I was trying to run SpinRite 6.1 on some drives from an old Drobo 5N NAS that bit the dust a few years back, but I didn't have an x86 machine handy, but after a bit of research I found a very elegant way to do this with QEMU.

All has been quiet on the blogging front, since life has been busy: on top of my wife and I moving houses in August, as part of the COO Leadership Development Program (LDP) at Autodesk I had the opportunity to travel to to Tokyo in May, met with my business challenge team in London in July, and experienced the culmination of our program with a presentation in beautiful San Diego before AU, the Design and Make conference.

I would be remiss if I wrote my next blog post without reflecting on a recent amazing and profound experience I had in Tokyo, as part of Autodesk's COO Leadership Development Program.

Python has become the lingua franca for developing various AI/ML solutions (and more), but getting started with setting up a proper Python environment can be tricky and involve several hours of research or asking colleagues how they go about it, and many "getting started with Python" guides tend to gloss over these aspects, which is why I hope in this post to give a no-nonsense, guide to setting up Python environments.

Back in the early part of my career, I found myself thrust into an environment that in retrospect was entirely predicated upon a waterfall design methodology. We would do big design up front, in excruciating detail, often without understanding the implications of what was even feasible, with the usual overruns that would happen in terms of time and money to go along with that.

I have pushed the content of this blog post to GitHub Pages with zero use of a personal access token (fine-grained or otherwise) or even an SSH key. How is this possible?

Chefs have a saying: mise en place, or "putting in place." This is a great analogy and philosophy for data in an enterprise as well...

Time and attention and energy are utterly precious and fleeting resources. Following that, there are few things you can do that are more egregiously and flagrantly detrimental to a colleague's time, attention, and energy than DM-ing them with a simple "Hi" or "Hello" with no context, expecting a response from that alone towards something you are seeking to accomplish.

Whether for your team, or for your product or service, a designated code name provides maximum flexibility in the face of what is an ever-present constant in our lives: change.

Point solution infrastructure as code (IaC) templates get very tiresome very fast, because they're not reusable.