Month: April 2020

After Bernie

Bernie may get some stuff added to the Democratic platform this summer … but is it anything Biden would be willing to fight for? Especially if he’s not planning to run for a second term (i.e. he doesn’t need my vote again in four years). My hope is that the current pandemic forces Biden to reevaluate some of his positions, *but* his statements in the last debate make me think this is unlikely to occur.
 
Trump is incompetent (and thus less likely to accomplish anything he sets out to do), but odds on a SCOTUS vacancy coming up are high. Returning to decade-old environmental policies are better than continuing a backslide. Maybe Biden would even manage to get the alt-energy tax credits increased and extended instead of the continued reduction to phaseout we’ve got now. An official policy of ignoring marijuana offenses at a federal level is better than active prosecution.
 
I’ll probably vote for Biden. How enthusiastic I am in that vote is going to depend a lot on who he selects as his VP (and hopefully he starts naming cabinet members so I’ll have a better picture of his administration’s composition). I won’t vote for Trump, and I won’t sit home (there are local elections with candidates I actually support). But you don’t have to vote for *every* office on the ballot (and, no, I’m not looking for anyone to yell “blue no matter who” at me — everyone gets to vote their own mind, and I’m intelligent enough to predict what either Biden or Trump as president in 2021 means). Biden picks Cheyney as his token Republican VP, floats Buttigieg for HHS to lead the M4A* (* who aren’t priced out of wanting it because their employer subsidizes private insurance and won’t subsidize their Medicare enrollment) initiative … abstaining gets more appealing. Warren as the VP, AOC over Energy … I’m there, and it has nothing to do with having women in the administration.

Bernie Suspends His Campaign

I expected it — there hasn’t been much campaigning in the past month anyway, and his campaign communications have been requests for charitable donations for the past few weeks — but still a little shocked to hear Bernie suspend his campaign. Listening to his announcement today was a rare occasion where I don’t get what he’s saying — yeah, this movement is an attempt to stand up to massive corporate interests and a corrupt political system. From the perspective of someone who cannot even speak ill of their government without fear of imprisonment, I guess that’s something to celebrate. But that’s not my perspective. America has a long history of letting people voice dissent; unfortunately America is also amassing a long history of ignoring majority dissent. We stood up against crony capitalism and crony democracy, but we didn’t win. Not like Bernie could say it sucks; but, as a voter who really believed that Bernie’s economic, social, and environmental policies are needed … it sucks.

I’m glad Bernie will continue to amass delegates as a tactical maneuver. While my totally impractical self thinks *maybe* people will see how tying health care to employment, how allowing corporations to deny people paid sick leave, how having a minimum wage that means you’re working two jobs to pay rent and feed your family isn’t the right direction so Bernie manages to win 99% of the remaining delegates (or Biden being the nominee makes Republicans think it’s open season on Biden investigations & Biden’s campaign becomes non-viable by mid-summer), I want to see what planks Bernie manages to insert into Biden’s platform. And how Biden manages to *not* look disingenuous adopting those planks.

Maven Deploy To Github Packages – Error 422: Unprocessable Entity

There is logical consistency to this error, but it would be nice if the error message was a little more indicative of the problem. Scott deployed a JAR to Github Packages. He needed to make a few changes and then was unable to upload the package in his deployment. The error indicted the jar was unable to be transferred to/from Github with error 422. Which was a new one on me — quick search produced the fact 422 is “Unprocessable Entity”. And, yeah, the maven error said exactly that if I’d bothered to read the whole error. I suggested incrementing the version, and the deploy succeeded.

Since GitHub doesn’t allow you to delete public packages, it seems logical that they wouldn’t allow you to overwrite public packages either (if nothing else, I could overwrite it with a text file that says “DELETED” and essentially have deleted the package). Since he was able to deploy the package successfully with a new version tag, it appears that you cannot delete or overwrite public packages. Each new push needs to have a unique tag.

Open Source Methodologies – Project Types

Scott and I were discussing a methodology for use in open source development, and I mentioned that there are some projects that someone posted online as an open source contribution where they’re not looking for input. I have some of these — if someone finds a bug in the code I wrote to gather MS Teams usage stats, I appreciate their help. If they want to change the report format, or what’s being reported, or … well, it’s a script I wrote and use for a specific purpose, and that’s what it does. Feel free to make a fork and adjust the report to suit your needs. But I’m not going to merge a PR in that keeps five years worth of data because I don’t want five years worth of data. And that’s a perfectly valid decision for code I built that I shared in case it helps someone else who needs to achieve a similar goal. I call this a dictatorial project — there’s an individual that makes the decisions. If you want to change something about how the program works, you should run it by the dictator prior to putting a lot of effort into it. Or plan on making changes in your own fork.

There are oligarchic projects — those may be corporate sponsored projects or projects owned by a group of private individuals. As with dictatorial projects, there are a small number of people “in charge” who decide if PRs are merged or not.

And there are democratic projects — at least in theory. I don’t know if this ends up being true in practice anywhere. But, in theory, a large community of developers or users would drive the direction of the project.

I suppose, if I’m discussing theoretical repository management types … I could add in mass chaos. Open for anyone to merge changes. This is an approach that’s worked surprisingly well for Wikipedia, so I suppose it could work for a smaller code base. Someone merges in some malicious or flawed code, someone else puts in a fix.

 

Trump Impeachment / SARS-CoV-2 Timeline

The timeline below was posted to a FB group today, but I wanted a more visual format to show how much nonsense  the “impeachment was a distraction from this serious pandemic business” story is. I cross-referenced dates in the timeline with the number of US SARS-CoV-2 infections using archived data from Johns Hopkins through 23 March and the dataset from COVID Tracking (which is current but doesn’t go back far enough to provide correlation with the impeachment dates). There is some overlap, but it’s not like Trump was completely focused on impeachment activity before 05 Feb. Campaign rallies and golfing were his choice distractions. Both of which continued well after the impeachment trial ended.
Timeline with a few additional impeachment-related events added and location info for rally and golf events:
Date # US Infections Detail
18-Dec-2019 0 House Impeaches Trump
18-Dec-2019 0 Trump campaign rally – Michigan
21-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
22-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
23-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
24-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
26-Dec-2019 0 Trump golfs – Florida
27-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
28-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
29-Dec-2019 0 Trump golfs – Florida
30-Dec-2019 0 Trump golfs – Florida
31-Dec-2019 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
1-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
2-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
3-Jan 0 Trump campaign rally – Florida
4-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
5-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
8-Jan 0 First CDC warning
9-Jan 0 Trump campaign rally – Ohio
14-Jan 0 Trump campaign rally – Wisconsin
16-Jan 0 House sends impeachment articles to Senate
18-Jan 0 Trump golfs – Florida
19-Jan 0 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
20-Jan 1 First case of corona virus in the US, Washington State.
22-Jan 1 “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
22-Jan 1 Impeachment prosecution’s opening arguments and presentation of evidence
23-Jan 1 Impeachment prosecution’s opening arguments and presentation of evidence
24-Jan 2 Impeachment prosecution’s opening arguments and presentation of evidence
25-Jan 2 Impeachment defense presentation
28-Jan 5 Trump campaign rally – New Jersey
30-Jan 5 Trump campaign rally – Iowa
31-Jan 7 Impeachment Senate vote against calling witnesses & travel restriction from China
1-Feb 8 Trump golfs – Florida
2-Feb 8 Trump maybe golfs – Florida
2-Feb 8 “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China.”
5-Feb 11 Impeachment Senate votes to acquit. Then takes a five-day weekend.
10-Feb 11 Trump campaign rally – New Hampshire
12-Feb 12 Dow Jones closes at an all time high of 29,551.42
15-Feb 13 Trump golfs – Florida
19-Feb 13 Trump campaign rally – Arizona
20-Feb 13 Trump campaign rally – Colorado
21-Feb 15 Trump campaign rally – Nevada
24-Feb 51 “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
25-Feb 51 “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
25-Feb 51 “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
26-Feb 57 “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
26-Feb 57 “We’re going very substantially down, not up.” Also “This is a flu. This is like a flu”; “Now, you treat this like a flu”; “It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.”
27-Feb 58 “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
28-Feb 60 “We’re ordering a lot of supplies. We’re ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn’t be ordering unless it was something like this. But we’re ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
28-Feb 60 Trump campaign rally – South Carolina
2-Mar 98 “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
2-Mar 98 Trump campaign rally – North Carolina
2-Mar 98 “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
4-Mar 149 “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
5-Mar 217 “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
5-Mar 217 “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
6-Mar 262 “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
6-Mar 262 “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
6-Mar 262 “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
6-Mar 262 “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
7-Mar 402 Trump golfs – Florida
8-Mar 518 Trump golfs – Florida
8-Mar 518 “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
9-Mar 583 “This blindsided the world.”
1-Mar 583 Travel lockdown from Europe.
13-Mar 2179 State of emergency declared
17-Mar 6421 “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
18-Mar 7783 It’s not racist at all. No. Not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate.
23-Mar 42152 Dow Jones closes at 18,591.93
25-Mar 63928 3.3 million Americans file for unemployment.
30-Mar 160530 Dow Jones closes at 21,917.16
2-Apr 239099 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.

 

Microsoft Teams – At Mentioning Shortcut For Multiple Individuals

I usually find myself at-mentioning the same handful of people in Teams channels – the managers, project leads, or SME’s. In a situation where I know everyone pretty well, that’s OK. A little time consuming as I get the three or four names typed in. And it’s not always obvious who the “go to” people in a Team should be. I find myself reading through a bunch of old posts just to figure out who is a good contact for a question.

Microsoft has introduced the idea of tagging individuals in Teams. These tags are defined within a Teams space – so the “managers” in Team XYZ aren’t the same “managers” from Team ABC. Tags both provide a shortcut – instead of typing the three individual manager’s names, I can at-mention managers – and a way of identifying people’s roles within the team – you can find the SMEs, Team Leads, or Tech Contacts just by looking at those tags.

How do you set up tags? You need to be a Team owner. Anyone can view the tags you set up, but creating tags is something only Team owners can do. Click on the ellipses next to the Team name and select “Manage tags”

Select “Create tag”

Give a name to your tag & start adding members

Tags aren’t objects that can be deleted – simply by removing all members from a tag, it disappears. So you’ll need to add someone here, even if that’s you. Click “Create” to create the tag.

You can also manage tags by managing the Team members – you’ll see a column for the tags, and moving your mouse into the tags column for an individual will display a little tag icon you can use to add tags to the individual.

If you enter a tag that does not exist, you can click the button to “Create …” the tag.

For existing tags, you can click the box to select the appropriate tags and select “Apply”

Now any team member can view the Team membership and see who is a project lead and who is an SME

Additionally, any Team member can at-mention these individuals by the tag. The display will indicate how many individuals are included in the tag – asking three people a question is probably reasonable, asking fifty may not be!

The at-mention will resolve as the tag name

Another cool feature — when I look at the members of a tag, I can start a chat with those people.

 

Science Experiment: Soil Composition

We did a simple experiment today that shows the composition of soil — get a jar, dig down 6″ and get a scoop of the soil. Put the soil in your jar, add water, close the lid, shake it around, then let it sit for a day. Anya wanted to take samples from a few different locations to compare.

ID Location
1 Under pine trees
2 Garden
3 Deer path in woods
4 Front planter bed
5 Irises

The soil from the deer path, I expected to be almost all clay — between the rain and the deer running through it, the path is a sticky, mucky mess. It has clay, but not as much as I expected.

And the rest of the jars

Is it helping?

Schools in Ohio have been closed since 17 March (and a lot of districts stayed home on 16 March). Restaurants have been in delivery and carry-out mode for about the same length of time. We’ve been under a stay at home order since 24 March. And the important question is … is it helping? That’s a difficult question to answer because epidemiological predictions have very broad ranges because most of their inputs are so unknown … and the limited testing makes the data being compared wildly inaccurate. But we’ve only got the data we’ve got, so I thought I’d run some comparisons to see how Ohio is faring.

I selected the four states closest to Ohio in population — PA, IL, GA, and NC. Because these states all identified their first case well before Ohio, I added CT because the first case identified there was 08-Mar and Ohio’s first cases appear on 09-Mar.

State 1st Case Population
PA 6-Mar 12,801,989
IL pre 4-Mar 12,671,821
OH 9-Mar 11,689,100
GA pre 4-Mar 10,617,423
NC pre 4-Mar 10,488,084
CT 8-Mar 3,565,287

It looks like our curve is flattened — although North Carolina, where the first infection was identified earlier than Ohio and their their stay at home order was issued on on 27 March, has identified a thousand fewer cases as of yesterday.

Is proximity to NYC a major factor? CT and PA (as well as NJ, which has a relatively high number of cases) are all right there. But Georgia and Illinois are farther away from NYC than Ohio. Is the number of tests a factor in these case numbers? I’d expected a higher correlation between the number of identified cases and the number of tests administered. GA and CT have fewer total test reports (positive + negative tests) and have more infected people. NC has more reported tests, but fewer cases than OH. PA and IL have more reported tests and more infected people.