Blog de Joe Freeman

We put together some firefly light jars for some accent lighting.  The light is an LED string dropped into a jar powered by an AA battery pack.  We originally just dropped the whole package into the mason jar. Using them without a cover was kind of cumbersome because you had to reach your hand into the jar every time you wanted to turn them off.   I found a plan on Thingverse and adapted it to better fit our needs and battery pack.  The design attached the jar like any of the two-part lids.  We just drop the lid part and retain the threaded attachments. The Plans - The Video and All That This article as a YouTube video  STL files can be found at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5928345 It looks like the Ikea lights we used are the  Ledfyr Standard Mason Jar In Use - On the Jar Drop the string of lights into the jar.  Slide the battery pack into the slot at the top. Push the wire into the slot on the side of the lid.  Insert the mount wi...

PII tokenization is a way of protecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with similar impacts as field-level encryption but without the overhead of key management or rotation.  Tokenization and Encryption both have an impact on data equality checking inside applications and on the fidelity of the data. Plaintext data can be searched and matched us case-sensitive or case-insensitive techniques. Tokenization and Encryption make that impossible because the data is transformed into a form where the case and punctuation are embedded in the data blob.  We can transform the data to a canonical form prior to tokenization.  That makes equality matches easy but makes it difficult to return the originally formatted value because the token/encryption had to same case or character set prior to tokenization in the source data. Video Presentation  Slides and Speaker Notes Slides are provided here for Video reference. Speaker notes to be added Speaker notes t...

Transformation is hard and people only tend to do it when a situation is untenable or the evidence undeniable.  You have to be willing to break things when you transform and it is often hard to stand up to the scrutiny of doing it prior to some major problem. A retired executive and I were talking the other day. I told them about two places that rolled back their transformation efforts after a regime change where the transformation champions left or were reorganized out of that role. The exec said that we were in the phase where seeing: The white blood cells were swarming the transformation infection to eradicate it. This article exists so that I wouldn't lose the quote for this Larry-ism . 👀 and this one from JK  The strong biological reaction to change feels like a  corporate autoimmune disorder. I love that phrasing.  It provides a good analogy for the corporate corpus reaction to forced change after the initial ...

Failure and Success. Was it me? Experiencing success and failure. The common denominator was me but maybe not the common cause. My first 4 were failures.   I thought I was the common denominator I need to change industries The next 4 were successes  I thought the common denominator was me I needed to go on stage and talk about my awesomeness The next 4 were a mixed bag.   I grew more discerning about when something would succeed or fail, usually because of political issues or snap-back. I could help make it happen but wasn't in a position to do it by myself. So I just had to continue getting better. Repeating success was hard It depended on the org. The same people might not succeed in a different setting or with a different environment. The organizational appetite for change and success is the top-level function determining success. You need to improve to contribute and tilt the playing field in your favor. Revision History 2023 03 Created

We are all "here to get paid" but you are shortchanging yourself if that is the end of your thought pattern.  This is especially true for those in the knowledge industry.  None of us would "work here for free" but knowledge work isn't static. It evolves over time and provides a growth path for more money and stimulation. There are times when you have the opportunity to move to the next level in your skills and the respect of others. Exploit those opportunities. Those skills and respect can lead to better work with more skills and more respect. More respect means a bigger social network.   Bigger social networks can lead to more interesting work and more money.  A high percentage of my work came from former co-workers. Work is the thing that lets you support yourself and your loved ones and provide leverage for a better future. Extra  investments at the right times can result in higher lifet...

People claim that great software engineers are 10x as productive as the average engineer. This notion has driven the industry transformation efforts for decades. Agile and other efforts are all about enabling high-performing teams. Studies show that performance follows the power law curve and not the bell curve. This radically changes the way we think about above and below average. I have another talk that discusses layoffs and IP that felt incomplete because it didn't address the phases that lead to layoffs. The reality is that some significant percentage of people or programs do not materially contribute to the company's success. I worked at a home lender where I was convinced that the department could shut down for a month without materially impacting the business. This eventually leads to layoffs.   Video The 60 second short version Images used in the talk Speaker's Notes to Follow Speaker's Notes to Follow Speaker's Notes to Follow Speaker's ...

The assets of many modern companies are more intellectual than physical. They are the Intellectual Property that is locked in the brains of the employees. That IP has legs. Companies may target layoffs at a single group but that often spills over escalating concern and confusion. That unease causes more assets to leave the company. Communication is key to keeping knowledge/people in place. Silent or stealth layoffs drive the rumor mill and make people wonder about the real drivers for staff reductions. I've worked in places where everyone in the company took the same pay cut or where executive compensation was slashed in order to save jobs. Those companies seem to be rare. Layoffs remind people that company loyalty is often a one-way street. Companies pay for this with higher turnover, increased costs, and reduced efficiency. There are times when layoffs are necessary. Restructuring and layoffs may be necessary but at the end of the day, layoffs are due to some organizat...

A new system that behaves exactly like the existing system in order to allay fears and, retain all the existing interfaces, data meanings, and testing approaches. The new system's business behavior is identical and all interfaces are the same or easily adaptable. That compatibility extends to all the idiosyncracies of the previous system including all the workarounds that were put in to support other systems or rules that may or may not still be valid. This is a design of least surprise. Video https://youtu.be/npcuWeKnkj0 Slides Speaker notes to be added Video Revision History Created 2023 02

 

I ran into this weird problem when using an OLED display on a Pico RP2040 when I initialized the Adafruit SH1106 SPI OLED driver.  Trash started scrolling up the screen.  The screen was erased and worked fine when sending my own graphics to it.   Finally, I looked at the output and found out Adafruit automatically routes REPL output to any display added. Video A second try at a video The first video #CircuitPython2023 Revision History 2023 03 Created