Per­for­mance: an Overview. I gave this talk at an internal brownbag at MetaBrite in January 2016.
• Fly­ing­Cloud: Docker containers built with SaltStack. I gave this talk at PuPPy (video) in March 2016.
• Security 101. I gave this talk at an internal brownbag at Cozi in November 2011.