a.k.a. The Suprising Utility of a Diver’s Bezel (see here for all the posts about using a diver’s bezel) I’ve worn a diver’s watch for years, and initially, I got one because I wanted a durable watch that I didn’t have to think too much about. The bezel on the watch was more of a decorative curiosity than something I planned much to use. Then I learned a few things.

I’ve been using this now for a bit, and now that I’ve not made any changes to it in a few months, and after a failed pitch at selling it to a publisher, I’ve decided to release this into the wild. I figure it’s useful to me and at least one other person, it may be useful to others. The essence of it is that instead of the usual tome of a chord dictionary that most are, this one plots the chord tones across 17 frets of a guitar neck, using note numbers instead of names.

Back at the end of December, I posted 17 Frets Chords, a concise chord dictionary. I had been working on a scale encyclopedia too, but hadn’t put the finishing touches on it. It’s mostly where I want it, but there are some places where it’s not as good as I want, but I figure, might as well release it now. 17 Frets Scales shows the major scale families and their modes, in addition to including available chords for most scales.

Since it’s related to my day job, it’s over on Medium.

For Christmas last year, my wife bought me a Seiko SKX-009 which I absolutely love. Even though I love it, I looked at a bunch of higher end Swiss watches but found that even though many of them look really great (I came pretty close to buying an Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Chrono), but realized that when it came to the features I use on the SKX, the number of Swiss watches that actually fulfil them is very few.

I’ve been interested in timekeeping devices for many years, and have generally been facinated with watches, and in the last year or so, I’ve become I big fan of mechanical ones. I’ve been particularly interested in the Seiko automatics. I’ve not seen a better quality automatic watch anywhere in the price range, both in terms of the movement, and the case. The Seiko movements have proven, for the two of them that I’ve owned, to be very reliable and satisfyingly accurate.

N.B. Some of this revolves around puppet, but if you know nothing about puppet, you won’t miss anything. I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff in puppet lately. Since my actual puppet runs are inside VMs which I nuke fairly frequently, doing the actual bits of development in the VM is impractical (and somewhat dangerous even). I use git to do my normal version control anyway, so that’s nothing earth shattering, but I also use git to update /etc/puppet in the VM from what’s on my laptop because it works really well.

It’s funny sometimes how when you’ve done something in a particular way for long enough, it’s easy to forget why you do it the way you do. I’ve been a big fan of early return for a long time and was recently challenged on my view. The argument I had received in favor of single return was dubious to me, but it’s always good to recheck why you do something when you’ve forgotten.

It’s been close to a year since I started my shorthand quest in earnest. I did wind up changing systems from Gregg Anniversary Edition to Gregg Shorthand Simplified as I found it better for those, like me, who don’t have an in person teacher. Speed-wise, last I checked I was at something better than 70wpm. I’m probably a bit faster since then which is over six months ago, but either way I’m sufficiently fast for my needs – well above the 30-35wpm longhand I could ever manage.

When designing storage systems for applications, not building something like a SQL/NoSQL database, I’m talking the layer/logic that goes on top, you have to consider a whole bunch of things if you want to build the “right thing(TM)” for your application. In part one, we’ll be considering the simple cases (spoiler: most cases are simple) and SQL databases, in part 2 we’ll be considering NoSQL databases. Even with various considerations to think about, hard and fast rules about datastores tend to get very difficult, as the various considerations can push things around quite a bit as to how to best implement them for today while taking tomorrow into account.

Somewhat written to future-me, but also to others who may be looking in the direction of these things. General Software ApacheDirectoryStudio / apacheDS If I ever need to deal with LDAP in any way, this tool will make me have a happy. Keystore Explorer For dealing with Java Keystores. The commandline tool supplied with Java kinda sucks, this makes it easier, especially for things like x509v3 extensions which you need to twiddle if you ever do CA work.

When writing Java servers (or servlets that run in a container), I’ve learned a few things that have saved me a bunch of trouble during development, as well as later on. Dependency Injection Injection: if something is singleton (request, global or any other scope), the only things injected to it should also be singleton – otherwise you get implicit singletons of things the singleton holds, and may not be what you want – and generally harder to reason about.