Thought Bricks

The French government is spending €200 million to destroy wine due to lack of demand. That is interesting in and of itself but the most astounding figure in the article is the drop in European wine consumption: European Commission data for the year to June shows that wine consumption has fallen 7% in Italy, 10% in Spain, 15% in France, 22% in Germany and 34% in Portugal… That’s a big year over year drop.

I found some loose change under a couch cushion and decided to get myself a new mountain bike. After a lot of deliberation, I went with a Trek Top Fuel 8. Although I got it on sale, it was still quite a lot of change but the reviews were very solid and I loved the red color when I saw it in person at Blue Ridge Cyclery. I took it for a test ride and pretty much knew I was going home with it.

I like the idea of labeling things as written by humans or AI so you know the origins of what you are reading on the internet. Not By AI has some nice badges that I’ve added to my site because, it is written by my primitive human brain. I thought about adding it to each post that I write, but since I don’t use AI to write the articles (except some small parts when I’ve written about AI and want to show some example output) that seemed like too much overhead on each article.

Python in Excel looks interesting. It’s only in public preview now and will go Windows first so I won’t see it for a while. Python has some really awesome tools for analytics and plots. Although it probably won’t ever be a mainstream tool, many data analysts are going to be all over this. I’ll definitely take a look when it’s out there. I played around with openpyxl a few times and it has some usefulness but is not as tightly integrated as the new =py() function.

I’ve been using Hugo for this blog for a few years now. It works well for me and I’ve not done much customization to the theme at all. Earlier this year, I took at look Mermaid to produce some charts for inclusion in the blog. The way that worked was by using a link to content hosted on another site. That was really easy to do, but I’d rather have the content inside my blog content.

On flipping through Meditations this morning, came across this: A rock thrown in the air. It loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up. That’s a very Zen quote. The rock is impervious to the state imposed on it from outside forces. Thinking about it from a lens of stoicism, we are (or should be) rocks. Ignore the forces outside of our control. Very existential. I wonder, does the rock get chipped by striking the ground?

In a continuation of recent changes to open source businesses, SUSE has decided to go back to being a private company. SUSE’s foray as a public company was certainly not profitable for investors who bought in at the IPO (thankfully, not me) but represents a good deal for current shareholders. My experience with SUSE has been very positive. I used it to deploy some SAP HANA databases about ten years ago and it was a very nice distro with some interesting configuration and management tools.

I recently enabled Kernel Livepatch on my Ubuntu 22.04.3 desktop system. Livepatch is intended for systems that you don’t want to reboot. It’s completely overkill for a desktop that I can reboot whenever I need to but I wanted to understand it better. Kernel Livepatch is part of the Ubuntu Pro offering that is free for a limited number of systems - five systems currently. That seems like a pretty smart play by Ubuntu to differentiate their offering a little bit and get a premium service into the hands of more users who might then go on to buy a package later.

A passage that caught my eye today while flipping through Meditations: Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.

I’ve written about HashiCorp before. They have some very nice infrastructure-as-code (IAC) tools that have many users around the world. These tools used to be open source, but that has now changed. Instead of following the Mozilla Public License v2.0, they are moving to the Business Source License (BUSL). It’s sort of of open sourcish but has made plenty of people mad. I can see the point if you have contributed to a project and a company takes the code away and puts it into a less open license.