Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Windows Azure

Now that my job at work is 100% focused on running a product in the cloud, I’ve been spending some time at home playing around with Azure (Microsoft’s cloud offering) and wow is it impressive! I remember looking at it a couple years ago and just seeing a garbled mess that was impossible to decipher, but now it’s gotten ridiculously easy.

The biggest change is that you don’t need a credit card to get started. You can sign up for a free account and get a surprising amount of learning and experimenting done without paying a dime. This approach is much more effective than having a big barrier to entry.

Secondly, each of the Azure pieces has gotten super easy to use. Want to set up a WordPress blog? I went from not even having an Azure account to having a functioning WordPress site in well under 5 minutes. That’s just one of the many project templates they have all set up and ready to install.

You can choose exactly how much detail you want to manager. I saw one blog post that described Azure as giving you the choice between building your own house and living in a hotel. If you want to control everything, they’ll give you a barebones virtual machine in the cloud. If you want to have it “just work”, they’ll set up a web application host for you and you can just publish your code to them. They’ll take care of everything from there.

I’m so impressed that I’m thinking about moving off of my ancient Community Server blog code hosted on GoDaddy and switching over to WordPress. That part is easy, but if I’m going to do this then I need to move EVERYTHING off of GoDaddy and that includes a bunch of the back end service code for CascadeSkier. It looks like that won’t be too hard but it will require a few changes and upgrades (which were long overdue anyway.)

Don’t expect any big changes right away. I’ll be picking away at this as I have free time.

benmartens August 27, 2014 Site News

Hot Neighborhood

We moved into our neighborhood about three years ago. The neighborhood was built in the 90s, a bunch of families moved in and raised their kids together, and apparently now they are all moving out. Since we moved in, a huge number of our immediate neighbors have sold their houses. Thankfully it wasn’t because of foreclosures or anything like that. I think it’s just a combination of their point in life and the fact that the market in our neighborhood is really hot.

Take a look at this map. The black circle is our house. Red ones have changed hands since we moved in and blue is either up for sale now or will be in the next month.

If you want to be our neighbor, you better be on your game. Almost all of these houses have sold within a few days of being listed and are going for ~10% over the asking price.

I’m thankful that we got in when we did because it looks like a pretty good point in the market history. Our sale price is roughly what it was worth back in the middle of 2005 and now the value is up ~25% back to almost the last peak. It does us very little good since we have no intention of selling, but it’s nice to be on the good end of a real estate investment for once. It gives me hope that down the road when we decide to sell, our good location will continue to make our house an easy sell.

P.S. I’ve been intentionally vague about some of these numbers because it feels a little weird to write about money. But everything here (and more) is public data that you can easily find if you know my address.

benmartens August 26, 2014 Commentary

Skin In UV Light

After having multiple chunks of skin cut out of my body over the last couple years, I think about UV light pretty much whenever I’m outside. There’s an interesting article on Slate about a photographer who took video of people under UV light. You can see how different skin features like freckles absorb and reflect UV light. And after watching the video, I’ll never look at sunscreen the same way again! It works by absorbing UV light so it doesn’t reach the skin. When people put it on in the video, it looks like they are smearing black tar on themselves. You can check out the video below but the article is worth a read too.

benmartens August 25, 2014 Links

The Martian and Mistborn

I’ve been reading some fantastic books lately, but I realized that I haven’t written a lot about them. The three best ones in the last year or so are:

1) The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss – I’ve already written once about this trilogy. The only negative point is that the third book isn’t finished yet and the first two were so good that it’s almost physically painful to wait for the third one! I heard someone say, “If you haven’t read these books or you didn’t like it, then you’re not my friend.” I won’t go quite that far, but this is one of my top three recommendations right now. You can listen to an interview with the author on the Triangulation podcast. (2,581 four and five star reviews on Amazon)

2) The Martian by Andy Weir – Technically I suppose this is sci-fi but it’s set very close to present day and is based on as much current science as possible. Tiny spoiler but in the first page or two, you realize that an astronaut gets stranded on Mars (they think he’s dead) and then he has to try and survive. It’s a bit like Robinson Crusoe on Mars. You can listen to an interview with the author on the Triangulation podcast. (4,271 four and five star reviews on Amazon)

3) Mistborn Trilogy  by Brandon Sanderson – This one is the most heavily fantasy/sci-fi of the bunch but it’s another solid recommendation. The basic concept is that there are a small subset of the population that can use various ingested metals to have a single simple super-power and an even smaller group can use all of the super-powers. The setting is a pre-technology world with an evil overlord and there are rumblings of a revolution which most people think is impossible. If I didn’t have so many other pressing responsibilities in my life, I could envision binging on three straight books. Fantastic storytelling! (980 four and five star reviews on Amazon)

If I had to pick just one book to recommend, it would probably be The Martian because it probably appeals to the broadest swath of readers. Or you can just wait a few years for a movie to come out. After the success of Gravity, I don’t see how they won’t make a movie of The Martian. Do yourself a favor and read it now.

benmartens August 22, 2014 Books

Throwback Thursday – In A Hole 1987

Dad built us a great treehouse when we were kids. I’ve been thinking a lot about it wondering if I should build something for Elijah and what it might look like. Today’s throwback picture shows just how deep the wholes were for the posts.

I guess this type of photo runs in the family because I did the same thing to Elijah when I dug the hole for the irrigation backflow prevention valve.

benmartens August 21, 2014 Throwback Thursday

Solar In Seattle

I love the idea of solar, but I don’t live in a great part of the country for it. We are one of the sunniest places in the US for 3-4 months of the year and then we switch to one of the most overcast places. A couple years ago, a guy at work did a big solar installation on his house. His monitoring website doesn’t have a password on it, so I check in every once in a while to check out how much money he is saving. Over the two years since he installed it, he has generated 7.51MWh while using 21.9MWh. So he has knocked about a third off his electricity bill saving him roughly $750. I bet he has a LONG way to go to recoup his investment.

I love the idea of solar power, but the technology just isn’t quite there yet if you want to have a quick return on investment. Yes, I know there are other reasons that people do it, and yes I know there are ways you can use it to generate a bigger portion of your usage, but for me, it’s going to be a while before I head that direction. If Tyla and I ever decide to buy some vacation property east of the mountains, I will be revisiting this topic. They get a LOT of sun over there and I could see it being a very useful way to power a vacation home.

benmartens August 20, 2014 Commentary

RC Planes And Hot Air Balloons

After many attempts, I finally gave up on my FT Duster. I finally figured out that a crash somewhere along the way had caused the tail to be out of whack. I used the heat gun to melt the glue and remove the old tail, fabricated a new one and then installed it. Everything was square and it actually flew pretty well. But then, mid-flight, the power pod broke loose and the plane spiraled hard into the ground. The fuselage was pretty bent up and correcting it basically would mean rebuilding a plane. It’s only a few dollars work of foam board but I’ll save that for another day. I was getting too frustrated with it to continue.

Instead, I pulled out the plans for an FT Nutball which is MUCH simpler to construct and fly. I had it together in an hour or two and the first time I powered it up, it flew great! I ran into another problem though. Elijah was afraid of it. He’s never been afraid of the planes before but for some reason, he just wasn’t happy whenever it was in the air.

I landed before using up all my batteries, but as I was cleaning up, I noticed three hot air balloons making their way towards the park! They make regular morning and evening flights down the valley and we can see them from our house. But this was the first time I’d been at their landing spot. We stayed around for about an hour watching them land and pack the balloons away. Elijah enjoyed watching them, but he was more impressed by the park’s John Deere Gator that was driving around in the parking lot. That boy loves trucks!

benmartens August 19, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Meydenbauer Beach Park

A couple weekends ago, Tyla and I headed to a new (for us) park in Bellevue. It’s small but it has a nice little swimming area with life guards. Mandy and Ike joined us for the sunny fun and I snapped a few photos. You can also check out my quick Photosynth from the park. Well, technically it’s the view FROM the park. I didn’t want to look too creepy photographing other people’s kids.

benmartens August 18, 2014 Outdoors

Solid State Drives

In the old days if your computer ran slowly and you asked a geek how to make it faster, they would probably say “Add more RAM.” With most computers having 4-8GB of RAM now, memory isn’t generally an issue. There’s still a new answer to that question: Get an SSD.

I had my first taste of a solid state drive years ago when I built my media center PC. I wanted something quiet and lower power. Once I saw first hand how fast it was, I started on a mission to replace the main operating system drive in every computer with an SSD. They were expensive at first but now the costs have come way down, and while they’re still significantly more expensive than the older spindle based hard drives, they’re not cost-prohibitive in most situations.

How much of a difference does it make? I ran benchmark comparisons of the SSD and the old HD in my computer. The average speed of reading data off the disk is 2.5 times faster with the SSD. That’s for reading single big files though. More common is that you’re reading little pieces from a bunch of small files all over the place. For that, an SSD really shines. In random access tests for small files, the SSD was more than 40 times faster! The times when you notice an SSD the most are when booting the computer (or resuming from a sleep state) and when you open programs.

If you’re interested in buying one, you can find them for around $0.40-0.50/GB. Don’t go too much smaller than 120GB for your operating system drive. Windows doesn’t take nearly that much space but by the time you get it installed, do some updates, and install a bunch of programs, it’s not too hard to use that much space. If you don’t want to spend much time shopping around, consider the Samsung 830 it’s not quite the cheapest but it’s a good bang for the buck.

benmartens August 15, 2014 Gadgets

Throwback Thursday – Baseball 1997

I just realized that this photo was taken halfway between my birth and today. Wow. Anyway, now that I feel old, here’s a shot from my Junior year of high school baseball. This was the best team I’ve ever played on. Our coaches were awesome and our team was really good. That’s me in the #12 jersey in the middle of the back row.

I dug up the stats sheet from that year:

  • We were ranked 10th in the state and finished 21-6.
  • I had a 1.55 ERA.
  • I set the school record for picking the most people off base. The exact stat isn’t in there, but I’m pretty sure it was 16. As far as I know, that record still stands.
  • My batting average? 0.00. Yep. They usually DH’d for me, but I had 14 at bats and never got a hit. It’s a good thing I could pitch because I was terrible at batting. Pretty much they only time they put me at the plate was when they needed a bunt because I could do that reasonably well.
  • I made the All-District team and the Academic All-State team… What’s academic all-state? Well, you’re not THAT good, but you’re a geek too so we’ll give you some extra credit and make a special team for you.

By now you should hear Bruce belting out Glory Days loud and clear.

benmartens August 14, 2014 Throwback Thursday