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1. Building a plotter (part 2)

   Building a plotter (part 2)

   So the Makerbase MKS DLC32 arrived. My challenge was how to mount it onto the frame and keep all the wires hidden.

   Normally I would fire up OpenSCAD and get my calipers out and risk the wrath of my family while I disappear for 3 days designing the enclosure to print.

   

   This time I said, let’s see what the LLMs can do.

   hardware

2. Building a plotter (part 1)

   Building a plotter (part 1)

   

   About two years ago I finally pulled the trigger and purchased a 3D printer. Now I missed the Great Fun™ part of the 3D printing hobby where you spent more time hardware hacking than actually printing. My 3D printer just works. It’s a utility. Sure I got to upgrade it from a bed slinger to a core-XY, but there was never any doubt that it would work at the end of the upgrade.

   hardware

3. When a Kubernetes Operator Makes Sense

   When a Kubernetes Operator Makes Sense

   

   Beyond YAML: Real-World Lessons from Managing Complex Infrastructure

   There are plenty of ways to deploy applications onto Kubernetes:

   • raw kubectl apply
   • Kustomize overlays
   • Helm charts
   • sidecars and init containers
   • and, at the far end of the spectrum, fully-fledged operators

   Most teams start at the simple end and stay there. And they should, most applications don’t need anything more complicated than a Deployment, a few ConfigMaps, and a kubectl apply -k.

   kubernetes operator-pattern vault devops platform-engineering

4. Migrating my old blog content to GitHub Pages

   About 19 years ago, I set up a blog on Google’s Blogger platform to track my adventures learning Java: https://javaadventure.blogspot.com/

   The platform has changed a lot since then, and not always for the better. Many posts no longer render the way they used to, and a few images have disappeared entirely.

   One feature I really loved, which is now broken, was the ability to email a special address and have the message automatically turned into a post. It made publishing effortless… though that was also before I discovered what was then X (née Twitter).

   general

5. The costs of guarding logging with Apache Log4J version 2

   Another interesting tidbit:

   @Benchmark
   public void debug1Arg_date(Blackhole blackhole) {
       LOGGER.debug("Started at %s", new Date(time));
       time++;
       blackhole.consume(time);
   }
   
   @Benchmark
   public void guardedDebug1Arg_date(Blackhole blackhole) {
       if (LOGGER.isDebugEnabled()) {
           LOGGER.debug("Started at %s", new Date(time));
       }
       time++;
       blackhole.consume(time);
   }
   

   Gives the following benchmark results:

   Benchmark                            Mode  Cnt          Score         Error  Units
   Log4jBenchmark.debug1Arg_date         thrpt   20  179653191.248 ± 2731044.349  ops/s
   Log4jBenchmark.guardedDebug1Arg_date  thrpt   20  207001790.376 ± 2074020.617  ops/s
   

   We can also compare guarding with SLF4J over logback

   Java

6. The costs of Java Utils Logging

   One of my colleagues had a question:

   Now for some context, when the Jenkins project started off, Kohsuke was working for Sun and felt it would be wrong, as a Sun employee, to use a logging framework other than that provided by the JVM as using a different logging framework could be seen as being implication that the built in Java Utils Logging framework was a steaming pile of excrement.

   Java