Writing by David Bazile

Planet.com seems to have stopped freeloader enthusiast use of their APIs for real this time.

I wrote a KWin plugin to auto-activate windows requesting attention instead of just flashing impotently in the taskbar (the KDE counterpart of GNOME’s SomeApplication is Ready problem that begat noannoyance).

I tried getting a MacOS VM running on Linux with the goal of having a simple disposable libvirt prototype so I don’t have to pay AWS $10 a minute for EC2 or drag ancient Apple hardware out of the tech closet just to run a one-off MacOS task every other month. My goal failed on simplicity so this is me documenting the why, how and other notable specifics before I move on and forget about the whole ordeal.

This is a living document containing notes, howtos and lessons-learned about installing and running VMs in libvirt I started for the purpose of keeping what I’ve learned committed to memory. I’ve published it so maybe other can also get use from it.

Sharing this script I use to make using Windows less obnoxious by removing a lot of the garbage Microsoft piled onto a default Windows install.

I run my virtualization workloads in libvirt but recently had a problem with a new Windows 10 guest not being able to run vdagent (screen resolution resizing, clipboard sharing, sane mouse cursor, etc).

I started writing this essay back in late 2019 after seeing scary recurring patterns of behavior around the use of technology in the areas of American society I have visibility into. With every passing day, the more I see how normies interact with tech, the more I’m convinced that their prolonged exposure to it contributes to their misery. Bear with me as I attempt to philosophize for a moment.

An episode in which I buy another Razer product and the Kafkaesque “utility” of Razer’s Synapse software causes buyers remorse.

Public Service Announcement: Check your spam folder for YouTube notifications if you have Gmail forwarding your mail to another account.

Apple Music is finally available on Linux!

May have to decommission Landsat Viewer because it looks like Planet.com doesn’t offer freeloader enthusiast use of their APIs anymore. :(

Keeping a few notes in an easy-to-reach place lest I forget (or end up having to reimage the disk after wrecking things beyond repair and forgetting to back stuff up first…)

A ~225 LOC program for making Gnome’s and KDE’s notifications audible by monitoring DBus for common notification pathways and playing a sound when a message matches a certain pattern (Updated 2025-01-10).

No more copy/paste from Sublime into iCloud.com’s Notes app.

Lessons learned over two years and several projects attempting to apply what I had learned after completing my masters in User Experience Design.

I accidentally discovered how to get Firefox on Fedora to play Hulu and Amazon Prime Videos and I’m finally Chrome-free again. 🎉.

This utility tries to make the multifactor authentication (MFA) login workflow with awscli a little more user-friendly.

This utility lets you maintain config files and scripts as actual files that get bundled up into the userdata instead of trying to interweave everything in hundreds of lines of brittle cat <<-EOT ... EOT blocks or take on the overhead of pre-staging files in S3 then pulling them in from the instance.

A baseline application development and deployment model based on lessons learned from the last two years of building, extending and deploying apps in CI/CD in “enterprise” GIS.

If you’re using Outlook.com to autoforward to another email address, turn off “delete after forwarding” and make sure it’s not silently dropping messages.

This week, we write a mini-report describing our iterations of the prototype design from start to finish.

This week, we refine the prototypes we built last week based on peer feedback.

This week involved building out a fully-interactive prototype of the project mobile app, showing off our designed user journeys and planned interactions.

This week, we performed an iterative wireframe exercise in order to flesh out the navigation architecture for our imaginary mobile app.

This week, we mapped out a user journey for an imaginary mobile app.

A multi-part series documenting what I’m learning about interaction design.

I recently had to defend the disabling of code style enforcement to allow function hoisting. Knowing that I wouldn’t get away with such a unilateral change without a very good reason, I wrote a lengthy justification in my commit message.

I am solidly a Python fan. There, I said it.

It appears that working with competent developers who actually get things done has had an observable effect on my coding style over the last year.

The final post in the Usability Reflections series.

This week, we wrote a proposal to customize a usability lab for mobile usability testing.

Posting a bunch of recent experiments and prototypes.

I spend this week involved in purely scholastic endeavors: lots of reading about usability on mobile devices.

This week, we compile the results from the Loop11 test and generate a high-level report of the findings.

This week, we were tasked with designing an actual remote usability test with Loop11 and running real people through it.

This week’s assignment was to evaluate two online remote research providers, determine the pros and cons and state which of the two we might be inclined to use and why.

This week’s assignment was to watch the recording sessions of three other students and compile a final usability report.

This week’s assignment was to do a scripted usability test with a live human being for practice.

This week’s assignment was to select a single Quantitative Usability Metric and evaluate its benefits and limitations.

This week’s assignment involved conjuring up a number of screening questions and tasks for potential test candidates.

This week’s assignment was to justify the suitability of using either a Summative or Formative Evaluation methodolody for conducting usability testing given a scenario where a project has already entered the development phase.

A multi-part series documenting what I’m learning about usability. Contains a moderate amount of sophomoric conjecture, logical gymnastics and the occasional soapbox rant.

Not every day do I get to use the word discombobulation, but when I do, it’s epic.

I ran across a post on HN this morning titled How I got a medal from the Army for writing code. Being a veteran coder myself, this story naturally prompted both a warm-fuzzy feeling and this celebratory me-too! post.

A period of downtime on my current project has freed some mental energy which I decided to use by learning Objective-C. My first exposure to the language was several years ago after which I reeled in horror from its syntax, thinking the only reason people put up with it is for a chance to win the App Store lottery jackpot.

I test-drove Ruby for a week and have recorded my results here, lest I forget in six months… At the risk of incurring the wrath of Rubyists everywhere, I am publishing my completely superficial, unrelated-to-any-objective-metric-whatsoever assessment of the language.

The last time I attempted to configure NetBeans to use PHPUnit is what drove me to write Tester.php. Second time’s the charm! In this post, I document the steps I took to successfully install PHPUnit 3.7 and configure NetBeans 7.3 and 7.4 to be able to run the tests and use the Skeleton Generator.

Definitely definitely not a New Years Resolution list. I’ve made a few changes to my workflow for this year. This is my attempt at documenting those changes and their effects.

The following is an account of my adventures in manually parsing SOAP server responses without actually using SOAP.

Written by me this afternoon, this script traverses a directory structure and strings all of the supported files together into a single plaintext file – essentially, a compressionless archive. Under normal circumstances, no one should ever need this…

Labor Day weekend was plagued by intermittent WiFi issues. Streaming was effectively impossible as ping times were sky high and Netflix buffering was occurring once every two minutes. The following is the historical log of events. Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Performed a Windows 7 reinstall this weekend. In the spirit of actually documenting these things so I’m not scrambling off into Google every time I have to do this, this post is a very unscientific description of how I was able to restore GRUB after the install.

Coming from PHP, I’ve found a few differences between the way I like doing things and The Python Way that are seriously challenging my assumptions. Some I like, some I don’t, and some I’m just plain old conflicted about.

So, the plan for converting my makeshift CMS, blog.php, over to Python has been shelved indefinitely.