Computing on Tate Eskew

The Arts, Technology, and Sport

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 19:37:32 +0000

These are my year-end totals for running over this past year. A year in which I spent the first three weeks of January having numerous invasive health tests done, which limited my ability to get out on the trails to start the year. A year that had me fighting metatarsalgia in my left foot for over a month, which kept me at lower mileage as I nursed it back to strength. A year that had me fighting COVID for two weeks straight and stripped me of nearly three months of fitness in just those two weeks of downtime. See, sport…especially endurance sports…push you to your limits, reset your expectations, humble you, increase your empathy, inspire you, call you out when you think of phoning it in, and most importantly in my case…keep my mental health in check. I guess you could say those first six things are a recipe for the last.

Automating Dynamic DNS updating with AWS Instances and Route53

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 06:11:27 +0000

UPDATE: This information is long out of date. With the release of the awscli toolset in pypi years ago, things have changed a bit. Also, Amazon is forcing you to VPC on new accounts (years ago now). I will not be updating this post, but maybe you can find something useful here.

Recently I’ve been building the underlying system platform for the development of our distributed application on AWS. We do a lot of clustering using Storm and Hadoop, which means that we sometimes spin up hundreds of instances that may only live for a few hours during a run. Getting metrics, logs and all of those ‘must-haves’ centralized has been part of this build-out. When working with large amounts of machines in short-lived clusters, it becomes a real pain in the ass to use the built-in DNS/naming mechanism/scheme that AWS provides by default. Everything starts to look the same inside of your reporting/metrics/monitoring tools when working with the arbitrary names given to the instances. Hence, this article.

Multi-touch interaction screen…

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:42:44 +0000

I was recently looking into the lemur as something to use to control live performances via a touch screen and got really into some of the technology used. So, I started digging deeper to see what else was out there. I had seen Microsoft’s multi-touch coffee table some time ago, but as with most things Microsoft, who knows when it will be out and how buggy it will be. Then I stumbled upon this multi-touch device. Watch the video on the right side of the page. I’ve always hated interfacing with a computer, even though that’s what I do to earn a living, and this is getting closer to how I would like to interact. I think voice commanding and this multi-touch approach are great ways to interact with computing platforms, especially when it involves creating music or other types of art.