Moving it here to immortalize it properly, where it belongs.

I don’t believe in geographical distances

I am less and less a believer of geographical distances. Bear with me.

I understand that literally speaking, this is not a matter or a system of belief, but I do believe that as human beings we stop imagining and thinking about new possibilities to render reality and facts, first because change is hard and it takes effort, and second because yay comfort zone.

It is 2018. I’ve now known the very few people that I’m fortunate to call my best friends for about half of my life now. This has now broken the fifteen-year time span. In a recent conversation with one of those friends, we spoke about an acquaintance in common that I last interacted with, roughly sixteen years ago. Holy crap. Time, linearly, is relentless and even more so is technology, because it’s not linear. You and I do not have the capacity to grow as fast as technological advancements, you and I will get outdated unless we keep a very open, young, fit, resilient mind. Easier said than done.

People still struggle with basic remote interaction. People still think that Lisbon or Dublin are far, or that interacting with a team of people from Ukraine, Canada and Argentina is an accomplishment. Older generations will applaud how smart their younger offsprings are, when in reality it is technology what has made it all possible, only making some of those younger folks more capable but dependable, if anything, not clever.

This is fine, though.

More easily than ever can you travel and experience the world. I even sometimes feel bad and guilty for my previous generations. I can’t imagine how frustrating traveling the world would’ve been for my dad when he was my age in the late 80s (well, he didn’t), much less how it would’ve been for my mom (she also didn’t), but that is a different can of worms.

Geographical distances should be treated as a lie today. You can shorten them with a variety of ways, traveling is very affordable; possibilities to work in most industries anywhere are unique in time; you now have to actively choose who to stop any interaction and communication with because you can’t stand them, even if you haven’t seen them in person for decades. You opt-out of technology benefits. When you do that, you neglect those benefits and advantages that it brings to you and anyone around you. As such, you develop a resistance or apprehension that eventually leads to mistaken notions or assumptions that things, events or activities, are difficult because they are physically and geographically distant.

Most groups of people, teams, organizations, families, will have very similar struggles when they are distant from one side of town versus the other one in Shanghai, as much as between Bordeaux and Nice, or between Argentina and Venezuela. If the struggles are similar or the same for everyone, the geographical distance no longer exists or represents a problem.

The problem in reality is human behavior change. And human beings can’t change easily or be told to do so. We are very accustomed to a single particular way of doing things that we don’t take full advantage of what technology has brought us because of resisting to change. And this is not only about video calls, but about how we work, what we work on, how we adapt our transportation habits, how we evolve as society.

I personally find great pleasure on proving a lot of those assumptions wrong. And those assumptions are naturally on me as well, as a human being. But self-awareness of your own problem is the first step to improving anything. I therefore greatly enjoy proving myself wrong.

It’s definitively been one crazy ride. I started blogging and writing a private journey, actually. It’s on Google Docs and it worked quite well even though there has nothing new on that for about six months. This post also serves as a simple proof that this blog is still alive and that I still intend to keep it updated.

For the time being, stay home, keep distanced from others and wear a mask.

From De Baarsjes, Amsterdam, NL, dm.

Inspired by that hack and based on the fact that I wanted to try out some of the AWS Lambda features, I started to think about how to calculate the progress of the entire 21st century. Given we are in 2019, assumption would be that we are roughly 19% in so far of the century. Then I started obsessing about it a little bit thinking on ways to calculate it. At the end, I learned a whole bunch about time calculation on a very long timespan. For instance, the fact that we have leap years makes the calculation far far interesting. A naive approach would be to think that every year elapsed will mean that 1% of the century has occured. And not really, since the leap years will unbalance that out:

>>> from datetime import datetime, date, time
>>> start = datetime(2001, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0)
>>> end   = datetime(2100, 12, 31, 23, 59, 59)
>>> (end - start).total_seconds()
3155673599.0

So if we split all of those seconds into 100, to get 1%, we don’t necessarily end up by the end of 2001 or early beginning of 2002:

>>> (end - start).total_seconds() / 100
31556735.99
>>> start + timedelta(0, 31556735.99)
datetime.datetime(2002, 1, 1, 5, 45, 35, 990000)

We are actually 5 hours and 45 minutes into the new year: 5h 45m 35s to be exact. On the other end, we are logically roughly the same distance away:

>>> start + timedelta(0, 31556735.99 * 99)
datetime.datetime(2099, 12, 31, 18, 14, 23, 10000)

Moreover, contrary to popular belief, not every four years a leap year happens. 2100 is not a leap year. So in the 21st century there’s 24 leap years:

>>> import calendar
>>> leaps = []
>>> for i in range(2001, 2100 + 1):
...     if calendar.isleap(i):
...             leaps.append(i)
... 
>>> 
>>> leaps
[2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, 2032, 2036, 2040, 2044, 2048, 2052, 2056, 2060, 2064, 2068, 2072, 2076, 2080, 2084, 2088, 2092, 2096]

So by the end of 2019, 4 leap years have elapsed in the century, which are 345600 seconds (4 times 86400 seconds).

So when 2019 comes to an end, we won’t really be at 19% elapsed sharp:

>>> end_2019 = datetime(2019, 12, 31, 23, 59, 59)
>>> full = end - start
>>> ( ( end_2019 - start).total_seconds() / full.total_seconds() ) * 100
18.998466735912885

Time is a pain in arse but also kinda fun. Go follow @century_bar for more of this fun. A bit more of the explanation is at the GitHub repo here.

dm

Now the entire repo is here.

Ubuntu didn’t last long though. I prefer OS X Mojave than any of the Ubuntu installations. It’s okay though, it’s just not for me.

Big big big shoutout to Jérémy Garrouste for his documentation only a few days ago of the Debian installation for Buster on the laptop which helped me figure out I needed to upgrade the BIOS to fix a couple of issues and be able to run the d-i alpha 5 with the Atheros drivers. Time to dust a few things here and there :)

Well that’s not a picture of the alpha d-i but from the first time I tried to install before upgrading the BIOS.