• Cameras as Traffic Cops – Hacker Noon

  Guy trains model on NYC traffic camera video to detect blocked bike lanes and bus stops. Estimates “the number of tickets being given represents less than .0001% of infractions”. (via lemonodor)

  (tags: via:lemonodorfutureticketstrafficnyccamerassurveillancebike-lanesbus-stopstraffic-law)

• Ken Foxe’s Beginner’s Guide to FOI

  This guide is designed to be read by members of the public or journalists looking to dip their toes into the world of Freedom of Information in Ireland. It is not designed to be an authoritative guide to FOI, a history book, or an academic text … it is simply a useful introduction to the first steps, the language, and the things you need to know before you start.

  (tags: foiafoigovernmentirelandken-foxe)

• Apache Airflow at Pandora – Algorithm and Blues

  sounds like they are pretty into Airflow

  (tags: airflowpythonapachepandoraopen-sourceschedulingdags)

With Apache board elections coming up soon, an ASF Member came up with a great set of questions for all director candidates. With permission, I’m sharing those questions here, and providing my answers as well.

I’ve also posted my own Director Position Statement for this year (and past years!).

Questions For Board Candidates

Missions, Visions…and Decisions

The ASF exists with a primary goal of “providing open source software to the public, at no charge”. What do you consider to be the foundation’s most important secondary (implicit) goal?

Fostering independent and collaborative communities; in particular by mentoring and encouraging our contributors and members to step up and become mentors and exemplars of the Apache Way so they can help others.

Looking ahead, 5 years, 10 years…what do you hope the biggest change (that you can conceivably contribute to) to the Foundation will be, if any? What are your greatest concerns?

That all Board < -> PMC communications are simple, concise, and friendly.

Think about the phrase “the board is a big hammer” – is that really how we want to operate? I’d rather have us conceptually expand the IPMC Mentor < -> Podling PPMC relationship, where the board (and the Membership at large) serve as regular and helpful mentors to Apache projects throughout their lifetime. In the very rare cases where a PMC does go off the rails, we need the board as a whole to cleanly engage as a kind but firm mentor, making it a friendly learning process, not a mixed message of a hammer from multiple people.

My greatest concern is our entirely flat hierarchy: we can’t change that, but we must learn how to focus it and keep it polite. Flat works on a project scale, because everyone the PMC has one codebase they all use. Flat at the Foundation level means we have 600+ Members who can each jump in to try to fix a problem in a single PMC.

Which aspect(s) (if any) of the way the ASF operates today are you least satisfied with? What would you do to change it?

Discussion behavior on private mailing lists. Our projects have pretty good behavior – because they’re smaller active communities, and because they are focused on software, where there tend to be obvious answers to technical questions.

At the Member level, we need to deal with corporate operations and policy making. Budget, legal, brand, press, – these are areas that 1) many of us don’t have deep expertise in, and 2) don’t have as obvious or simple answers as software problems do.

Ensuring that the Membership, the board, and all our officers keep conversations here focused, polite, and productive is our biggest challenge. Since we rely on volunteers for all policy making, making this process more welcoming is the first step to improving the actual operations and work we do to provide support to all our projects.

Budget and Operations

Which roles do you envision moving towards paid roles. Is this the right move, and if not, what can we do to prevent/delay this?

Infra, obviously: keeping our infra team fully staffed – anytime we can provide more services safely with our own staff to our projects helps ensure their independence from corporate donors.

The other area is editorial help: while we have many, many useful emails, web pages, and presentations explaining the Apache Way, we need to organize them all and provide well-written materials that everyone can find and understand easily, even newcomers. Even a short-term information architect or editor to organize the apache.org developer portal and Community Development website, and give a focus and structure to the great volunteer-created content we have would be incredibly valuable. Volunteers do a great job on the parts; having a coherent whole would mean we can succeed in reaching our communities easily.

What, if anything, would you do to ensure that budgets are approved on time? does it even matter?

It absolutely matters – both to our suppliers (like Virtual and our contractors!) and to our volunteer officers who manage expenses. The first step is to clearly document the process – it’s all explained in emails on the Operations list each year, but we don’t have a comprehensive budget calendar and process documented on the website at a stable URL. That is simple to fix – modulo volunteers to actually write, edit, and check the work in.

80%+ of budgets should be super-simple and obvious – we need cloud servers and infra peeps. The rest of budget should be clear proposals by volunteer officers stating a need, a plan to meet that need, and a cost for the board’s consideration.

If you had to pick a keyword for budget planning and execution, which would it be? Things like “transparency”, “timeliness”, “cost-effective”

Transparency, clearly documented process.

Membership and Governance

Should the membership play a more prominent role in decision-making at the ASF? If so, where do you propose this be?

Yes – on the same lines as merit within our project communities. That means providing alternatives or documented reasons for -1s; it also means showing up to help do the work for +1s.

Membership brings access to all areas of Foundation operations, but we need to remember that each operational area has its own merit that should be earned independently. Being a Member means you can show up on any list but doesn’t mean you get a binding vote there yet.

What would be your take on the cohesion of the ASF, the PMCs, the membership and the communities. Are we one big happy family, or just a bunch of silos? Where do you see it heading, and where do we need to take action, if anywhere?

We’re a bunch of big happy families. Happy is good, but different families means we often have different views of what being an Apache project means.

We need two things: better document what the “Apache Way” means, and what the board expects projects to do (or not), and more organized and cohesive mentoring and culture sharing across all of our projects – and across Foundation operations too.

If you were in charge of overall community development, what would you focus on as your primary and secondary goal? How would you implement what you think is needed to achieve this?

The real need for the ComDev PMC is to focus and empower our many volunteers to improve our overall documentation, education, and social message as a cohesive whole that helps our communities do their work.

The key tasks are to put forth some clear goals, and mentor/help/encourage all committers that show up on how to build effective and lasting materials that we can use and re-use across all our communities – and outside our communities as well. We have lots of individual volunteers and separate bits of content – what we need now is tying them together, and ensuring we have better writing and editing so the information is easy to approach and understand.

Show and Tell

What is, in your view, your proudest accomplishment in your time at the ASF? How’d that make you feel?

Creating our comprehensive set of trademark and branding policies, including explanations of how to deal with issues suited to our communities, both in terms of content and expertise level. Bonus achievement: other organizations have copied parts of those policies and procedures, and I’ve been asked by FOSS leaders and lawyers at other organizations for help as well. That makes me feel great, for achieving something important enough that others want to use it.

Which abilities/skills do you think you’ll bring to the board, that would improve or strengthen the foundation?

Clear and polite communication and organization skills, to help us be efficient at making decisions, and ensure that our discussions, records, and any policy or best practices we decide on are easy for the world to understand – both the how, and the why.

Who do you admire the most at the foundation (past/present), and may we know why?

Brian Behlendorf, one of the ASF’s founders, wrote lots of cool code, ran servers, all sorts of amazeballs useful stuff, etc. But I admire him for his humility, kindness, and helpfulness to everyone who asks.

Very early committers remember when they first got their Apache accounts, Brian would personally send friendly and welcoming root@ emails with their new account details – since some of the original ASF servers were in his house. That friendliness and willingness to help is my goal.

Ponies or gnomes? (yes/no?)

Ponies, of course! Trick question – gnomes muck up all the works.

Thanks for the great questions!

The post Where Is The ASF Going? Director Q&A appeared first on Community Over Code.

Once again late to the party, I came across Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

And devoured it.

My reaction to Neil Gaiman, in general, is quite similar to my reaction to Stephen King: amazing, fascinating, compelling books, but often the subject matter, or theme, or setting, is too disturbing for me and I avoid even attempting the book.

American Gods is plenty disturbing, no doubt about it.

But it is also intoxicating and absorbing.

Whenever I think about Stephen King, and how he must work, I envision that there is some moment where he suddenly gets an idea, vivid and remarkable, and then he develops it and develops it and develops it, and the result is The Dark Tower, or some such.

With American Gods, I wonder if the original spark for Gaiman was actually captured in the title of the book, and perhaps went something like this: Who are the American Gods? We know about Norse Gods, and Greek Gods, and Egyptian Gods, and Chinese Gods, so surely there must be American Gods?

And as he thought about this, perhaps he thought, well: people came to America, and so perhaps their gods came to America, too?

Hyacinth learned some French, and was taught a few of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Each day he cut sugar cane from well before the sun rose until after the sun had set.

He fathered several children. He went with the other slaves, in the small hours of the night, to the woods, although it was forbidden, to dance the Calinda, to sing to Damballa-Wedo, the serpent god, in the form of a black snake. He sang to Elegba, to Ogu, Shango, Zaka, and to many others, all the gods the captives had brought with them to the island, brought in their minds and their secret hearts.

And yet, gods also emerge from a place, so what sort of gods might emerge from America? Well it would depend a lot on what Americans believed in:

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. [...] " She stopped, out of breath.

Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, "Okay. So if I tell you what I've learned you won't think that I'm a nut."

"Maybe," she said. "Try me."

"Would you believe that all the gods that people have ever imagined are still with us today?"

"... maybe."

"And that there are new gods out there, gods of computers and telephones and whatever, and that they all seem to think there isn't room for them both in the world. And that some kind of war is likely."

But what would happen as these new gods emerged? And what would happen to those old gods, here in America?

"This is a bad land for gods," said Shadow. As an opening statement it wasn't Friends, Romans, Countrymen, but it would do. "You've probably all learned that, in your own way. The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either you've been forgotten, or you're scared you're going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you're just getting tired of existing on the whim of people."

The problem is, as Gaiman observes, that America is America, and that has some pretty serious consequences, both for the old and for the new:

There was an arrogance to the new ones. Shadow could see that. But there was also a fear.

They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over.

American Gods is already 17 years old, and as I read through it I thought it was fated to be a book stuck in a certain time. After all, for a book about "gods of computers and telephones and whatever," there isn't a self-driving car or a social media app or a virtual reality headset to be found anywhere in the book.

But as Gaiman, an Englishman and yet also a converted American, knows deeply in his soul, so much of what makes America America is distinct from the momentary matters of a certain time or place:

"The battle you're here to fight isn't something that any of you can win or lose. The winning and the losing are unimportant to him, to them. What matters is that enough of you die. Each of you that falls in battle gives him power. Every one of you that dies, feeds him. Do you understand?"

Laser-focused and razor-sharp, Gaiman's clarity of vision and courage to let the truth emerge from the telling produces a sure and solid result, a book that doubtless will be read and re-read decades from now, for its story, in the end, is timeless.

We're nearly halfway through the 2018 Candidates Tournament (6 of the 14 rounds have been played).

The contest is hard-fought, with not much space from first (Caruana) to last (Karjakin). There have been 9 decisive results, and 15 draws. Of the decisive results, 5 have been with the white pieces, and 4 with the black pieces. Kramnik's games have been the sharpest, as he has had 2 wins, 2 losses, and 2 draws. Only Ding Liren, the 25-year-old Chinese superstar, has no decisive results yet, playing 6 draws so far.

Meanwhile, if all these beautiful, if deep and mysterious, grandmaster chess games aren't providing you enough entertainment, perhaps you need to liven things up (and no, I don't mean you should start rooting for the University of Maryland Baltimore County Retrievers, wonderful though last night's result was)?

Rather, you could get your way over to Twitch, and tune in to the hottest e-Sport online: I Want My ChessTV

Compare that to a typical session with the Chessbrahs, the most popular chess streamers on Twitch. Over the course of one of their streams, which can last up to four hours, you might see chairs thrown amid a torrent of f-bombs, freestyle rapping mid-game, and a never-ending barrage of trash talk. This is the new, online era of chess—set to the soundtrack of dance music.

Although certainly not the same thing as the Chessbrahs, chess as an e-Sport is finding, perhaps, some real traction.

Here, locally, there's a significant e-Sports chess event just a few weeks away: PRO Chess League Finals Set For San Francisco

The world's best chess players will travel to San Francisco to compete in a live championship organized by Chess.com and Twitch, the companies announced today. This epic event will be the culmination of Chess.com's Professional Rapid Online (PRO) Chess League, a groundbreaking, season-long competition with the world's top chess players representing international regions. The two-day event kicks off at 10 a.m. on April 7 at the Folsom Street Foundry and will also be live-broadcast exclusively on Chess.com’s Twitch channel (twitch.tv/chess).

Twitch have immense resources behind them, as they are part of Amazon, now.

So, who knows? Maybe this is really a thing?

py-fortress is a Python API implementing Role-Based Access Control level 0 – Core.  It’s still pretty new so there’s going to be some rough edges that will need to be smoothed out in the coming weeks.

To try it out, clone its git repo and use one of the fortress docker images for OpenLDAP or Apache Directory.  The README has the details.

py-fortress git repo

The API is pretty simple to use.

Admin functions work like this

# Add User:
admin_mgr.add_user(User(uid='foo', password='secret'))

# Add Role:
admin_mgr.add_role(Role(name='customer'))

# Assign User:
admin_mgr.assign(User(uid='foo'), Role(name='customer'))

# Add Permission:
admin_mgr.add_perm_obj(PermObj(obj_name='shopping-cart'))
admin_mgr.add_perm(Perm(obj_name='shopping-cart', op_name='checkout'))

# Grant:
admin_mgr.grant(Perm(obj_name='shopping-cart', op_name='checkout'),Role(name='customer')) 

Access control functions

# Create Session, False means mandatory password authentication.
session = access_mgr.create_session(User(uid='foo', password='secret'), False)

# Permission check, returns True if allowed:
result = access_mgr.check_access(session, Perm(obj_name='shopping-cart', op_name='checkout'))

# Get all the permissions allowed for user:
perms = access_mgr.session_perms(session)

# Check a role:
result = access_mgr.is_user_in_role(session, Role(name='customer'))

# Get all roles in the session:
roles = access_mgr.session_roles(session)

In addition, there’s the full compliment of review apis as prescribed by RBAC.  If interested, look at the RBAC modules:

• admin_mgr
• review_mgr
• access_mgr

Each of the modules have comments that describe the functions, along with their required and optional attributes.

Try it out and let me know what you think.  There will be a release in the near future that will include some additional tooling.  If it takes off, RBAC1 – RBAC3 will follow.

On the day that both Claire's and Toys 'R' Us file for bankruptcy, perhaps we can pause briefly and contemplate:

• How vulture capitalists ate Toys 'R' Us

  After big success in the 1980s, Toys 'R' Us' performance turned lackluster in the 1990s. Sales were flat and profits shrank. Toys 'R' Us was a public company at the time, and the board of directors decided to put it up for sale. The buyers were a real estate investment firm called Vornado, and two private equity firms named KKR and Bain Capital. [...]

  The trio put up $6.6 billion to pay off Toys 'R' Us' shareholders. But it was a leveraged buyout: Only 20 percent came out out of the buyers' pockets. The other 80 percent was borrowed. Once Toys 'R' Us was acquired, it became responsible for paying off that massive debt burden[...]

  [...]

  Whatever magic Bain, KKR, and Vornado were supposed to work never materialized. From the purchase in 2004 through 2016, the company's sales never rose much above $11 billion. They actually fell from $13.5 billion in 2013 back to $11.5 billion in 2017.

• Claire's Plans Bankruptcy, With Creditors Taking Over

  Claire’s Stores Inc., the fashion accessories chain where legions of preteens got their ears pierced, is preparing to file for bankruptcy in the coming weeks, according to people with knowledge of the plans.

  The company is closing in on a deal in which control would pass from Apollo Global Management LLC to lenders including Elliott Capital Management and Monarch Alternative Capital, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter isn’t public. Venor Capital Management and Diameter Capital Partners are also involved, the people said. The move should help ease the $2 billion debt load at Claire’s.

• America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning

  The root cause is that many of these long-standing chains are overloaded with debt—often from leveraged buyouts led by private equity firms. There are billions in borrowings on the balance sheets of troubled retailers, and sustaining that load is only going to become harder—even for healthy chains.

  The debt coming due, along with America’s over-stored suburbs and the continued gains of online shopping, has all the makings of a disaster. The spillover will likely flow far and wide across the U.S. economy. There will be displaced low-income workers, shrinking local tax bases and investor losses on stocks, bonds and real estate. If today is considered a retail apocalypse, then what’s coming next could truly be scary.

• Ten Reasons Why I Don’t Like Golang

  When I first started programming in Go, my summary of it was, “The good things are great and the bad things are weird and I can live with them.” After another three years and a few large projects in Go, I no longer like the language and wouldn’t use it for a new project. Here are 10 reasons why, in no particular order.

  (tags: golanggocodinglanguagesprogramminggripes)

• A quantitive analysis of the impact of arbitrary blockchain content on Bitcoin

  ‘People put all sorts of things into the Bitcoin blockchain – some of it objectionable, some of it illegal. Now what?’

  (tags: blockchainbitcoinledgerimmutabilityinternetlawcrimepapers)

• SXSW 2018: A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System – IEEE Spectrum

  Author Brian Dear on how these terminals were designed for coursework, but students preferred to chat and play games […] “Out of the top 10 programs on PLATO running any day, most were games,” Dear says. “They used more CPU time than anything else.” In one popular game called Empire, players blast each other’s spaceships with phasers and torpedoes in order to take over planets.

  And PLATO had code review built into the OS:

  Another helpful feature that no longer exists was called Term Comment. It allowed users to leave feedback for developers and programmers at any place within a program where they spotted a typo or had trouble completing a task. To do this, the user would simply open a comment box and leave a note right there on the screen. Term Comment would append the comment to the user’s place in the program so that the recipient could easily navigate to it and clearly see the problem, instead of trying to recreate it from scratch on their own system. “That was immensely useful for developers,” Dear says. “If you were doing QA on software, you could quickly comment, and it would track exactly where the user left this comment. We never really got this on the Web, and it’s such a shame that we didn’t.”

  (tags: platocomputinghistorychatempiregamingcode-reviewcodingbrian-dear)

Last week while helping my wife load a household appliance we were donating into her aunt’s pickup was the sickening sound of my right bicep detaching itself from the elbow distal tendon.  The pain was bad, of course, but the realization of the extent of the injury was worse.  Suddenly plans of completing a 3rd consecutive DirtyKanza were nixed.  In addition to a surgical reattachment, performed yesterday, there’s several months of recovery and rehab before I can return to riding once again.

In situations like this one must focus on the positives.

• Injury to right arm and I’m left-handed.
• We have health insurance and can take the steps necessary for a full recovery.
• Support of a wonderful family, friends and employer.
• I can still code.
• Inside trainer to maintain conditioning on order.

There’s not much value in thinking about the negatives or what-ifs.  Life has a way of throwing curve balls.  Find a way of knocking the cover off it anyway.

As far as what’s next.  I already mentioned the trainer which will be a way to maintain conditioning during the lull.

Once the splint comes off and the brace is opened enough to hold on I am going to try and get some rides in (despite doctor’s orders) and we’ll see what happens come June 2nd.

photo courtesy of http://www.swiftwick.com/sw/cycling/kanza-does-not-care-

"Open up the champagne, pop! 🍾" -- Flo Rida, My House

I’m thrilled to announce that Hefe, my 1966 21-Window VW Bus, is finally finished!

It only took 4,342 days, starting on April 17, 2006 and ending just a couple weeks ago (March 7, 2018).

When I last wrote about Hefe, I mentioned he was in the shop getting a better stereo.

For Hefe's stereo, I tried going phone-only for a controller. This turned out to be a bad idea, mostly due to bit Play HD and its terrible mobile app. Also, Hefe is lowered and a bit bumpy in the front, so trying to use a touch screen while driving doesn't work very well. He's in the shop now getting a new deck installed.

My dad and I visited Elevated Audio to pick him up two weeks ago today. I’ve known the owner, Andrew, ever since I hired him to install a sweet system in Stout the Syncro in 2013. Back then, his business was named Andrew’s Installs. Fast forward five years and his business is thriving. For a good reason too, his team and their attention to detail is magnificent.

It sounds fucking incredible.

Having Hefe finished sometimes makes me misty eyed when I drive him.

I was especially pumped to get Hefe back because we’d signed him up to be in Denver’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

That’s where the untold story begins.

Last Friday evening, I washed and polished him to get ready. While cleaning him, I accidentally sprayed a bunch of water on the engine. It’s a no-no to drench a car’s engine when it’s not running. I’d done this to our Syncro six months after we got it and it might’ve contributed to our engine’s untimely death.

After I finished, I tried to start Hefe. The engine turned over just fine, but it’d barely fire and never catch. I pumped the gas pedal a bunch and eventually gave up thinking I'd flooded the engine. I told myself to revisit the problem in an hour; maybe things would dry out by then.

I didn’t tell Trish about the problem until I’d tried (and failed) to start him an hour later. I took off the distributor cap and dried things out. I wiggled and re-routed some wires. Moving wires around made the spark plugs fire but in the wrong order. I reverted my changes and told Trish the bad news.

We couldn’t be in the parade without a running bus.

I cursed, loudly.

Trish’s high-school friend was flying in from NYC with her family that night. Trish left for the airport to pick them up, suggesting “we could go skiing instead” as she left.

Shortly after, I recognized my lousy attitude and vowed to turn things around.

“Now it’s flooded,” I thought. I knew the wires were correct.

I threw on my University of Denver hockey jersey and went to my living room to finish watching them in a playoff game. They beat the Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs 3-2, and I celebrated with a cold Guinness.

Then I strolled outside, sat in Hefe, told him he could do it and started him right up. 💥

Wahoo! He recovered!!

The parade was epic.

We all felt glorious; cranking the stereo, blowing bubbles out the top, dancing up a storm, and basking in the happiness that is downtown Denver on St. Paddy’s Day. 🍀🤗

Yes, there will likely be more to do to Hefe in the coming years. That’s OK. He inspires smiles every time I drive him and providing joy to people is a beautiful experience.

Kudos to all seven Colorado shops that made Hefe possible. I won’t say he’s worth every penny, but he’s pretty darn close! 😍

• awslabs/awscli-aliases

  The AWS CLI tool supports aliases, a la git, so you can do things like “aws whoami” aliased to “aws sts get-caller-identity”.

• The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal

  ‘Part of the NSA’s Bitcoin access, codenamed MONKEYROCKET, involved essentially tricking targets into using privacy software (a VPN app?) that was actually feeding information directly to the agency.’

• HTTP/2 Test

  ‘A simple HTTP/2.0 test tool’

• Arena

  Film by Páraic McGloughlin A brief look at the earth from above, based on the shapes we make, the game of life, our playing ground – Arena. Created using Google Earth imagery. Pearse McGloughlin and I collaborated on the audio resulting in something between music and a soundtrack. Audio mastered by TJ LippleHear

Board statement:

• "Community over code" to me includes rewarding contributions that aren't code. I believe it is important to get people into the foundation that are committed to both our projects as well as the foundation itself - helping us in all sorts of ways, including but not limited to coding, documenting, marketing, mentoring, legal, education and more.
• "What didn't happen on the mailing list didn't happen" to me means communicating as publicly as possible (while keeping privacy as needed) to enable others to better understand where we are, how we work, what we value and ultimately how to help us. I would like for us to think twice before sending information to private lists - both at the project and at the operational level.
• I believe we can do better in getting those into the loop who have a vested interest in seeing that our projects are run in a vendor neutral way: Our downstream users who rely on Apache projects for their daily work.

Answers to questions to the board nominees:

• Brad Templeton’s commentary on the Uber robocar killing a pedestrian

  At this point, it does seem as though a wrongful death lawsuit might emerge from the family of the victim. The fame for the lawyer will cause pro bono representation to appear, and the deep pockets of Uber will certainly be attractive. I recommend Uber immediately offer a settlement the courts would consider generous. And tell us more information about what really happened. And, if it’s as surmised, to get their act together. The hard truth is, that if Uber’s vehicle is unable to detect a pedestrian like this in time to stop, Uber has no business testing at 40mph on a road like this. Certainly not with an inattentive solo safety driver.

  It certainly sounds like they need to answer questions about LIDAR usage on that car.