Thinking about it

Category: Uncategorized

  • The most expensive spell check I can make

    I am really bad at spelling. I always have been and the older I get, my ability to spell things correctly only gets worse. Often my attempts are so bad that the spelling suggestions fail because I am not even close. I started playing around with seeing how well ChatGPT could guess what I meant…

  • NicaPhoto

    I’ve lost count of how many trips I’ve made to Central America and I’ve seen many examples of programs that work to improve the lives of people there but none has impressed me more than NicaPhoto. The name comes from its beginning as an idea to teach photography classes to kids in the town of…

  • Using Prometheus and Grafana with Django

    For my web app project I wanted to add some monitoring and dashboards so I decided to try out prometheus. Since I am using django I also decided to use django-prometheus. It ended up fine but there was a bump or two along the way. The README tells you most of what you need to…

  • Agents and Agency

    I think the first time I heard about how software agents were going to be useful to help perform tasks for us must have been with General Magic in the 90s. It was all the same use cases we hear about today, flight booking, recipe generation etc. Just taking out all that drudgery from our…

  • Google Earth and KML

    Let’s say you have a KML file and you want to import it into Google Earth. Maybe its a parcel polygon you want to visualize. You can easily import the file and see your polygon displayed. Now comes the interesting part. What if you want to share this? You can’t really do it because this…

  • Productivity of Software Teams

    People love talking about productivity in Software development. So much so that this conversation is probably a key contribution to low productivity. Since Covid, we’ve been asking if remote work is as effective as in office etc. Many of the bigCos are now pushing people to go back into the office. They give all kinds…

  • Amazon Clinic

    So I had covid several weeks ago for the first time. As often happens when I get a respiratory illness, even after I feel better I can get a lingering cough that seems to go on forever. There are a few prescription meds that have helped in the past but getting a prescription requires a…

  • Flagging a problem in GPTV

    took this photo: what flag is this? That is the flag of Guatemala. show me the flag of guatemala I’m unable to directly show images, but the flag of Guatemala consists of three vertical stripes. The outer stripes are blue, and the central stripe is white. In the center of the white stripe is the…

  • Starting again?

    So It looks like its been around 9 years since I have written a blog post. I think I stopped when I took a job at Amazon and didn’t want to have to make a disclaimer about these views not being the opinion of my employer. I’ve been thinking of starting again but I am…

  • Flattening the Backbone.js Learning Curve

    I just spent some time getting into Backbone.js finally.  The learning curve was a little steeper than I expected, mostly because I think I expected Backbone.js to be something that it is not. From the docs: Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions,views with…