Budget Rental Car Electrical Problem Record

This is hopefully not important for anyone. It is simply a public record of what happened in case it is useful because of a problem.

In Berkeley, CA in October we rented a Budget rental car numbered 47088182, a gray Hyundai Elantra with Washington plates BAZ7021. While driving on the …

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Google Cloud SQL 2nd Generation Beta Review

Google Cloud Platform

At work I’ve been instructed to get MySQL working in the cloud. I scoffed, whined and asked “Do we really need SQL?”. The Peanuts Gang teacher explained why and I didn’t really follow but I think I heard the words “business needs” and “blah blah blah”. If I …

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Javascript Pitfall: Async Await, Callbacks, and the Event Loop

Node JS

Alternate working title: Awaiting for g’Doh!

TL;DR

  • an async function is actually returning a promise behind the scenes

Details

See if you can figure out the output from this example:

import _Isofetch from 'isomorphic-fetch';

async function …
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Javascript Async/Await Patterns

Node JS

I’ve been using async/await, with help from babel, for the past several months at work and I figured I’d share some patterns I’ve found beneficial. I don’t have a background with async/await in other languages so I am coming at this problem without previous …

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Crucial M500 Material Number

If you’re trying to RMA a Crucial SSD with model number CT960M500SSD1 (M500 2.5” 960GB SSD), then the material number is 225109.

The first step to starting the RMA with Crucial is to give them the “Material Number” for the SSD or memory. However my SSD had no …

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Google Pubsub Reliability

Google Cloud Platform

When you outsource a component of your architecture to a cloud company you are consciously making a trade-off: You often get a cheap(er) (hopefully better, faster) service but you yield control to the service provider. This trade-off just became personal with Google Pub/Sub.

We’ve been using Google …

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Docker Layer Corrupt, What Do?

docker logo

Update 2015-11-10: In the docker registry v2 API (now supported by Google Container Registry) an image digest is checked for each layer. So in theory this problem should no longer be possible.

Attempting a docker deployment, the deploy failed on the target system when docker pull resulted in one layer …

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How Does a Staunch Atheist Turn Catholic?

Updated: 2013-06-29

Leah Libresco is a fairly well-known blogger and self-identified geek, and the reason I’m paying attention is because she was an outspoken Atheist discussing religion, and now she’s an outspoken Catholic discussing religion.

Why do I care about what a complete stranger does? I identify with …

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Interesting Outcomes of Assumption-Laden Perception: 2001 A Save Theodicy

Some people are accused of wearing rose-colored glasses, but you won’t be surprised when I say that it’s actually a much grander problem than that. I have endless amusement (and sometimes consternation) that an objective event can be interpreted radically differently depending on someone’s background. For example …

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