Articles by ryan

The thing about HIMSS is that there are a lot of people. I mean ... a lot of people. More than 43k people will attend as speakers, exhibitors or attendees.

Let that sink in for a second.

No. Really. Let. That. Sink. In.

That’s more than the average attendance of a MLB game of 29 teams. It’s ridiculous.

As an introvert you know what will drain you and what will invigorate you. For me I need to be cautious of conferencing too hard. That is, I need to be aware of myself, my surroundings and my energy levels.

My tips are:

1. Have a great playlist on your smart phone. I use an iPhone and get a subscription to Apple Music just for the conference. This allows me to have a killer set of music that helps to drown out the cacophony of people.
2. Know when you’ve reached your limit. Even with some sweet tunes it’s easy to get drained. When you’re done you’re done. Don’t be a hero.
3. Try to make at least one meaningful connection. I know, it’s hard. But it’s totally worth it. Other introverts are easy to spot because they’re the people on their smart phones pretending to write a blog post while listening to their sweet playlist. But if you can start a conversation, not small talk, it will be worth it. Attend a networking function that’s applicable to you and you’ll be able to find at least one or two people to connect with.

The other tips for surviving HIMSS are the same for any other conference:

1. Don’t worry about how you’re dressed ... you will always be underdressed when compared to Hospital Administrators ... you’re in ‘IT’ and you dress like it
2. Wear good walking shoes (see number 2 about being under dressed)
3. Drink plenty of water
4. Wash your hands and/or have hand sanitizer
5. Accept free food when it’s offered

Ok. One day down. 3+ more to go!

Posted by ryan on Tue 06 March 2018

In my last post I indicated that I may need to

reinstalling everything on the Pi and starting from scratch

While speaking about my issues with pip3 and python3. Turns out that the fix was easier than I though. I checked to see what where pip3 and python3 where being executed from by running the which command.

The which pip3 returned /usr/local/bin/pip3 while which python3 returned /usr/local/bin/python3. This is exactly what was causing my problem.

To verify what version of python was running, I checked python3 --version and it returned 3.6.0.

To fix it I just ran these commands to unlink the new, broken versions:

sudo unlink /usr/local/bin/pip3

And

sudo unlink /usr/local/bin/python3

I found this answer on StackOverflow and tweaked it slightly for my needs.

Now, when I run python --version I get 3.4.2 instead of 3.6.0

Unfortunately I didn’t think to run the --version flag on pip before and after the change, and I’m hesitant to do it now as it’s back to working.

Posted by ryan on Tue 13 February 2018

My wife and I love baseball season. Specifically we love the Dodgers and we can’t wait for Spring Training to begin. In fact, today pitchers and catchers report!

I’ve wanted to do something with the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat that I got (since I got it) but I’ve struggled to find anything useful. And then I remembered baseball season and I thought, ‘Hey, what if I wrote something to have the Sense Hat say “#ITFDB” starting 10 minutes before a Dodgers game started?’

And so I did!

The script itself is relatively straight forward. It reads a csv file and checks to see if the current time in California is within 10 minutes of start time of the game. If it is, then it will send a show_message command to the Sense Hat.

I also wrote a cron job to run the script every minute so that I get a beautiful scrolling bit of text every minute before the Dodgers start!

The code can be found on my GitHub page in the itfdb repository. There are 3 files:

1. Program.py which does the actual running of the script
2. data_types.py which defines a class used in Program.py
3. schedule.csv which is the schedule of the games for 2018 as a csv file.

I ran into a couple of issues along the way. First, my development environment on my Mac Book Pro was Python 3.6.4 while the Production Environment on the Raspberry Pi was 3.4. This made it so that the code about time ran locally but not on the server 🤦‍♂️.

It took some playing with the code, but I was finally able to go from this (which worked on 3.6 but not on 3.4):

now = utc_now.astimezone(pytz.timezone("America/Los_Angeles"))
game_date_time = game_date_time.astimezone(pytz.timezone("America/Los_Angeles"))

To this which worked on both:

local_tz = pytz.timezone('America/Los_Angeles')
now = utc_now.astimezone(local_tz)
game_date_time = local_tz.localize(game_date_time)

For both, the game_date_time variable setting was done in a for loop.

Another issue I ran into was being able to display the message for the sense hat on my Mac Book Pro. I wasn’t ever able to because of a package that is missing (RTIMU ) and is apparently only available on Raspbian (the OS on the Pi).

Finally, in my attempts to get the code I wrote locally to work on the Pi I decided to install Python 3.6.0 on the Pi (while 3.4 was installed) and seemed to do nothing but break pip. It looks like I’ll be learning how to uninstall Python 3.4 OR reinstalling everything on the Pi and starting from scratch. Oh well … at least it’s just a Pi and not a real server.

Although, I’m pretty sure I hosed my Linode server a while back and basically did the same thing so maybe it’s just what I do with servers when I’m learning.

One final thing. While sitting in the living room watching DC Legends of Tomorrow the Sense Hat started to display the message. Turns out, I was accounting for the minute, hour, and day but NOT the month. The Dodgers play the Cubs on September 12 at 9:35 (according to the schedule.csv file anyway) and so the conditions to display were met.

I added another condition to make sure it was the right month and now we’re good to go!

Super pumped for this season with the Dodgers!

Posted by ryan on Tue 13 February 2018

In my last post I wrote out the steps that I was going to use to turn a ton of .h264 files into one mp4 file with the use of MP4Box.

Before outlining my steps I said, “The method below works but I’m sure that there is a better way to do it.”

Shortly after posting that I decided to find that better way. Turns out, ~~it wasn’t really that much more work~~ it was much harder than originally thought.

The command below is a single line and it will create a text file (com.txt) and then execute it as a bash script:

~~(echo '#!/bin/sh'; for i in *.h264; do if [ "$i" -eq 1 ]; then echo -n " -add $i"; else echo -n " -cat $i"; fi; done; echo -n " hummingbird.mp4") > /Desktop/com.txt | chmod +x /Desktop/com.txt | ~/Desktop/com.txt~~

(echo '#!/bin/sh'; echo -n "MP4Box"; array=($(ls *.h264)); for index in ${!array[@]}; do if [ "$index" -eq 1 ]; then echo -n " -add ${array[index]}"; else echo -n " -cat ${array[index]}"; fi; done; echo -n " hummingbird.mp4") > com.txt | chmod +x com.txt

Next you execute the script with

./com.txt

OK, but what is it doing? The parentheses surround a set of echo commands that output to com.txt. I’m using a for loop with an if statement. The reason I can’t do a straight for loop is because the first h264 file used in MP4Box needs to have the -add flag while all of the others need the -cat flag.

Once the file is output to the com.txt file (on the Desktop) I pipe it to the chmod +x command to change it’s mode to make it executable.

Finally, I pipe that to a command to run the file ~/Desktop/com.txt

I was pretty stoked when I figured it out and was able to get it to run.

The next step will be to use it for the hundreds of h264 files that will be output from my hummingbird camera that I just installed today.

I’ll have a post on that in the next couple of days.

Posted by ryan on Sat 10 February 2018

The general form of the concatenate command for MP4Box is:

MP4Box -add <filename>.ext -cat <filename>.ext output.ext¹

When you have more than a couple of output files, you’re going to want to automate that -cat part as much as possible because let’s face it, writing out that statement even more than a couple of times will get really old really fast.

The method below works but I’m sure that there is a better way to do it.

1. echo out the command you want to run. In this case:

(echo -n "MP4Box "; for i in *.h264; do echo -n " -cat $i"; done; echo -n " hummingbird.mp4") >> com.txt

1. Edit the file com.txt created in (1) so that you can change the first -cat to -add

vim com.txt

1. While still in vim editing the com.txt file add the #!/bin/sh to the first line. When finished, exit vim²
2. Change the mode of the file so it can run

chmod +x com.txt

1. Run the file:

./com.txt

Why am I doing all of this? I have a Raspberry Pi with a Camera attachment and a motion sensor. I’d like to watch the hummingbirds that come to my hummingbird feeder with it for a day or two and get some sweet video. We’ll see how it goes.

1. The -add will add the \<filename> to the output file while the -cat will add any other files to the output file (all while not overwriting the output file so that the files all get streamed together). ↩︎
2. I’m sure there’s an xkcd comic about this, but I just can’t find it! ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Thu 08 February 2018

This last weekend was the divisional round of the NFL playoffs. There were 3 really good games and the game that the Patriot played in. This is unfortunate because I only had the Patriots game on the calendar for the weekend so that meant other things could get scheduled whenever and I would end up missing many, if not all, of the other games.

Sunday had 2 amazing games. The Steelers lost to the Jaguars in an upset and I got to see the last drive that put the Steelers down by a Field Goal as time expired. It was simply amazing to see how hard they played even though they must have known that they weren’t going to win.

When I got home from being out the New Orleans at Minnesota game was at half time with Minnesota up 17-0. It looked like it was going to be a route and I was glad that I wasn’t really watching it.

I started to do the chores that needed to be done (laundry, straightening up, getting ready for the week) and had the game on in the background.

And then the improbable started to happen. Drew Brees played an amazing half of football and all of a sudden it’s 21-20 New Orleans. After a couple of field goals are exchanged it’s 24-23 New Orleans with Minnesota in possession of the ball.

Case Keenum had made a couple of errors earlier in the game (one interception lead to a touch down and really helped the Saints get back in the game). It looked like he was on track to do something similarly ill-advised.

Then, with 10 seconds left the bar is snapped and he passes the ball to Stefon Diggs who catches the ball. And just as he catches the ball Marcus Williams, a defensive back for New Orleans is cued up to make an ordinary tackle in an extraordinary situation.

I was only on my high school football team for 2 years, but one thing the coaches were always on us about was wrapping up the ball carrier when we were going to tackle. “Wrap him up” they’d scream at us. Over and over again.

It became something we did just so they’d stop yelling at us (for that anyway).

So Marcus Williams is getting ready to tackle Stefon Diggs and all he has to do is “Wrap him up!” But something inside of Willliams’ head is saying, “Sports Center highlight” and instead of going for the boring, but effective arm wrapping tackle, he tried to hit Diggs with his shoulder to hopefully get the ball to be knocked loose.

Instead, he whiffs by Diggs who spins, plants his hand on the ground to stay up and proceeds to run 60 yards for the game winning, walk-off, touchdown.

I truly believe that Williams was thinking about how cool it would be to get on Sport Center when he was deciding how to tackle Diggs, and that cost the Saints the game.

Dear Sports center, stop making our sports be bad and our athletes make dumb decisions. Can you just go away now. Ok, thanks, bye

Posted by ryan on Sun 04 February 2018

I’d discovered a python package called osmnx which will take GIS data and allow you to draw maps using python. Pretty cool, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it.

After a bit of playing around with it I finally decided that I could make some pretty cool Fractures.

I’ve got lots of Fracture images in my house and I even turned my diplomas into Fractures to hang up on the wall at my office, but I hadn’t tried to make anything like this before.

I needed to figure out what locations I was going to do. I decided that I wanted to do 9 of them so that I could create a 3 x 3 grid of these maps.

I selected 9 cities that were important to me and my family for various reasons.

Next writing the code. The script is 54 lines of code and doesn’t really adhere to PEP8 but that just gives me a chance to do some reformatting / refactoring later on.

In order to get the desired output I needed several libraries:

osmnx (as I’d mentioned before)
matplotlib.pyplot
numpy
PIL

If you’ve never used PIL before it’s the ‘Python Image Library’ and according to it’s home page it

adds image processing capabilities to your Python interpreter. This library supports many file formats, and provides powerful image processing and graphics capabilities.

OK, let’s import some libraries!

import osmnx as ox, geopandas as gpd, os
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from PIL import Image
from PIL import ImageFont
from PIL import ImageDraw

Next, we establish the configurations:

ox.config(log_file=True, log_console=False, use_cache=True)

The ox.config allows you to specify several options. In this case, I’m:

1. Specifying that the logs be saved to a file in the log directory
2. Suppress the output of the log file to the console (this is helpful to have set to True when you’re first running the script to see what, if any, errors you have.
3. The use_chache=True will use a local cache to save/retrieve http responses instead of calling API repetitively for the same request URL

This option will help performance if you have the run the script more than once.

OSMX has many different options to generate maps. I played around with the options and found that the walking network within 750 meters of my address gave me the most interesting lines.

AddressDistance = 750
AddressDistanceType = 'network'
AddressNetworkType = 'walk'

Now comes some of the most important decisions (and code!). Since I’ll be making this into a printed image I want to make sure that the image and resulting file will be of a high enough quality to render good results. I also want to start with a white background (although a black background might have been kind of cool). I also want to have a high DPI. Taking these needs into consideration I set my plot variables:

PlotBackgroundColor = '#ffffff'
PlotNodeSize = 0
PlotFigureHeight = 40
PlotFigureWidth = 40
PlotFileType = 'png'
PlotDPI = 300
PlotEdgeLineWidth = 10.0

I played with the PlotEdgeLineWidth a bit until I got a result that I liked. It controls how thick the route lines are and is influenced by the PlotDPI. For the look I was going for 10.0 worked out well for me. I’m not sure if that means a 30:1 ratio for PlotDPI to PlotEdgeLineWidth would be universal but if you like what you see then it’s a good place to start.

One final piece was deciding on the landmarks that I was going to use. I picked nine places that my family and I had been to together and used addresses that were either of the places that we stayed at (usually hotels) OR major landmarks in the areas that we stayed. Nothing special here, just a text file with one location per line set up as

Address, City, State

For example:

1234 Main Street, Anytown, CA

So we just read that file into memory:

landmarks = open('/Users/Ryan/Dropbox/Ryan/Python/landmarks.txt', 'r')

Next we set up some scaffolding so we can loop through the data effectively

landmarks = landmarks.readlines()
landmarks = [item.rstrip() for item in landmarks]

fill = (0,0,0,0)

city = []

The loop below is doing a couple of things:

1. Splits the landmarks array into base elements by breaking it apart at the commas (I can do this because of the way that the addresses were entered. Changes may be needed to account for my complex addresses (i.e. those with multiple address lines (suite numbers, etc) or if local addresses aren’t constructed in the same way that US addresses are)
2. Appends the second and third elements of the parts array and replaces the space between them with an underscore to convert Anytown, CA to Anytown_CA

<!-- -->

for element in landmarks:
    parts = element.split(',')
    city.append(parts[1].replace(' ', '', 1)+'_'+parts[2].replace(' ', ''))

This next line isn’t strictly necessary as it could just live in the loop, but it was helpful for me when writing to see what was going on. We want to know how many items are in the landmarks

rows = len(landmarks)

Now to loop through it. A couple of things of note:

The package includes several graph_from_... functions. They take as input some type, like address, i.e. graph_from_address (which is what I’m using) and have several keyword arguments.

In the code below I’m using the ith landmarks item and setting the distance, distance_type, network_type and specifying an option to make the map simple by setting simplify=‘true’

To add some visual interest to the map I’m using this line

ec = ['#cc0000' if data['length'] >=100 else '#3366cc' for u, v, key, data in G.edges(keys=True, data=True)]

If the length of the part of the map is longer than 100m then the color is displayed as #cc0000 (red) otherwise it will be #3366cc (blue)

The plot_graph is what does the heavy lifting to generate the image. It takes as input the output from the graph_from_address and ec to identify what and how the map will look.

Next we use the PIL library to add text to the image. It takes into memory the image file and saves out to a directory called /images/. My favorite part of this library is that I can choose what font I want to use (whether it’s part of the system fonts or a custom user font) and the size of the font. For my project I used San Francisco at 512.

Finally, there is an exception for the code that adds text. The reason for this is that when I was playing with adding text to the image I found that for 8 of 9 maps having the text in the upper left hand corner worker really well. It was just that last one (San Luis Obispo, CA) that didn’t.

So, instead of trying to find a different landmark, I decided to take a bit of artistic license and put the San Luis Obispo text in the upper right hard corner.

Once the script is all set simply typing python MapProject.py in my terminal window from the directory where the file is saved generated the files.

All I had to do what wait and the images were saved to my /images/ directory.

Next, upload to Fracture and order the glass images!

I received the images and was super excited. However, upon opening the box and looking at them I noticed something wasn’t quite right

[caption id="attachment_188" align="alignnone" width="2376"]![Napa with the text slightly off the image]images/uploads/2018/01/Image-12-16-17-6-55-AM.jpeg){.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-188 width="2376" height="2327"} Napa with the text slightly off the image[/caption]

As you can see, the name place is cut off on the left. Bummer.

No reason to fret though! Fracture has a 100% satisfaction guarantee. So I emailed support and explained the situation.

Within a couple of days I had my bright and shiny fractures to hang on my wall

[caption id="attachment_187" align="alignnone" width="2138"]![Napa with the text properly displaying]images/uploads/2018/01/IMG_9079.jpg){.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-187 width="2138" height="2138"} Napa with the text properly displaying[/caption]

So that my office wall is no longer blank and boring:

but interesting and fun to look at

Posted by ryan on Fri 12 January 2018

In a previous post I spoke about my use of Rules and Custom Actions in Outlook. In this post I’ll talk about my Review process which I adapted from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology.

There are several decisions that need to be made when reviewing email:

1. Is this for me?
2. Is it something that I need to do right now?

If the email is not for me then I need to decide who it is for. Once I have made that decision I Delegate the responsibility of the email.

I will forward the email (or write up a new email with the salient details) and send it to the person that I’m delegating the responsibility to. But here’s the trick … I have a rule that if I put my email address in the BCC line it will be moved to a folder called @waiting and flagged as a follow up item.

I then review the @waiting folder once a day or every other day and will send a follow up email if needed OR delete the email once the person has responded to me.

The next decision I need to make is “Do I need to do this right now?” If I don’t, then I’ll Defer a response or action to the needed time. Unfortunately Outlook doesn’t have a good defer mechanism like my beloved OmniFocus, so I will convert the email into a meeting and remove the attendees other than me to a data and time when I need to work on the email.

Finally, the email may require me to Do something right now. In that case, I focus fully on the requirements of the email and do it.

This may involve scheduling a meeting, or supplying times when I’m available for a meeting, or it might be answering a question asked of me. I will do any necessary research OR as I start working on the email that requires a decision I’ll discover that I don’t have enough information to actually make that decision.

When that happens I’ll send an email (either forwarding or creating a new one) to the person I think that can supply the information and, you guessed it, I’ll BCC myself so that the email is put into my @waiting folder.

Using the above methodology I’m able to manage the massive amounts of email that I receive. Hopefully this helps someone out there who is drowning in email.

Posted by ryan on Sat 30 December 2017

One of the best things about the holidays is getting to take some time off and visit family and friends.

One of the worst things about the holidays is coming back to work and an inbox with more than 1200 emails. Granted, I was out of the office for 4 business days so it’s only about 300 emails per day, but still … it’s a lot¹.

I have two strategies for dealing with the many emails I get:

1. Outlook Rules (Rules)
2. Outlook Custom Actions (Actions)

Rules

Rules allow you to apply actions automatically as they are received in your inbox. This is useful if you work (or manage) one or more tech support desks and you need to segregate the email received into folders to review later.

This is exactly the kind of thing that I do. I currently have more than 50 rules set up in Outlook and they help process about 50%-60% of the emails that I receive.

The other 40% - 50% can’t be ‘Rule’ drive.

For these types of emails I use Actions.

Actions

Actions are amazing because they can have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them.²

I have 3 Actions that I use consistently to help manage my email that isn’t automatically routed with Rules:

1. Archive (Ctrl + Shift + 9)
2. Review (Ctrl + Shift + 5)
3. Review with Boss (Ctrl + Shift + 1)

I archive all internal emails I receive, and probably about 90% of the external emails I receive so that I can refer back to them when needed. I have to archive them into a .pst file because my IS department only allocates a finite (some might say small finite) amount of space.

Using the Keyboard Shortcut Ctrl + Shift + 9 will automatically move an email to the archive. This is really helpful for emails that were sent to me for informational purposes OR that have a long email chain and a resolution was reached without me.

The Review Action will mark the email with a Flag and move it to a @Review folder. I do this with emails that will take more than 2 minutes to process. This works well for longer emails, or emails that need me to make a decision and I am not ready to make that decision yet.

The Review with Boss action is the one action that is used the least of these three. It is useful when I receive an email and need guidance from my boss. If I just need to send her an email about it then I’ll usually mark it as Review and follow up with it during my review process or if it will take less than 2 minutes to write up an email I’ll take care of it right then and there.

Usually emails to her take longer than 2 minutes to compose because they need to be short ³

In my next post I’ll go over my review process. This is where I go through the 25 - 100 emails that have been marked as Review and answer the emails that need attention.

1. I used to get even more. When my company upgraded to Exchange Server 2016 we got the ability for Out of Office Notifications to appear in a message BEFORE a person sent it. This has cut down on the amount of email I receive when I’m out of the office by about 30% - 50% ↩︎
2. If you’re not using keyboard shortcuts, you’re really missing out on some power user productivity hacks that will help you out. ↩︎
3. This idea is cribbed from Blaise Pascal’s statement, “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte” … in English, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” Hat tip to Quote Investigator ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Thu 28 December 2017

For Christmas I bought myself a 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. Several bonuses were associated with the purchase:

1. A \$150 Apple Gift Card because I bought the MacBook Pro on Black Friday and Apple had a special going (w00t!)
2. The Credit Card I use to make ALL of my purchases at Apple has a 3% cash back (in the form of iTunes cards)
3. A free 30 minute online / phone session with an ‘Apple Specialist’

Now I didn’t know about item number 3 when I made the purchase, but was greeted with an email informing me of my great luck.

This is my fifth Mac¹ and I don’t remember ever getting this kind of service before. So I figured, what the hell and decided to snooze the email until the day after Christmas to remind myself to sign up for the session.

When I entered the session I was asked to optionally provide some information about myself. I indicated that I had been using a Mac for several years and considered myself an intermediate user.

My Apple ‘Specialist’ was Jaime. She confirmed the optional notes that I entered and we were off to the races.

Now a lot of what she told me about Safari (blocking creepy tracking behavior, ability to mute sound from auto play videos, default site to display in reader view) I knew from the WWDC Keynote that I watched back in June, but I listened just in case I had missed something from that session (or the 10s / 100s of hours of podcasts I listened to about the Keynote).

One thing that I had heard about was the ability to pin tabs in Safari. I never really knew what that meant and figured it wasn’t anything that I needed.

I was wrong. Holy crap is pinning tabs in Safari a useful feature! I can keep all of my most used sites pinned and get to them really quickly and they get auto refreshed! Sweet!

The other super useful thing I found out about was the Split Screen feature that allows you to split apps on your screen (in a very iOS-y way!).

Finally, Jaime reviewed how to customize the touch bar! This one was super useful as I think there are 2 discoverability issues with it:

1. The option to Customize Touch Bar is hidden in the View menu which isn’t somewhere I’d look for it
2. To Customize the Touch Bar you drag down from the Main Screen onto the Touch Bar.

After the call I received a nice follow up email from Apple / Jaime

Now that you're more familiar with your new Mac, here are some additional resources that can help you go further.

Apple Support Find answers to common questions, watch video tutorials, download user guides, and share solutions with the Apple community. Visit Support

Today at Apple Discover inspiring programs happening near you. Visit Today at Apple

Accessories From the Apple accessories page, you can learn about all kinds of new and innovative products that work with iPhone, iPad, Mac and more. Visit Accessories

How to use the Touch Bar on your MacBook Pro - https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT207055

Use Mission Control on your Mac - https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204100

Use two Mac apps side by side in Split View - https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204948

Websites preferences - https://support.apple.com/ guide/safari/websites- preferences-ibrwe2159f50

I’m glad that I had the Mac session and I will encourage anyone that buys a Mac in the future to schedule one.

1. They are in order of purchase: 2012 15-inch MacBook Pro, 2014 27-inch 5K iMac, 2015 MacBook, 2016 13-inch 2 Thunderbolt MacBook Pro; 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar ↩︎

Posted by ryan on Wed 27 December 2017