Void Where Prohibited

I spent a beautiful sunny day in San Jose with four 90 year old men yesterday: three siblings (including my father in law) and their cousin, all Chinese Americans born to immigrants. Some served in WWII and some in Korea. The closest we got to talking about the military was their visits to the VA. I missed another opportunity to ask about their experience, to apologize, or to thank them for fighting for the future of an empire that withheld rights from Asian Americans and immigrants for centuries. My father was drafted to serve in Vietnam and enrolled in officer’s school. He had the good fortune of being stationed in Georgia in a unit that must have been set aside for kids with connections. They spent their days marching in the woods and destroying tanks. Therefore, I exist. A few years ago, my daughter's choir group sang at a Memorial Day ceremony at the military cemetery in Colma where it is foggy every morning between May and September. Vets in the audience were asked to stan

As this diagram shows, a password consisting of three four-letter words smashed together with camelCase is more secure than 8-character passwords that are impossible to remember. Length is what matters.

How to change the extension of multiple files at once on Linuxish systems: find . -type f -iname "auditTrail.csv" -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' file; do mv -- "$file" "${file%csv}zip" done

I miss Grandma’s smile and her trademark greeting: “You look so good!” You might not have looked your best, but she meant it. Grandma was happy to see you because she genuinely enjoyed the company. Grandma was always up for adventure. She looked forward to her great grand daughter Kate’s birthday parties, musicals, and school promotions. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to make it to Kate’s high school graduation but she attended a musical during Kate’s senior year. From my childhood birthday dinners to Pam’s bridal shower to Kate’s first birthday to Kate’s last year of high school, Grandma was always there. She made every event better with her enthusiasm and cheerful, engaging conversation.  When served food or a glass of wine , she would always declare: “This is so good!” Thank you Carole, Dad, and Caryl Anne for making sure GG was part of Kate’s life. In keeping with Grandma’s generation, she was also a tireless worker. She did everything she could to help win the Second World War. Sh

When an optimist is unsurprised by another routine victory, it's usually because pessimists tested and fixed most of the failure scenarios. See also premortem analysis.

Unit tests and staging environments are nice and all but how do you know whether your latest release works? SaaS vendors must test in production. Consider your users to be testers, or, better: create test users and run nonstop tests in production deliberately. As this  article  says: “ Certain services need to know that an account isn't real, so we don't count or bill users like production accounts or match them with a production user. With these cases handled, all other services essentially treat all accounts, production or test, exactly the same. ”