I've added metrics to some #Kafka Connect connectors, and it was so much easier than I think people realise. I wrote up a walkthrough of a simplified example, because it's worth us doing to a lot of Connectors - instrumented Connectors could be much easier to correctly configure.

It's my birthday! 🥳 Sharing my birthday with Star Wars Day is both lovely (people tend to remember it) and groan-inducing (I've heard every possible variation of Star Wars related pun. every year)

hiding from the rain in the Dark Arts Bar - it's like an escape room, except you do all the puzzles sat down while people bring you beers and cocktails 💀🍺

For fans of entirely spurious numbers, the UNIX timestamp is about to hit 17777777. Hold on to your butts!

second cinema movie of the year for Michael for this week's #LetterboxdFriday . It was okay... soundtrack was obviously amazing 🤷 #LastFourWatched

This is huge and welcome news in the world of AI music. Two of the biggest music distributors are banning music from Suno and other AI music companies they call "pirate studios". They will allow AI music that comes from products that license training data, but not from products that don't. 🧵 1/3

I've updated my template and instructions for how to create new #Scratch extensions to work with the new version of Scratch. I've used GitHub Codespaces as an environment for implementing & building your Scratch fork, and GitHub Pages for hosting it - so you can do the whole thing from a browser.

I've been looking at the analytics I get about #MLforKids A lot of it is what I expected (e.g. Windows is the most common OS) but there were some surreal surprises in there. 13 visitors using a PlayStation?? 😵‍💫

replacing the lock on our front door How did people do these kind of small DIY jobs before YouTube was a thing?

I enjoyed listening to this: about how important AI literacy is for children, and the way that the Raspberry Pi Foundation are working to improve it. It's only short, but it's a good intro

A few weeks ago, I needed to explain why it's difficult to say the number of CPU cores needed for #Flink to process 100k events/sec (in the absence of any info about the data, the environment, nature of the processing, etc.) Two dozen graphs & one Doctor Who meme later, that turned into this 😀

"when used as RAM ... their [shitake] mushroom memristor was able to switch between electrical states at up to 5,850 signals per second, with about 90% accuracy" 🤯

It's not like I was itching to go work in a restaurant, but wow Boiling Point made it look like hell on toast. letterboxd.com/dale_lane/ #LastFourWatched #LetterboxdFriday

This looks neat... as if I needed any more excuses to try new coffee shops

The #Artemis II crew are now further from home than any humans ever. 🌍 The record of 400 171 km was previously held by the Apollo 13 mission 🚀🌕. Astronaut Reid Wiseman “We choose this moment to challenge the current & next generation to make sure this record is not long lived”

on our way home after a week in Devon - a week of walking and catching up on books, games, and movies dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=5993

Sunlight - weird Love and Monsters - fun Fundamentals of Caring - touching Two Distant Strangers - bleak They were all good! #LastFourWatched #LetterboxdFriday

I've completed two episodes of Dispatch so far, and I'm loving it - it's like another Telltale story again but better in lots of ways. The (not-removable) censorship boxes are weirdly distracting though. backloggd.com/games/dispat...

Stayed up (later than is probably sensible) watching the NASA coverage

tagged some benches in Axminster today which (finally!) put me over 100 contributions on #openbenches 🎉

"Make Freddos 10p again." https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/764825

I've written up some #Flink thoughts : event-stream processing project don't have to be accessible SQL *or* powerful Java. UDFs let you work in SQL, and write Java to extend what SQL can do when you need. I've come up with six examples of when it helps to extend Flink SQL with Java functions.

we've come down to Seaton for a week in the hills by the Devon coast - I'll be alternating between reading, walking, and nagging F to revise for A-levels

Hacksaw Ridge was the highlight of my #LastFourWatched for this #LetterboxdFriday First half was fun (Vince Vaughn was an excellent hardass sargeant). Second half was an uncomfortably uncompromising portrayal of a battle. Great film.

That was phenomenal. The story was Mockingbird, the rhythm and dialog was classic Sorkin, the actors were sublime. Loved it.

We're at the Mayflower to watch To Kill A Mockingbird. The West Wing, the (too overlooked?) Newsroom and Studio 60 are some of my favourite ever TV shows - so I jumped at the chance to get tickets for this when I heard Aaron Sorkin had written the stage adaptation 🤩

reading a super-high-level summary of who owns IBM shares strangely, the tiny number of shares I've got weren't enough to justify a mention 😜

Delivery update notification - tells me that my parcel has "manifested". I assume they mean that a delivery manifest has been created for it, and not that it's magically appeared, but I suppose either are possible

one of our #TechCon sessions last week was "Monitoring your Event Driven Architecture" so many Kafka support tickets I've worked were detectable in advance if only the admins were monitoring the metrics that we emit This session was basically our 40-minute long heartfelt plea to look at metrics!

Reading about manhole covers, because I know how to have fun in the evenings. 🤓 I put a crack in the one on our drive by stupidly parking a van on it. This site says an "A15" cover is only suitable for pedestrian areas anyway, so oops 🤦 www.drainagesuperstore.co.uk/help-and-adv...

wow, #emfcamp tickets sold quick in this batch - they were gone in seconds!

keep your eyes peeled for a capybara

Eastleigh brought its comedy home-made sign game this morning - my favourite was "Smile, you've paid for this!"

It's been ten years since I last did the Eastleigh 10k. Given that I'm ten years older and sort of forgot to do any training this time... today is going to be a challenge!

"And Roger" - a video game that took me 45 minutes to play and made me feel sad.

I presented at our annual online #TechCon yesterday about Deploying an Apache #Flink job into production. I gave a walk-through of what is involved taking an event processing flow, and deploying it into Kubernetes. I tried to fit a lot in the hour! dalelane.co.uk/blog/?p=5906

running late this morning, because my route to work includes going through this gate 🐄🐮

It’s official! IBM has closed its acquisition of Confluent. Together, we’ll deliver a smart data platform built to support enterprise AI at scale. Learn more here: www.confluent.io/press-releas...

I've had a day away from my desk today, for a site hackathon. The twist is this one is (unsurprisingly?) AI-focused - a chance for us to practice building stuff using an AI-enhanced IDE. I've used it as a chance to play with the new metrics support for Kafka Connect that was released last month

Setting up S3 + CloudFront as a cheaper place to host images than my blog's hosting provider charges me. It's impressively easy... I'm seriously tempted to just ditch WordPress, switch to a static site and move the whole lot there.

how have I only just spotted that today is Friday 13th?

I think Pieces of April was my favourite of my #LastFourWatched for #LetterboxdFriday this week - it was simple and super-low-budget but touching. letterboxd.com/dale_lane/

another quiet Friday in the office I'm one of a (small!) number of (mostly old and stubborn) people who still come into work on Fridays. It's a weird vibe to be in a large open plan office floor where I can't see any other people from my desk.

Having finished everything I want to do in Cyberpunk, I spent 121 hours in Night City. It feels like a lot, but it doesn't beat the 154 hours I spent in Witcher 3's world. And it's not close to the frankly embarrassing 443 hours I spent in Hyrule (if you treat BotW and TotK as the same world)

Node.js is moving to one major release per year starting with Node 27! 🚀 ✅ Simpler: Every release becomes LTS. ✅ Predictable: Version numbers now align with the year. ✅ New: A 6-month Alpha channel for early testing. https://bit.ly/4rnosLg

Today, we're publishing Don't Steal This Book - a (mostly) empty book from almost 10,000 authors, protesting the theft of their work by AI companies. 🧵 1/3

I was reminded about this delightful educational AI/ML project - a physical hands-on device to train an image classifier using images you draw on paper. If I wasn't so hardware-incompetent, I'd *love* to build this! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Finished Cyberpunk's Phantom Liberty DLC. I've been playing Cyberpunk off and on since last July - it's been fun.

I've been bouncing between having a silly amount of fun building with AI, and feeling sort of weird and uncomfortable with it. This blog post gets close to describing how I feel in my more reflective moments.

I'm being a white van man again this weekend, driving between Winchester, Eastleigh & Basingstoke to move a load of musical instruments between concerts. Fingers crossed I don't break any of them! 🤞