Tales from the jar side: My new homepage, The Internet Wayback machine, The Rest Can Wait, and amusing tweets
The oldest computer was used by Adam and Eve. It was an Apple. Just one byte and everything crashed.
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 3 - July 10, 2022. This week I taught the two-day Introduction to the Gradle Build Tool course for Gradle, Inc.
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Kousen IT Facelift
I’ve been planning to update the Kousen IT homepage for years. When I started my own company back in 2005, I created it using a simple HTML frameset (shudder). It’s probably just as well that it’s been lost …
… oh wait. Nothing is ever really lost on the Internet, is it? Thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine, here’s a snapshot of what my original homepage looked like back in April, 2005 (snapshot from 2006, but nothing changed by then):
A couple of comments are in order:
Yes, at one time I actually had hair.
This was a Struts 1.0 app, running on Tomcat on a laptop in my office. Hey, what could go wrong?
By May, 2010, things had moved along a bit:
The updates included:
A couple of GitHub repositories featuring a few apps I’d written. I don’t think they work any more.
A link to the album The Rest Can Wait recorded by my son’s band, The Tension. I still love that album. (More about that below.)
A Twitter widget, showing my feed, which was pretty low volume back then.
A graph from the Job Trends widget from indeed.com, who sadly is no longer available.
Moving lower:
Also included:
A link to GroovyMag, for which I wrote a few articles
My Altova Education Partner logo, for a certification I acquired on the XMLSpy editor
A TripIt widget showing that I had no trips scheduled at the moment. This was right before I joined the NFJS tour, though, so that was really going to change.
By about 2015, I got tired of my friends making fun of my website. Everything by that point was JavaScript libraries and CSS styles, and I didn’t want to dig into all that. I therefore hired someone to redo my site for me. The result was this:
The single-page app had several sections, and that logo rotated through a series of topics.
By then I’d started recording some video courses for O’Reilly Media, so I had links to those, and I also had a series of links at the bottom that included, believe it or not, Google+.
The problem was, the person who wrote the site used a couple of frameworks I didn’t understand, so I couldn’t update it myself. I eventually had him do an update, but nothing happened after that — for literally years (hangs head in shame).
There things remained until this week, when I finally did something about all this.
The stack I’m now using is based on Hugo, the static site generator, which includes tons of themes. I selected the Raditian Free Hugo Theme and set about customizing it. That took a fair amount of doing, because it turned out the theme itself used a few CSS libraries (like Bootstrap) and lots of detailed code which I didn’t know.
Suffice it to say it took me awhile to get everything looking okay, and it took longer to figure out how to deploy the processed result to Heroku, where I host everything now. I wound up using a buildpack, which converts the site to static HTML and deploys it automatically, but unfortunately the buildpack I wanted to use was out of date and didn’t work. Fortunately, this blog post by Joan Tolós explained the problem and gave me a workaround, and now my site appears to be okay. You can find it here, of course.
The basic look is very simple:
You can scroll down, or follow the links at the top to see my books, a bit about my education and experience, and some contact info. At this stage in my career I no longer feel the need to stuff everything in there. The site seems to work properly on both desktop and mobile, and it’s easy enough to update using git.
It’s about freakin’ time.
The Rest Can Wait
Assuming you read the previous section, you might have been struck by the oblique reference to my son’s band and album. I wrote a couple of blog posts about the experience of recording that album way back in 2010. In case you’re interested, here are links to the two posts:
The band was called The Tension, and I’m sure my son would be happy for me NOT to link to their MySpace page (!). My role in the whole process was basically to act as a roadie (I drove them to the studio and back) and provide some financial support. The tiny, local label they were on had a recording studio in New Britain, CT, which charged about $60/hour. The label paid half of that, and I paid half the rest. The boys therefore only had to come up with about $15/hour, which was enough for them to keep working while they were there.
Here’s an early picture of the band:
My son was the lead singer and rhythm guitarist, and he looks about as much like that picture now as I do of the picture at the top of this newsletter. That is to say, not much.
The album is available on iTunes and other music services, but a few years ago someone posted a YouTube playlist of all the songs:
Sadly, the band didn’t last much longer than that, but I was very happy they at least finished the album.
Finally, here’s a picture that my wife snuck of the two of us today:
As you can see, he stole all my hair.
Tweet’s And Such
This upcoming week is UberConf, one of the so-called destination shows on the NFJS tour, and I’ll be giving a lot of technical talks, so I’m not doing anything technical in this week’s newsletter. Instead, let’s see what happened in the world at large.
I found the included article at the New York Times entertaining, and as a subscriber I am able to share it for free. It describes a chess puzzle that was solved using a simple network graph, and I found the explanation easy enough to follow. The article is about the awarding of the Fields Medal, which is a mathematics award given out only every four years, and only to mathematicians under the age of 40.
Part of the reason for the existence of the Fields Medal is there is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. Rumor always had it that the reason for that is Alfred Nobel’s wife ran off with a mathematician, but sadly that appears not to be true.
When I was an undergrad, a Fields Medalist guest lectured in one of my courses. (I’d give you his name, but I don’t remember.) He was clear and understandable until someone asked him a question, at which point he wandered off into Hilbert Space, never to return.
Dad Jokes
Needs a rimshot.
Here’s another good one:
Think about it.
One Geeky Item
For those who don’t get the reference: the image is from the movie Arrival, where they had to figure out how to communicate with aliens. The whiteboard explains how to save your work and exit out of the vi editor, which comes with every Unix system. That joke is really funny for the right audience.
I can’t believe these still get laughs, but the related jokes I’ve used are:
I’ve been a vi user for three years, mostly because I can’t figure out how to get out, and
Emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor.
Reuse those jokes at your peril.
Crypto Diversity
Yeah, sorry about that. I promise to do better from now on.
Superpowers
Healing factor, get it? Here’s another Canadian joke I saw once but I can’t find the original source:
Q: How do you get a group of Canadians to leave the pool?
A: Everyone get out of the pool, please.
Deep Space Diversity
I had to think about that one. Her follow-up tweet identified the listed characters as Sisko, Kira, Dax, Bashir & Garak, Odo, Rom, and O’Brien. Make of that what you will.
Finally, I didn’t tweet it, but I’ll say that this: Season one of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds was as good as season two of Star Trek: Picard was bad, and that’s very high praise indeed.
What I did tweet was medical:
Have a great week everybody. :)
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Introduction to the Gradle Build Tool, Gradle, Inc.
This week:
UberConf, in Denver, CO. I’m giving a full-day workshop on the latest features in Java, and seven talks, which is a much lower load this year than last. My real goal is to make it home without catching the new BA.5 variant of COVID. Wish me luck!
The site looks really good! I actually need to do something like this for my wife's business. Thank you for the inspiration. It looks professional. You would never know it was really done by a PHd in Aero&ME + Masters CS average kind of guy. :)