Category: valeblog

Akadake loser

Akadake (often romanized as Mt Aka) is part of Yatsugatake, it’s highest peak actually. The range is known for being “active” all year round. Other mountains get inaccessible and deserted as winter starts: buses stop running, mountain huts close until spring and so on.

The Yatsugatake range has lots of ski resorts and it’s a friendly place for people like me who want to try climbing in snow. I’ve had a weekend’s fun in Tateshina already (which is the northern neighbor of Yatsugatake actually), so now I decided to jump into the deep water (snow) and go for Mt Aka. I didn’t expect the difficulty I faced.


Az idő pénz

Azt mondjuk, az idő pénz, aztán a következő pillanatban már azt, hogy az idő az egyetlen dolog a világon, amit nem kapsz meg pénzért. Akkor most melyik? Az első állítás, miszerint az idő pénz, nekem egy egyenlőségnek tűnik, az egyenlőség meg, mint tudjuk, kommutatív, vagyis fordítva is ugyanúgy működnie kéne.

Szerintem működik is. Ha dolgozol, az időbe telik, és pénzt kapsz érte – bár itt felvetődik, hogy mi van azzal a pénzzel, amiért nem áldoztál közvetlenül időt (például a tőzsdén vagy kamatokból). És visszafelé szintén, mert a modern élet kényelmei, amik általában nagyon sok időt felszabadítanak, nem ingyen vannak. A vonat se, a gyorskaja se, sajnos az orvos se.


Mapping

The other day I was thinking about Rich Hickey’s keynote at last year’s Conj. He goes into how the literal maps (or hashes or hashmaps or however a language prefers to call them) are really functions too. A function in maths is a mapping between sets and that’s what maps are.

Then that makes functions we normally write are just like that too, except the mappings are more abstract and defined through code. Because the mappings are so complex and indirect, we write tests to check (automated) that the mapping we defined through code is correct.

Obviously defining the exact mappings for every possible combination of the input set(s) is not feasible (that’d be a map, the end). But if “all” is not possible then how much is? What exactly is the absolute minimum amount of test( case)s that’s useful?


Gala

To keep practicing snowboard, the next target was Gala Yuzawa. It’s an apparently pretty famous snow resort, considering how it has its own shinkansen station (yes really) and probably the first destination for snow tourists seeing the huge number of foreigners (including the staff).


In motion

I don’t know how it’s at other schools, but my university had compulsory PE classes. Sure only once a week and only for two semesters, but it was still annoying. Except for one good thing: there was an option to take a few days long ski trip instead of the regular class in the winter semester. Which of course I did. It was my first time skiing and I loved it. That was in 2011.


2018 in retrospect

2018 was a trainwreck if I judge by the news, but a friend of mine wrote a quite positive post about their year, which inspired me to do the same. One of the first things that come to mind is that I should write about stuff when they’re fresh in memory, because I barely remember what I did last week, let alone last year (though currently the two overlap).


Getting that system dashboard working

Earlier I wrote about how I set up Beats – Elasticsearch – Grafana to visualize the various metrics (and logs, hate me) from Kitsune‘s dev server. There were a few tricky spots that didn’t work at first and took a while to figure out (or at least get working).


SNS連合とActivityPubで通信できた

タイトル通りではあるが、その言葉全部通じない人も少なからずいるし、そもそもどうやっては書いてない。まずは言葉の定義から順にする:ActivityPubって何、それを使った通信が一体どんなものか、SNS連合とは何なのか、そして最後どうやってそれと通信できたかを述べる。


分散型SNSの可視化

前回は何を使って可視化しようかなと悩んでいろいろと試して比較したが、そのあと実際に形にしたので、今はこういったダッシュボードがいつでも眺められる。

System metrics dashboard

On Mount Buddha

I was looking for a mountain to climb. I wanted something easy for a change, but still preferably one of the 100 famous mountains of Japan. In the end I went with Mt Daibosatsu, which is relatively close, easy to access (that is when the buses run) and isn’t difficult.