The Design and Implementation of laffer1

Here are some interesting links I found for etags.

http://www.baeldung.com/etags-for-rest-with-spring

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40950005/how-to-embbed-etags-into-crud-api-in-spring-boot

http://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-caching-etag-lastmodified

https://github.com/pglebow/rest-data

I've been looking into etags again. I looked into them several years ago as I found a very bad etag hand rolled implementation for Just Journal. It's an old pre spring approach.

I decided to add a few etags to some common API endpoints in just journal. I think I may have to version the api.

So I started a new job last week. Now I'm trying to learn a few new things like rxjava.

Having problems connecting Java apps to amazon RDS instances? Try installing the CAcerts from amazon as follows. These instructions cover freebsd and Mac OS X.

# (use curl or wget on mac)
fetch http://s3.amazonaws.com/rds-downloads/rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem


# create individual files from the bundle for loading into java
split -p "-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----" rds-combined-ca-bundle.pem individual-


# load them into your cacerts file in freebsd
find . -iname 'individual*' -exec keytool -import -file {} -alias {} -storepass changeit -keystore /usr/local/openjdk8/jre/lib/security/cacerts \;

# mac version, tweak for your JDK path
find . -iname 'individual*' -exec keytool -import -file {} -alias {} -storepass changeit -keystore /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_25.jdk/Contents/Home/jre/lib/security/cacerts \;

According to this article, apple admits the design of the mac pro limited what they could do with it. They also claim they are working on it with next year possible for a refresh.

More waiting.

http://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

In the event you need to proxy from say /api/ and the context root is / in your app, you can set a header for the proxy as follows

RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Prefix "api"

This will make hateaos URLs work properly in output.

I doubt one can generalize that a remote software team is more productive. I know that when I worked for Prime Research, I got to work from home for the first 9 months and I got a lot more done that way. Of course, then I ended up working in the office and managing a team.
When you're trying to build something complex, it's impossible to get anything done with distractions. I can code up some front end changes or add a new endpoint for an existing controller in spring without a lot of thought, but if I'm trying to design a major new feature, I need quiet and a white board.
I can say in the last 3 months, I've avoided starting several tickets at work until I knew I could get at least an hour to actually focus on them without meetings or other interruptions. It's happened at least 5 times. The farther I go with my career, the harder it is. I remember when I used to get 2-3 hour blocks of time to work on things. Those were the good old days.

https://ask.slashdot.org/story/17/02/18/223215/slashdot-asks-are-remote-software-teams-more-productive

It's kind of amazing what they have been able to do with DosBox in browsers. You can now run Windows 3.1 in a web browser and play solitaire or minesweeper, old school!

https://archive.org/details/win3_stock

Intel has given up on another CPU generation getting any speed. More 14nm and no more cores. DEFAULT TO SIX CORE GUYS. Sell mobile chips with PERFORMANCE for power users.

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/02/10/1322206/intel-confirms-8th-gen-core-on-14nm-data-center-first-to-new-nodes

There are way too many sites out there that don't patch. Since wordpress is the most popular platform, it's an obvious thing to attack. I think they should develop some type of auto update mechanism for critical patches.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/02/virally-growing-attacks-on-unpatched-wordpress-sites-affects-2m-pages/

I purchased a Wii U refurbished the other day. I was always skeptical after trying one out in Best Buy. Turns out the demos just sucked. I actually do like some of the games.

Ended up buying several Wii U games yesterday. Got pikman 3, Mario maker, new Super Mario bros u, donkey King tropical freeze and Zelda ww.

The first wild office macro virus for Mac OS X is out.

http://thehackernews.com/2017/02/mac-osx-macro-malware.html

I'm really happy that Yale decided to rename the building after Grace Hopper. Big influence on computer science.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/11/514747243/yale-renames-calhoun-college-over-namesakes-ties-to-slavery-and-white-supremacy

I've been woking on upgrading an app from Spring Boot 1.2.4 to 1.2.8. It seems that the app wouldn't work with any version past 1.2.5 and that turned out to be an issue with Jackson serialization. Back references were not working as expected. I ended up punting on it and making a new class to represent incoming post data and then transforming that into a valid entity. Things are going smoothly now.

I setup a water cooling kit and new case for my desktop PC in January. It's an xspc setup with a alphacool waterblock for the AMD R9 Fury Nitro card. It's running as low as 22C idle and 55C under heavy load (Overwatch) with the gpu. CPU load seems to keep it in the 40s.

The best part is that unlike those self contained loops for CPUs, this is actually quieter. It's often quieter than my mac mini. That thing is loud when the fans spin up!

My testing shows it runs around 20db with overwatch going (and audio muted)

I'm experimenting with spring data elasticsearch. I've managed to use an embedded instance with the just journal site and at work I've got it running in a cluster.

I'm a big fan so far. It's not my first time using elasticsearch, but it certainly makes it easier to query.

Some of the crashing problems I was experiencing with Overwatch have been fixed. Updated NVIDIA drivers have helped some and I also found that the cooler on my CPU was starting to go. I replaced it with a water cooler and have fought a bit with the fan placement on the radiator, but at this point it's pretty stable.

The game is quite fun to play and I think blizzard needs to put out some more information to users about their network setup to minimize lag

1. Make sure your router/firewall supports UPNP and that it is configured correctly. This seems to make a big difference in game play.
2. Priority queues. Blizzard recommends against them, but I've found that setting up priority queues with game traffic getting priority as well as ACKs in pfsense helped a lot with my lag issues.
3. powerline networking hardware can cause serious lag for this game if you have any connection issues. Sometimes, I find that playing over wifi is actually more reliable despite the fact it's slower on my network.

Can't get enough overwatch. It's an amazing game despite the bugs.

A few years ago, I had to write a bunch of management scripts that setup and maintained ssh tunnels for executing commands and running symmetric ds over protected connections.

Today, I happened to stumble on a ton of different tools to issue commands to multiple servers at the same time. For example, pssh. A little googling could have saved me a lot of time.

Upon reading that Apple was killing support for the original iPad Mini with the upcoming iOS 10 update, I decided to start researching tablets. So far, I've learned the following:

iPad Pro models seem to be the air replacements. They start at $599 so they're a bit too expensive for my taste. I've also looked into higher end Android devices and found the Pixel C to be the most interesting, but again it has a pretty hefty price tag attached to it.

Some of the PC manufacturers like Lenovo and HP offer Android devices, but they're relatively low end devices with slower CPUs and inferior cameras. A 200 dollar tablet sounds nice until you go to use it.

Sony seems to be pulling out of the device market so I'm ignoring the xperia line as I don't think they're going to be around.

I think I'm going to wait and see if apple does a refresh or if there are more high end android devices. I'd probably pull the trigger on the Pixel C if it had 64GB of space for the low end price.