Recently I came across the concept of "messing up as much as possible" so one can learn as much as possible. I first encountered it when following and reading about SpaceX Starship April 20 2023 orbital test flight. Continue reading..

The most significant art exhibit I ever attended to date was the 2013 remake of a 1969 art show in Bern, Switzerland called "Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form" where Harald Szeemann "wanted to show everything that we had not yet seen, everything that came after 'Pop Art' and 'Minimal Art'" (Grégoire Muller, exhibition catalog). Continue reading..

Recently I've been interested in generating "3D" acoustic soundscapes; I looked into tools that allow creation and rendering of such immersive audio scenes. Continue reading..

I never learned about containers. The OS-level virtualization kind. In this article I'm documenting my journey of trying to understand what it is all about and hopefully getting excited about virtualization. Continue reading..

I recently quit my job at Butterfly Network and am now spending some time writing code I am excited for, covering topics I want to learn more about. It is an incredible feeling to start with a blank source-code file. It can also be somewhat intimidating - many decisions must be made. But in my case it was quite liberating as I did not care about technical debt or making the perfect decision. I am just tinkering. Continue reading..

As a computer scientists working on image processing algorithms I know about the frustrating process of hunting bugs on massively-parallel architectures like GPUs. Sometimes those bugs can produce completely incorrect images or sequences of images but with a certain aesthetic appeal. Continue reading..

Inspired by an old but brilliant Clifford Stoll [video](https://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_the_call_to_learn/up-next?language=en) and by my desire to get back into running experiments and reporting the results, I recently set out to measure the speed of sound using a set of Roland CS-10EM binaural microphones and a Zoom H2n I borrowed. Continue reading..

As sometimes is the case I'm a bit late to the game when it comes to new technologies. This has the effect that when I try out those new technologies I get excited in the same way folks got excited for it months or years ago. Continue reading..

Over the last 3 years I read and listened to a number of books. Some of them stood out to me for one reason or another. I am listing those books here. The list serves the purpose of reminding myself of the interesting tidbits in the book, why I enjoyed it and why I might want to read it/listen to it again. I tried to categorize them but I don't think that is particularly helpful - it is also hard. The box are all fiction books and a mix of history, technology, science, aviation, memoir and biography. Continue reading..

At a high level backfilling in Airflow is a mechanism that allows (re-)execution of Airflow DAG instances for a specific time interval. It is a useful but inherently fragile and brittle process in Airflow. Continue reading..

If you ever wrote software or designed hardware in a regulated industry, it is very possible that you interfaced within a Quality Management System (QMS). I personally have seen a couple of different incarnations of such a system: from paper-based with wet-ink signatures to fully database driven and smart-card sign-off. Especially at smaller companies, paper-based systems are common. Templates, checklist, manuals, SOPs and protocols are created often as Word documents, are edited, sent, printed, signed, revised, edited again, etc. Continue reading..

A common gotcha when working with airflow is to determine when a DAG is going to execute, and what the execution date-time is going to be when it executes. Especially if a DAG relies on processing data for a given execution date-time only to ensure idempotency. The best way to think about this is not in dates or timestamps but time-spans. An Airflow DAG run is going to cover a times-span - i.e. it is going to process data that was generated/received/added etc. in a given time-span. Continue reading..

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During the emergence of electronic communication, the two scientists/engineers Carl Friedrich Gauss and Wilhelm Eduard Weber built the first electrical communications line in Goettingen, Germany. They set up a two kilometer two wire copper line between Gauss' workplace – the Astronomical Observatory – and Weber’s laboratory in the physics department of the Goettingen University. Continue reading..