bazile.org

2020 03/03

Razer: Decent hardware ruined by bad software; change my mind

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

2019 11/16

PSA - Gmail may be marking YouTube notifications as spam

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

2019 10/30

Apple Music on Linux

Apple Music is finally available on Linux!

2019 10/17

End of an Era?

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

2019 10/12

Raspbian Notes (Updated)

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…)

2019 05/30

Audible Gnome Notifications

A ~150 LOC program for making Gnome’s notifications audible by monitoring DBus for common notification pathways and playing a sound when a message matches a certain pattern.

2019 05/06

iCloud.com's Notes app keybindings fixed

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

2019 01/14

Compatibility of Cost-Center Development and Usability

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

2019 01/08

Watching Hulu and Prime Video in Firefox on Fedora

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

2018 05/20

A Nicer MFA Workflow with awscli

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

2018 05/19

Bootstrapping EC2 instances with user-data "resource bundles"

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.

2017 12/09

Architecture, Deployment and Operations

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.

2017 12/08

Added a new phrase to my lexicon

“drive-by” UI

A class of user interfaces written by developers who look down on frontend developers because “UI is easy”. These developers build spectacularly brittle UIs in a short amount of time, then move on to whatever other activity they deem worthy of their skills, leaving chaos and destruction in their wake.

These hastily-built UIs underperform and blow up regularly, after which they usually become the responsibility of actual frontend developers to extend.

2017 10/05

Usefulness of GSuite Calendar Notifications

2017 10/01

Outlook.com and Data Loss

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.

2017 01/28

Quote: Clarity

How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity—in short: what mathematicians call “elegance”—are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?

Dijkstra

2016 08/07

Principle of Least Surprise

2016 07/22

Apple Music: Voice and Tone

2016 06/26

Interaction Design Reflections: Report Writing

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

2016 06/13

Interaction Design Reflections: Interactive Prototypes (Redux)

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

2016 06/11

Interaction Design Reflections: Interactive Prototypes

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

2016 05/30

Interaction Design Reflections: Wireframes

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

2016 05/23

Interaction Design Reflections: User Journeys

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

2016 05/22

Interaction Design Reflections (Series)

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

2016 04/02

But I had a polyfill...

2016 01/31

Quote: Complexity Creep

Complexity creep is something that should be fought tooth and nail where ever you find it. It’s the biggest enemy of keeping your code maintainable. As soon as you feel that you’re losing track of what is going on you need to step back and re-think your approach and re-factor. If you don’t then in the long term you’ll lose control completely. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ and by the time ‘when’ rolls around you will end up wishing you had taken care of the problem when it was still tractable. Short term thinking on long term projects is not an option. @jacquesm, link

2016 01/11

Added a new word to my lexicon today

hackystack |‘ha•kee•stak|

noun

A game which is played by piling onto existing technical debt because the time required to pay down the original debt exceeds the amount of time to implement a hack by a factor of 10 or more.

A not particularly original name for a game in which there are no winners.

Me this morning

2015 12/03

Defending Function Hoisting in a Commit Message

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.

2015 09/05

Three Cheers for Python

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

2015 09/01

Code Style Changes

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.

2015 05/23

Quote: A Day in the Life of Wesley Crusher aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise

Wesley: “There’s a guy with a gun over there about to shoot–“

Picard: “STFU WESLEY GET OUT GOD I HATE YOU”

Wesley: “Aye, Captain”

Every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation

2015 05/02

Usability Reflections: Analyzing Eye Tracking Data

The final post in the Usability Reflections series.

2015 04/19

Usability Reflections: Mobile Usability Testing Logistics

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

2015 04/12

JSBin Experiments

Posting a bunch of recent experiments and prototypes.

2015 04/11

Usability Reflections: Mobile Usability

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

2015 04/05

Usability Reflections: Analyzing Remote Usability Test Results

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

2015 03/22

Usability Reflections: Designing a Remote Usability Test

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

2015 03/15

Usability Reflections: Remote Research

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.

2015 02/27

Usability Reflections: Usability Test Reports

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

2015 02/15

Usability Reflections: Moderating Usability Tests

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

2015 02/03

Usability Reflections: Quantitive Metrics

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

2015 01/31

Usability Reflections: Screening and Tasking Test Candidates

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

2015 01/24

Usability Reflections: Summative vs. Formative Usability Testing

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.

2015 01/20

Usability Reflections (Series)

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.

2014 10/28

Video: Sketching & Prototyping: Rapid Design Techniques

2014 10/11

Quote: Norman on Technology and Design

The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology and the challenge for the designer.

Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

2014 09/11

Quote: An update to Adobe Flash Player is available

function nightmare(laptop) {
    laptop.wakeFromSleep();
    alert("An update to Adobe Flash Player is available.");
    laptop.updateFlash();
    laptop.performOriginalTask();
    laptop.sleep();
    return nightmare(laptop);
}

Flash Update Utility

2014 07/16

CentOS 7 and Me

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

2014 06/26

Geeks in Uniform

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.

2014 06/19

Objective-C Revisited

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.

2014 06/17

A Week With Ruby

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.

2014 02/16

Setting up PHPUnit and NetBeans 7.4

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.

2014 01/11

Changes for 2014

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.

2013 12/20

Quote: Teamwork and Maintainability

An important part of working on any technical team is human parallelism – the ability for multiple people to be able to work simultaneously on the same codebase. But it’s also important for teams to be able to work asynchronously too – I should be able to make changes to your code when you’re away, and vice versa.

[…]

Strong developers understand technical debt and try to limit it by designing code that is as maintainable and self-explainable as possible.

Writing readable code really requires developers to change their outlook – your code should last longer in the organization that you. Aaron Stannard on Maintainability #

2013 12/05

SOAP Opera

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

2013 09/26

serializer.py

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…

2013 09/25

Quote: Who are the Real Heros of Programming?

Who are the real heros of programming?

My customers.

My customers do great things. They often need my software, built and functioning properly for years to do these things. I love building stuff, but they are the real heroes. Just some of the things that they do:

get the right drugs get to the right people

get the ambulance to the right address

get the right materials purchased and delivered

get the right product built, on time and budget

get the right product shipped accurately and on time

make sure the parts going into that airplane are certified

make sure your insurance claim gets processed properly

make sure they make enough $, so they can keep doing it

I can go on and on, but you kinda get the idea. I love to learn, to optimize and refactor, and to build beautiful things. But what I do pales in comparison to what they need to do. I never forget that. Ed Weissman, 2010 #

2013 09/10

Wifi Overcrowding

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.

2013 08/15

Adventures in Dual Booting

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.

2013 08/05

Python Impressions

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.

2013 08/01

Slight Change of Course

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

Writing by David Bazile

“drive-by” UI

Usefulness of GSuite Calendar Notifications

Principle of Least Surprise

Apple Music: Voice and Tone

But I had a polyfill...

hackystack |‘ha•kee•stak|

noun