Archive of posts from
2021
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My Great Granddad's Chicken Recipe
26 September 2021
My great granddad used to make chicken similar to this using a basting
mixture. This is his recipe with some modifications by me to get more
browning out of it. He poured it over with a whiskey bottle and a speed
pour, I use a mug and a brush to be more efficient with the liquid. He
did it with chicken quarters, but I prefer using a spatch-cocked chicken.
He also used a different vinegar than I do.
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TIL my site is a JAMStack site.
10 September 2021
Today I learned that my site which has been basically the same since
2016 is a JAMStack site. Although it was coined in 2015 by
Netlify, it seems to have become really popular in the past 2 years as a
term. I’m told it’s more of a theoretical framework than anything else.
JAMStack stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.
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A Review of "Extraterrestrial" by Avi Loeb
01 September 2021
I’ve been listening to “Extraterrestrial” by Avi Loeb published in
January 2021. It is a decent book with some flaws in it’s presentation
and dialogue. It’s about what is believed to be the first extra solar
object found called “Oumuamua” and how it’s weird properties might
indicate that was made by intelligent extraterrestrial life. It also
covers a fair bit of the author’s academic career which seem to be very
successful based on how many committees he’s on, and some of the issues
he sees with the academic community and how funding is allocated.
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Search Suggestions on My Website
27 July 2021
I previously talked about the search engine I recently added to my
blog, and this is an extension to that previous post. Here I will
discuss how I added a simple search suggestion option. It works for my
website with the limited vocabulary and time to return results, but if I
was working on a larger site I might try to make it smarter. So here’s
how I implemented it.
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The Problem with Regex Search and Replace in Java
15 July 2021
I had an issue where I needed to support
search and replace of certain quoted strings in various scripts which take the
form of $(VARNAME). There’s a minor issue with Java where if the replaced by
string contains certain characters where it will quit with an unhelpful message
like “IndexNotFound: Match group 5 not found” or something similar. This is how to
resolve that error, and the importance of escaping things.
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Adding Search to My Static Blog Using AWS Lambda and SQLite
09 July 2021
I always wanted to have search on my site, but it’s statically hosted,
so I can’t have any dynamic content on it. I recently resolved that by
creating a little tiny lambda function on AWS that queries a SQLite
database hosted on S3. Here I’ll walk you through how I created the
back-end for it, and in some later posts I’ll include details on
calculating the cost.
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Visiting the NYC Fire Fighter Museum
06 July 2021
I was in New York City for 4th of July this year. I actually discovered
a pretty cool museum when I saw this firefighting boat docked near
Little Island, which had great views of New Jersey. I searched for Fire
Boat tours, but there was none to be found. However I did find a
firefighter museum which was really cool. So I went because it was
raining a little bit outside and just a little bit dreary out.
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A Blender Muddled Julep Inspired Strawberry Cocktail
05 June 2021
So I had some inspiration with some fresh strawberries and some
homegrown mint, so I decided to try to make a blender muddled cocktail.
Blender muddling is a technique described in “Liquid Intelligence” by
Dave Arnold. It’s designed to maximize flavor extraction while
minimizing oxidation. I think this is really simple and flavorful
cocktail. This recipe I have described will serve 3 people.
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Using a Bash Script to Generate Random Fake Data To Insert Into DynamoDB
30 March 2021
I’ve been studying for my developer associate certification on Amazon
Web Services. I’ve been practicing with the various streaming solutions
like SQS and Kinesis lately. I’ve wanted to branch into using DynamoDB
and capturing changes. To do that I needed to generate a lot of take
data.
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I Cooked a Leg of Lamb on my Smoker.
26 March 2021
I made a glazed leg of lamb on the smoker. These are the pictures of how
I served it, and the procedure of how I cooked it.
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Converting a JavaScript array of strings to numbers, and the problem with `Array.map`
15 March 2021
JavaScript has a very weird type system with how strings can sometimes
be converted to numbers. It’s a very cool feature but can cause a lot of
pain because adding 1 doesn’t always do what you think it should due to
type-juggling. So you might think there’s an easy and relatively
foot-gun free to convert an array of strings to numbers. You would be
wrong, well maybe not at least if you don’t use the functional language
stuff in JavaScript or just do an in-place update or your array, but
that’s besides the point.
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A Brief and Painless Introduction To Bash
27 January 2021
A pretty decent introduction to Bash for pipelines and interactive use.
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Adding `pylint` to your Github Actions flow
21 January 2021
Recently, I’ve been doing more CICD work, so I wanted to practice adding
some of that to my personal projects. I’ve also taken a liking to
pylint, so I decided to have Github Actions automatically
check my code quality on push for my log-analysis
repository. This is how I added that linting to my workflow.
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Finding Jekyll Posts to Update With Cover Images
10 January 2021
I recently updated my site to make use of cover images on the post
listing. I wanted to make sure that I got all of the posts that need to
be updated. I used grep to find posts which had an image in them, but no
cover attribute in their front-matter.
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PyGame FFT Audio Visualizations
07 January 2021
This tutorial is to write a very simple audio visualizer using
PyGame, PyAudio, and Numpy. The visualization uses the
frequency domain of some input sound, and display a bar graph of the
frequency domain as the audio plays. The audio source is the computer
line-in or microphone.