basepi

Vibe-Signaling

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The company I work at, like many, has been invaded by a bit of AI psychosis. The pressure to use AI coding agents is high, and with it has come a lot of pressure to experiment and create new shiny things. Lots of applause in the all-hands meeting for the rough-around-the-edges, but coded-in-a-week app, product, or feature.

I’ve taken to calling this “vibe-signaling.” I think it’s a lot like the “virtue-signaling” we saw (and continue to see) in social media. There, we were posting obvious moral truisms to be seen as virtuous. Here, we’re vibe-coding to be seen vibe-coding.

Losing My Religion

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Two years ago, I had lunch with a friend. This friend expressed that they were having doubts about the religion that he and I shared. His doubts were specifically about the way that the church treated LGBTQ+ people.

He and I were a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. You probably know it as the Mormon church. The Mormon church teaches that we can love our LGBTQ friends and family, but that if they enter loving relationships that aren’t heterosexual, they are breaking the commandments of God and won’t be able to enter heaven. It’s a teaching that causes a lot of pain, especially for LGBTQ members of the church.

Bullet Journaling

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently been on a real scaling-back-digital-distractions kick. Most recently, I read Deep Work and Digital Minimalism (both by Cal Newport) back to back. I highly recommend them. They confirmed and validated my efforts to cull distractions in my life and to live more intentionally.

After finishing up Digital Minimalism, I happened to find my Bullet Journal that I had purchased a few months ago when I stumbled across that system. I had never gotten around to starting it – my perfectionist tendencies keep me from starting a lot of things that could contribute value to my life. I want to wait until the perfect time and when I’m perfectly prepared. But that’s probably a good subject for another day.

On Attention

Fri, 12 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years, I have struggled with my attention. I have struggled to focus on much of anything in my life. I haven’t been able to read books quickly or effectively; I have struggled to get into that superfocused programming state at work.

I assumed that perhaps I had undiagnosed ADHD. Who knows, that may even be true. But increasingly I think it’s more likely that I’ve done this to myself.

HubbleStack on FLOSS Weekly

Wed, 23 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I was on FLOSS Weekly today talking about HubbleStack!

Here’s the Overcast link.

And if you really want to see my ugly mug, there are video options as well on the episode page: FLOSS Weekly 485 HubbleStack

If you have questions about HubbleStack or want to get involved, tweet at me!

The Value of Diversity

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently an ex-Google recruiter sued Google for wrongful termination due to his complaints about hiring practices he claimed were discriminatory against white and Asian men.

Many of us have been in positions where hiring for diversity has been a focus. There might be a temptation to say that this is discriminatory. “We’re passing up more qualified candidates for diverse ones!”

But diversity is about more than skin color or gender – it’s also about the different ideas and points of view that come from different life experiences. These are real qualifications. Their value-add is hard to quantify, but that doesn’t mean the value isn’t there.

Gun Violence

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

At the risk of joining the echo chamber, I want to talk for a moment about gun violence.

But I don’t want to talk about criminal gun violence.

Start here.

Click through that graph. See the red dots? Those are suicides.

Two-thirds of the 33,000 gun deaths annually in America are suicides. That’s more than 20,000 people killing themselves annually.

This is why I want to talk about gun control. I believe it would also reduce gun-related homicides and accidental gun deaths, a result that would also be amazing. But they’re much harder to argue about because we don’t have enough data and there are too many guns in circulation and blah blah blah blah.

Karabiner (Elements) and macOS Sierra

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I like hacks. I like tweaks. I like setting things up just to my specifications. I mean, I use an Ergodox Infinity, a CST Trackball and I’m an avid Vim user.

But these hacks and tweaks are not without their disadvantages. When macOS Sierra came out, it severely broke support for a key app in my setup: Karabiner. I was using Karabiner for three very specific, very important hacks, all inspired by Steve Losh’s “A Modern Space Cadet” blog post from 2012:

Poison

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today I found out that a good friend of mine quit Facebook. I was astounded – he had just been filled with such righteous indignation about the election, and big ideas about the change that we needed to bring about. How could he bring about that change if he removed the best tool for talking to people?

But the more we talked, the more convinced I was that he had it right.

Hate

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Trump gave a surprisingly presidential victory speech:

I mean, she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.

I mean that very sincerely. Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division, have to get together. To all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.

American

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight I am embarrassed to be an American.

For much of my life I identified as a Republican. In the last few years I’ve found myself identifying less and less with that party. Not to say I’m a Democrat; both parties have serious problems.

This year I voted for Hillary. Not because she was the lesser of two evils. She’s far from perfect, and I don’t agree with her on everything. But she’s an accomplished politician and a qualified presidential candidate. I like the strength with which she has dealt with Trump’s attacks. I voted for her because I’m With Her.

Check Out the Packt Free Learning Campaign!

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Packt is running a cool promotion right now where you can get a different free ebook each day until a March 5. Check it out!

My Book is Available!

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My book, Learning SaltStack, is available for purchase!

It’s available in paperback, as well as for kindle from Amazon.

You can also buy it directly from Packt.

Hope you enjoy it!

Mitigating GHOST with SaltStack

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My coworker CR wrote up a great guide to mitigating the new GHOST vulnerability with SaltStack.

Check it out here: Mitigating GHOST with Salt

If you haven’t already checked out SaltStack, I highly recommend it! You’ll never have to manually patch all of your machines again!

The Problem with the Hobbit Movies

Sat, 03 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was catching up on my RSS feeds and I found [this review of the last Hobbit movie by Ars Technica][1]. Sums up my feelings perfectly:

There’s one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset—the fiscally smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish children’s novel into three feature-length prequel films.

Artistically bankrupt. Perfect way to put it.

What these movies desperately need are boundaries, reasons to condense scenes or cut them out entirely instead of reasons to pile on more. Chopping these down into a pair of two-and-a-half hour movies would drastically improve the pacing even if you didn’t address the characterization or the tone issues. You could leave around three hours of slow-motion action sequences, goblin chases, and Radagast the Brown on the cutting room floor! Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Legos "For Girls"

Wed, 17 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

“This one weird trick that will make all Legos appeal to girls more”

So good. And so true.

Fix Linode Manager Repeated Log-out (Force IPv4)

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been having issues with Linode Manager repeatedly logging me out every few requests. I figured this was related to ipv4/ipv6 switching, because sometimes the logout would also trigger a new IP whitelist request, which would sometimes be ipv4, and sometimes be ipv6.

After a little googling, I found this twitter conversation:

@linode Manager keeps logging me out at seemingly random intervals, especially when trying to do DNS management. Is this a known problem?

Blog Auto-Publish with Dropbox

Sun, 23 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I moved my blog over to Pelican from Octopress. I’ve been very happy with this decision.

But I decided I wanted to go a step further, and set up autopublish. I knew it could be easily done with a git hook, but I wanted to be able to easily blog from my iOS devices as well, so I decided to go with Dropbox instead.

Getting Dropbox

First, I needed to install Dropbox on my machine. Dropbox provides an easy one-liner:

Low Friction

Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a long time.

…again.

I thought that I had a pretty low-friction setup with my new blog on Octopress. However, that was not the case. This morning I decided I needed to get my blog back up. There have been a few times in the last couple of years that I wished I had it available. However, I didn’t have any of the dependencies set up on my new laptop. So I set out to get ruby installed and ready to generate my blog again.

I'm Back!

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Well, at long last I got around to re-installing Ruby on my machine, updated Octopress, and got my blogs settled. I’m back!

So what’s been going on in the interim? Let’s hit the top two:

I graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Utah with a BS in Computer Science.
I switched jobs – I now work for Salt Stack, Inc, making awesome open source software.

A lot has changed, and I hope to have much more to blog about now that I’m more involved in the open source community. Feel free to throw me feedback! I don’t pretend to be an awesome blogger. =)

Why I switched to Octopress

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Update, Nov 2014: Since I wrote this blog post, I have ditched Jekyll and Octopress (mostly because of the pain of setting up Ruby, not because of those pieces of software themselves). This blog is still static, but is now generated using Pelican, a Python project.

The Problem

Last week I received an e-mail from the RSA Anti-Fraud Command Center. It related to my personal blog:

It appears that your website cmyers.net has been hacked by a fraudster. It is now hosting a phishing attack against RBC. Please remove the fraudulent folders/files as soon as possible and secure your website as it has been compromised. Please note that it is possible that the fraudulent content is embedded in your website’s legitimate files.

Minecraft!!!

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Update, November 2014: These days, I’m hosting my own vanilla minecraft server on Linode, using MCMyAdmin for a web interface.

I finally did it. I broke down and rented a Minecraft server.

Previously, I had hosted a Minecraft server pretty successfully on my personal web server. The problem became two-fold: it was a huge time-sink, as updating all the plugins that I was running took a long time at each release. Also, while hosting the Minecraft server, my server would often become unresponsive, requiring a restart. This was unacceptable, as I also host a Teamspeak 3 server, an IRC bouncer, and multiple websites from my server. I needed maximum uptime! So I finally shut down my Minecraft server for good.

Slide Design for Developers

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This is a great article by a guy over at Github about slide design. He makes some really good points, and his slides really are beautiful. I want to see more presentations with these design pointers in mind.

More on SOPA and Protect-IP (Don't break the internet!)

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

More on SOPA and Protect-IP (Don’t break the internet!)

As I said in my previous post, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP are both very bad pieces of legislation. They are not only technically damning for the internet, but they are unconstitutional. When I started doing my due diligence the other day with regards to these bills, I didn’t know much about them. After some research, though, I have discovered just how bad these bills are. Here’s some more information, in a post by Adam Savage (from MythBusters).

Stop SOPA (Stop Online Privacy Act)

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve heard a lot of chatter about SOPA (the Stop Online Privacy Act), which is currently going through congress. However, today I finally decided to look into it. And I definitely didn’t like what I found. Here’s a video summing up the problems (the video is for the Protect IP act, which was introduced earlier this year, but most of the same problems apply to both bills). (Found via Matt Cutt’s Blog

Android vs. iOS

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

My iPhone 4S came this last week. Previously, I was a proud owner of the HTC Evo 4G, a great phone. But still I switched. Since I’ve had a few people ask me why, I decided I’d better just blog it. Sorry for my rambling.

Both platforms have their advantages. I suppose I’ll go platform by platform and examine some pros and cons:

iOS

With iOS 5, an iPhone was finally a valid alternative to my Android phone. Previously, I never would have switched, because of the lack of a good notifications system. If a push notification came in, it would interrupt whatever you were doing, sometimes to the effect of restarting your progress in a game or something. This in and of itself was an annoyance, but could be overlooked. The main problem was that once a notification popped, if didn’t immediately go to that app and take care of it, it was gone. Poof. You couldn’t decide to leave this or that notification for later, because they weren’t being stored anyplace. That all changed with Notification Center in iOS 5.

More on Python

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

My good friend Chad recently started learning about Python. After getting a fair bit into a book on the subject, he posted on Google+:

Language seems cool, though I haven’t found a compelling reason to need it. I think Django is the main reason I want to use it. Calling upon the powers of +Julio Carlos Menendez and +Colton Myers to give me some examples where using Python is WAY better than another language.

Vim -- why???

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I use vim.

Vim is a 20-year-old text editor, based on the 35-year-old “vi” editor (pronounced vee-eye, not vie). vi and emacs are both part of an editor holy war that has been going on for decades. I discovered this holy war years ago, mentioned on some website or another, and started to research. I tried both editors briefly, and then decided to take vim’s side of the holy war. At the time, this pick was kind of arbitrary – I really didn’t know enough about the two editors to make a truly educated decision. I think I saw vim as the underdog in the war, and as the more interesting of the two editors, with it’s strange idea of separate modes for text entry and for commands.

Python: My Language of Choice

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently found a “poem” about the philosophies of Python. It pretty well embodies the reasons behind my recently acquired love of Python:

The Zen Of Python

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those!

...and again.

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here we go again.

I mean, seriously. You’ve gotta be wondering, “Why does he even keep trying?” This has to be my 6th or 7th attempt at a blog. Shouldn’t I just give up already?

Well this time I’m trying something a little bit different. I’m going to blog about technology, rather than my personal life. Obviously I’ll try to throw some personal life stuff in there, but the problem is, I don’t feel like my life is interesting to write about, and thus I have a hard time staying interested in the writing, and I assume others have a hard time staying interested in the reading. Those of you who aren’t “techies” out there, I hope you’ll still come read a little. I think you’ll find some interesting stuff. And who knows, if I can keep up interest in a tech blog, maybe I’ll be able to make and keep a personal blog too.

Always and Forever...

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Like I mentioned in the last post, I’m taking a little bit of a different approach with this blog. Rather than try to blog about my life, which, in my opinion, leads to rapid loss of interest both on my part and the part of my readers, I’ve decided to focus on something that I’m actually interested in (and I hope interests a few of you): technology. Specifically, computers.

I got pulled in at a pretty young age. First it was the computer games – Load Runner on our black-and-white Macintosh; later, Warcraft 2 on our 486. It just escalated from there. I still play a lot of video games (my parents will tell you that I play way too much, and they’re probably right), but the less… flashy end of computing pulled me in, slowly but surely, as time went on.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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