Author Archives: remkohdev

Moments in History – Many is Man

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Many is man, Prigozhin said. He chewed on a carrot stick, which had snapped off from its stem held in his right hand, his mouth gaped open, his thick underlip protruded sadly, the ring of his mouth opening and closing repeatedly, while with every bite he gently squeezed his buttocks together in tight harmony, as flighty words and sweet carrot mingled into half reason, half prime. Many is man, he repeated. The ring begins Prigozhin said, quiet, listen. The water of the Rhine rippled from its source, barely audible, quietly swelling, from the Lake Toma at the Oberalp Pass. You have to see to hear it, only then to rise to waves and flow around the castle of man. Prigozhin was a boor, but don’t be fooled by his simple, crude appearance, he was sophisticated. Many years later, I would think back of this scene, as Prigozhin had risen and he had long forgotten about me or the carrot he had chunked on quietly, but I remembered it indistinguishably like a great silent moment in history, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings.

Open Source driving Security, DevOps and Infrastructure Automation

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If you are an Application Developer, DevOps engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or otherwise interested in Cloud Native and application modernization, you will see a lot of action in the fields of security, automation and devops areas on Cloud Native. Venture Capital is investing heavily in devops automation and security, recruiters are aggressively hunting down talent, new job openings are being posted every day, new startups are funded, open source projects and Kubernetes extensions launched with no end.

There are also a lot of really boring companies and technologies, capitalizing on the surge in adoption of cloud native without inspiring vision, like anything with “data-driven”, “single-sign on”, “insights”, “utilizing AI to optimize”, “future of cloud engineering” or “AI driven” makes me fall asleep fast. But there are also some really exciting initiatives, especially in the field of “everything is code”, automation of infrastructure, security and Kubernetes extensions and standardizations.

One thing, that IBM always got right in my opinion, is the decades long strategy to lead innovation by open sourcing technologies and creating community governed foundations to govern the open source standards for it, from the Apache Foundation, the Linux Foundation, Node.js Foundation to the more recent Cloud Native Computing Foundations (CNCF), CD Foundation to Open Cybersecurity Alliance (OCA).

The technologies and startups that I am most excited about, and which I recommend to let your long term career choices and direction be guided by all follow the same model and objectives: to build a service organization, to open source their core technology and to aim to be promoted to foundation projects. Just to name a few startups:

  • env0, two rounds of seed funding in 2020 of 6.8M
  • Snyk, added 200M investments in September 2020 and went from Series A to a $2.6BN valuation in 2.5 years
  • Harness, added 60M in series B funding in 2019, acquiring Drone.io in 2020
  • Pulumi, raised $37.5 million in Series B funding
  • Ambassador, formerly known as datawire.io 4M funding in seed funding in 2019

Or some interesting open source projects,

  • Ansible. Ansible is too widely adopted and established to really mention here, but the reason why I include it here, is because it too keeps innovating to adept to the growing complexity of cloud native architectures and still driving and inspiring a lot of the above mentioned startups probably, for instance with Ansible Molecule and Ansible AWX.
  • OpenSCAP, I am personally very interested in the automation of so-called business controls and compliance with regulatory requirements. OpenSCAP is one of the best tools out there, especially with image, container and NIST scanning. But there are also super exciting developments in the field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
  • kustomize, if you are used to Helm to configure your Kubernetes deployments, you will find Kustomize fun to play with. There are other tools like Source-to-Image (S2I) for instance that are similar.
  • skopeo, the longer I work on Cloud Native, the more I find myself drawn back to the basics of managing containers, skopeo is a great tool for this.
  • podman, also a bit out of line here, but if you are interested in security and hate to be stuck with only a single tool in the toolbox, Podman is a great alternative to Docker to build your images, and comes out of the SELinux corner with a much better security design.

Separation from the Past

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A step into the presence you could call it, or a separation from the past, but every long-term migrant will experience a similar process. The first step in a migration is the physical move from the old land to the new land. In its trail follows a long, slow shadow that drags out in the foggy dawn of a migrant’s newly rising persona. This long trail is a largely invisible transition which change you recognize best under the light of hindsight. 

Fifteen years after my migration to the new land, the United States, or rather New York City, I can say today, I look backward and see the new dawn around me. I was born into my Dutch heritage like a fish that moves around in the water and my upbringing is the land on which I crawled, but I see that what was my right by birth, Holland, has now become my past. What has settled and rooted so deeply in who I am, has been separated from me, like a ship that disappears past the horizon out of sight. I am afloat, have become my own buoy.

In sight, only the rails of the ship and a horizon all around still are. Above the clouds, below the waves and the play of light and shadow drifting on the water. Today, there is no lifeline back, no road back, no home to return to, any direction is equally random past this point. Of course, one always has direction, and the water itself, spacetime if you will, always holds a steady course for a certain amount of time. There is no clear separation of past and future, the present is a long continuum that shifts slowly, gently, fastly.

Where lies my future now? Heavy wheels were set in motion, a new seed planted, roots intertwined, a wind blows, a stream flows.

Complexity and Economics by NAF-Biz NY (Nov 16, 2017)

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On November 16, prior to the 2017 Peter Stuyvesant Ball, the Netherland-America Foundation (NAF) organized this year a lecture about Complexity and Economics. The lecture, at Baker McKenzie in New York, was a high level overview of complexity principles for public policy by speakers Dr. Roland Kupers, among other associate fellow at the University of Oxford, and via a pre-recorded video by Prof. Lex Hoogduin.

On forehand, I was very excited to attend this talk as I deal with the topic more or less as a developer advocate for IBM either via the IBM Data Science Experience (DSX), Machine Learning and IBM Watson (cognitive computing, having some experience in R programming, data science, machine learning, calculus, and 20+ years of software engineering. The evening was certainly not un-interesting, but I was a little disappointed by the lack of depth of the presentations, and neither of the speakers touched on machine learning, statistics, or mathematics which have my immediate interest. But nevertheless, the two talks touched upon enough topics for further inquiry to make the evening inspiring.

Kupers’ talk relates to his publication entitled ‘Complexity and the art of public policy’ (2016) in collaboration with David Colander. Kupers is a physicist by training with experience in the field of fractals, then switched to economic policy early in his career, being a consultant now, who among other advised the NWO (Dutch organization for scientific research). Continue reading →

Salman Akhtar, Selma Kramer, The Seasons of Life (1997)

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Salman Akhtar, Selma Kramer, The Seasons of Life (1997) 183p

Salman Akhtar (1946-) is a Indian-American psycho-analyst, born into a Muslim family in Khairabad (Uttar Pradesh, India), who was a former pupil of Margaret Mahler (1897-1985). I previously read ‘Immigration and Identity (1999)‘ by Akhtar. In academia, your success often depends greatly on the favor and serendipity of your professor. Akhtar’s chance was to work with world famous child psycho-analyst Margaret Mahler. Mahler is renowned for her pivotal role in the study of normal development of child psychology. Her famous work ‘The psychological birth of the human infant (1975)’ defined the process of separation-individuation in child psychology.

Akhtar’s ‘The Seasons of Life’ is essentially a literature study of articles and works by subsequent psychologists supporting the view that this separation-individuation continues throughout life.
Anni Bergman worked closely with Margaret Mahler and researched the individuation that continues after object constancy throughout life and how this development of the autonomous self impacts later phases of development and later life conflicts and crises.
Calvin Colarusso argues that the lifelong separation-individuation process comes with an inherent threat of object loss in every stage of growing independence, which can be translated into ongoing negotiation and control during the middle years.
Stanley Cath focuses more on the third phase in life, where older individuals balance between ongoing losses and the restitution in anchoraches that hold the self together. Colarusso uses the example of Mr. Holland’s Opus () to demonstrate the conflicts between family loyalties versus career aspirations or aspirations of the self.

Ionic2: if … else … template blocks in Angular2

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Angular2 supported an if-condition via the *ngIf directive.

<div *ngIf="edit == false">
VIEW
</div>
<div *ngIf="edit == true">
EDIT
</div>

Since Angular2 v4, the ngIf directive was extended with an ‘then.. else..’ syntax, in which you can reference the identifier of the HTML tags to include.

<div *ngIf="edit; then editDiv else viewDiv"></div>
<ng-template #editDiv>
EDIT
</ng-template>
<ng-template #viewDiv>
VIEW
</ng-template>

Another way to control HTML input-tags to be editable or disabled, is to use the [attr.disabled] syntax.

<input [attr.disabled]="edit ? null : true">

When using Ionic2, this translates to the following code.

<ion-input [disabled]="!edit"><ion-input>

In the TypeScript component, then in the control the ‘edit’ boolean variable.

I use the [attr.disabled] syntax for instance to display a detail page of an object in view (Read) or edit (Create/Update) form, and adding a Delete option to the view modus to complete a CRUD option. This simplifies my application development, imo, cause now the navigation in my application is mostly from List to Detail pages.

See also: NgIf Else lands in Angular 2.x+/4.0, Ashish Singh (Dec 18, 2016)

The Sommelier

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The sommelier was a light-black hispanic man in his mid-twenties, perfectly mannered and composed, quick to react to my teasing wit, while at the same time leaving no trace of composition in his smile, displaying an honest exuberance. The sommelier had been held up in the wine cellar while we picked our courses from the menu and had inquired for his advice on the wine pairing. He stood lightly stooped over our table, one hand behind his back and pointed with his hand, extended in a straight angle from his shoulder, at the wine choice, an Austrian Grüner Veltliner by Hirsch from 2013, that paired well with the Spanish octopus and the Japanese hamachi.
“You got locked up in the wine cellar by your co-workers, it seemed?”
“They tend to do that, yes,” he answered with a genuine and gentle smile.
“The Château de Pressac, Grand Cru Classé, from Saint-Émilion is a French wine with a very dark hue and berry that pairs excellent with the Wagyu Beef.”
“Excellent, I trust you.”
As the sommelier walked off, one of the middle-aged Indian backwaiters walked over, holding a dark wood woven breadbasket in front of his pelvis and a silver bread tongs in his right hand hovering above the whole grain, mini bread rolls and elongated berry bread sticks, ready to grasp a single roll with his tongs and transfer it to our plates.
“No, thank you.”
We had gracefully declined already at least 3 times prior.
Immediately following the bread runner, sensing another window of opportunity to prove his value, came the water runner holding a thin, chrome water dispenser, and carrying a white napkin folded over his wrist. I could hear the ice cubes dancing in the can, clinging against the metal sides of the dispenser, creating a wild, loud motion inside. Barely without pause, his arm stretched in one flow with his walk, as his legs came to a stop the dispenser moved steadily forward, being stretched out without delay to the rim of the glass. The glass was not even half empty yet, but water poured down like an avalanche or waterfall in one wholesome fall, everything passing so quickly it could not be helped. Drops of water splashed all over the table, the glass now refilled to the rim in a wild splatter of an instant, the base of the glass soaked in condensed water rolling down the bowl along the stem of the glass and being absorbed by the saturated table cloth. Seeing the refilled bowl of water, the Hispanic runner’s smile was equally full with satisfied content of a job well done.

Nikolay Gogol, The Government Inspector (1863)

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Nikolay Gogol, The Government Inspector (1863) p213-306

I am not a big fan of comedy, and certainly not of farce. Humor is too often no more than a coquette compulsion to please, it is by definition a social function, even if we might have evolved to laugh uncontrollably. Yet, watching the adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher, I found myself to laugh without self awareness. The book however, is especially clever in the first part, but toward the end it slowly evens out into a cleverly written play without depth or wit.

The Government Inspector
Adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher
From The Government Inspector by Nikolay Gogol

The Duke Theater
a New 42nd Street project
229 West 42nd Street (between 7th & 8th)​