Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Strata 2019 San Francisco

My company was nice enough to send me down to San Francisco last week to attend the Strata Data Conference. If there’s a bigger conference in my field of data engineering/science/analysis, I don’t know what it is.

I attended a big data conference four years ago, but going to Strata was a huge step up both in terms of the quality of the event planning and in the quality of the talks. I came away with a stronger vision about things I want our team at work to accomplish and how we can make a bigger effect on our business group.

I skipped all the social events surrounding the conference, but I filled both days wither every talk I could cram into my schedule. A couple were total duds, but there were a lot of great ones from Netflix, Lyft, Uber, Intuit and others.

Aside from the conference itself, it was strange to be traveling alone. I did spend one evening in a movie theater watching Captain Marvel, but otherwise I mostly hung out in my room. I felt guilty about temporarily forcing Tyla into single parent mode and leaving my team at work short-handed, so I spent a lot of my free time working on the laptop and trying to make good use of my time.

My hotel was right next to Moscone West where the conference was held and that was fantastic. I was able to get from my room to a talk in about 5 minutes. That let me hustle back to the room even when we had ~45 minute breaks to get away from the crowds and recharge a bit. It’s surprising how tiring it is to sit on your rear end and listen to talks all day. I felt like my brain was very full!

It was a great trip, and while it’s not something that I need to do every year, I hope I can go back in 3-4 years. Thank you Tyla for holding down the fort while I took this trip!

benmartens April 4, 2019 Geek, Travel

Unplugging From Facebook

Yesterday somebody asked if I’m still using Facebook. “Oh yeah, I guess I haven’t posted anything there in a while.” The truth is, I’ve almost completely weaned myself off of Facebook.

I already knew that I was wasting a lot of time each day checking Facebook, but the last presidential election turned my stomach enough to make me want to start taking more drastic measures to break my habit. (Remember the last time YOU changed your opinion because somebody disagreed with you on Facebook? No? Why do you think it will work the other way around?) I started by installing the F.B. Purity plugin for Chrome. It let me configure exactly which parts of the interface I want to hide and even lets me hide posts with specific words. Here’s what my word block list looks like “Trump, Hillary, Clinton, Greenpeace, Wildtree, Isagenix”.

That cleaned things up a lot, but it didn’t do much to break my habit and I found myself trusting Facebook less and less. It was time to get more extreme so I deleted almost everything I’ve ever posted to Facebook. That turns out to be really difficult if you’re not willing to delete your account, but another Chrome plugin, Social Book Post Manager, automates the process a bit. It’s not perfect but it’s way faster than clicking by hand.

Next, I started unfollowing people. A lot of people. EVERYONE. You know how to break the Facebook habit? Make it so that every time you go to the site, there is literally nothing new. Even then it took me a shocking amount of time to stop going there out of habit. It was ridiculous and eye opening.

The nice thing about this solution is that I can still choose to spend some time browsing updates from specific people, but I’ve removed the mindless browsing half a dozen times a day. For now I still cross post some of my Instagram photos to Facebook but even that is dying off. Instagram seems like a lot happier environment, but it will probably devolve into the same cesspool that Twitter and Facebook have become. (And yes, I know that Instagram is owned by Facebook.)

I’m not here to preach that this is right for everyone, but if you’re looking for a way out, it IS possible. And if you’re just wondering why I’m not commenting or liking (or maybe even posting at all), now you know why.

benmartens April 1, 2019 Commentary

Washington Ornaments

Evergreen Lutheran High School in Tacoma has a fundraiser auction every year. Every year I think about making something and then fail to do so. This year I made it under the deadline by about two hours.

I only had five days to whip something up so I decided to completely steal an idea from Nick at 6_8woodworks, and make some ornaments out of laminated scraps. Thankfully I had enough interesting pieces of the right sizes to make a few at the same time.

Since I have that shiny new CNC sitting there, I whipped up a drawing and was able to cut out 3 identical ornaments relatively easily. The only real trick was making the cut into Puget Sound wide enough for my 1/8″ bit to get in there. As I cut each one, I rotated my stock piece to get a slightly different pattern on each one. I finished them off with a bunch of sanding, boiled linseed oil, and some twine through a hole to hold it onto a Christmas tree.

I don’t expect these to raise a huge amount of money but it will be fun to see other people put a price tag on my woodworking. I almost exclusively make things for myself or as gifts so there’s no real price tag involved.

benmartens March 20, 2019 Woodworking

Patent Application

Azure Data Explorer has made a dramatic impact on my career. It has inspired a whole new breed of data engineering and it feels like a wide open playground for ideas and innovation. There were so many new ideas and patterns floating around in my head that I decided to attempt the patent process (through work) for one of them. I’ve never been through it before and it was interesting to see all the different levels of scrutiny and checks that go into it before you even sit down with a lawyer to start drafting the application.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve completed all of that work and my patent application has been submitted! Unfortunately… I’ve been advised not to share the details of it yet. After about 18 months, the US Patent Office will publish the application. At that point it will be public information on their site but it will still take another 2-3 years from that point for them to review it and either approve it or ask for some more information.

So I guess the point of this post is to say that I’m really excited about applying for my first patent. Even if it doesn’t get approved, it’s neat to see how the process works and it has me thinking whether or not other ideas are patentable too.

benmartens March 11, 2019 Geek

Computer Upgrades

It dawned on me recently that my main home desktop is coming up on seven years old. SEVEN YEARS. I used to be happy if I got four years out of a computer and here I am at 7 years and I can’t come up with any reason why I’d need to upgrade. I took a look at CPU benchmarks and stuff in my price range would only be a ~30% increase of what I have now. Increases in RAM speed and major increases in SSD technology would definitely give me an improvement but I can’t say that I’d notice it much with my use case. I love getting new computer gear, but I think it’s going to be a while before that happens again.

This seems like a good excuse to update my computer ownership history though. The ones in italics are still in use.

  • 1998 – Gateway Pentium 2 350 with a 10GB hard drive and a tape backup.
  • 2002 – Dell P4 2.4GHz with 512MB RAM and an 80GB hard drive. $900
  • 2006 – Dell Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive. $1200
  • 2010 – Core i7 860 2.8GHz quad core with 8 GB RAM. $1000 (Replaced motherboard and CPU ins 2014 for $260)
  • 2011 – Lenovo Thinkpad Edge $700
  • 2012 – Core i7 3770 3.4GHz quad core with 16GB RAM. $1400.
  • 2013 – HP Pavilion Touchsmart 15-b154nr AMD A8-4555M quad core 1.6GHZ and 6 GB of RAM. $550
  • 2015 – Dell XPS 13. $800
  • 2016 – Intel Core i3-6100 CPU with 8GB RAM. $360

I suspect that the next thing we’ll replace is the laptop only because that gets more abuse than the desktop machines. I’ve been very happy with the XPS 13 though. It has held up much longer than our previous laptops and isn’t showing any signs of impending doom.

benmartens March 8, 2019 Gadgets

Snow Storm Recap

We survived Snowmaggedon 2019! February was the third coldest February on record in Seattle and all that cold weather meant that our normally wet weather ended up being snow. The snow kept coming and coming over many days and schools were closed for the majority of two straight weeks. The official total ended up being around 20″ which puts it just behind the 2008 storm and almost double the 2012 storm.

Thankfully it didn’t have a huge effect on us other than some canceled school days. We had plenty of food in the house and we were able to restock easily by walking down to Safeway. I kept waiting for the power to go out towards the end of the storm cycle when we had a really heavy snow, but it never went out for more than a few seconds. I guess I’ll have to keep waiting to use my fancy transfer switch that lets me plug the generator right into the electrical panel.

Elijah LOVED all the snow. He spent a ton of time outside with Tyla sledding down the street, building forts in the snow piles and playing with all the neighbor kids. A huge thanks goes out to Tyla for all the time she spent playing with him!

benmartens March 6, 2019 Commentary

Analyzing Water Data in Azure Data Explorer

One of my favorite systems at work officially launched a couple weeks ago as Azure Data Explorer (internally called Kusto). I’ve been doing some blogging for their team on their Tech Community site. You can see all my posts on my profile page. This post will use Azure Data Explorer too but I thought it fit better on this blog.

A year or two ago, our local water company replaced all of the meters with digital, cellular meters. I immediately asked if that meant we’d get access to more data and they said it was coming in the future. The future is now! If you happen to live in Woodinville, you can get connected with these instructions.

The site is nice and lets you see charts, but by now you probably know that I love collecting data about random things so I immediately tried to figure out how to download the raw data. The only download directly supported form their site is the bi-monthly usage from the bills, but from the charts, I could see that hourly data was available somewhere. A little spelunking in the Chrome dev tools revealed the right REST endpoint to call to get a big JSON array full of the water usage for every hour in the last ~11 months.

I pulled that into Azure Data Explorer and started querying to see what I could learn. This first chart shows the median water usage by three hour chunks of the day. Tyla and I usually both shower in the morning so it makes sense that 6-9am has the heaviest usage.

WaterUsage
| summarize 
    sum(Gallons)
    by Hour=bin(hourofday(Timestamp), 3), bin(Timestamp, 1d)
| summarize percentile(sum_Gallons, 50) by Hour
| render columnchart  with (title = 'Median Water Usage by 3 Hour Bin', legend = hidden)

I feel like there’s probably a better way to do write the next query, but this works. It’s the cumulative usage throughout each month. The four lines at the top of the chart are the summer months when I’m using the irrigation in the yard. The lines that drop off at the end of the month are because I ran the x axis all the way from 1 to 31 for every month so months don’t have enough data, but it still conveys the general idea. It’s interesting how similar all the non-watering months are.

union
(
    WaterUsage
    | summarize Gallons=sum(Gallons) by bin(Timestamp, 1d)
    | extend Month=monthofyear(Timestamp), Day = dayofmonth(Timestamp)
),
(
    // Original data had some missing rows
    datatable(Timestamp:datetime, Gallons:long, Month:long, Day:long)
    [
        datetime(2018-11-26T00:00:00.0000000Z), 0, 11, 26, 
        datetime(2018-11-27T00:00:00.0000000Z), 0, 11, 27, 
    ]
)
| order by Timestamp asc
| serialize MonthlyWater=row_cumsum(Gallons, Month != prev(Month))
| project Month, Day, MonthlyWater
| make-series sum(MonthlyWater) on Day from 1 to 32 step 1 by Month
| render linechart with  (ycolumns = sum_MonthlyWater, series = Day, Month, legend=hidden, title='Cumulative Gallons By Month')

The data is in 10 gallon increments so it’s not super precise but it’s a LOT better than the two month resolution I had previously. I’m excited to play around with this data and see if we can start decreasing our usage.

Along these same lines, I heard that the local power company is starting to install power meters with Zigbee connectivity so there’s a chance that I’ll be able to start getting more insight into my power consumption in a similar fashion…

benmartens March 1, 2019 Geek

Best Of YouTube

First up is Steve Ramsey with a bunch of woodworking tips. I love watching woodworking and making videos on YouTube, but it’s really easy to fall in to some traps if you only learn that way. Steve gets real and gives 18 good tips for woodworking. He labels the video as tips for beginners but I think that any level of experience would benefit, even if it’s as a reminder.

Over in Toledo, David Picciuto enjoys going to the antique mall and rehabilitating old things. His xylophone video is a great example and the soundtrack he made using the xylophone is one of my favorite parts.

And why not stay with David to show his “bowl without a lathe” video. Tyla has been asking me to make a bowl for a long time and this might be a way I could pull it off. I’m not sure it’s exactly what she’s looking for but I’m interested in trying this.

benmartens February 20, 2019 Links

Big Decisions

There are points in my life where I’m faced with big decisions even though I feel largely unqualified to make the right choice. Two of those came up recently.

The first was “Where should we send Elijah to school?” Proximity to school through grade 8 was a big reason why we bought this house. It would be so nice to just walk out the door and be at school instead of dealing with traffic and commute time. But on the flip side, we’ve really been enjoying our experience at our church preschool and kindergarten. Tyla and I both attended WELS grade schools and we have reaped the benefits both spiritually and intellectually. There are some great WELS schools in the area but they are too far away to make them work.

At the marriage retreat last fall, we talked to a Pastor from our area who mentioned Zion Lutheran School up in Lake Stevens. It’s an LCMS school and after visiting it, we felt like God was nudging us in that direction. It will mean a ~30 minute commute one way to school, but it’s doable and we’re going to give it a shot. We don’t love it as much as we’ve loved the WELS schools and we’ll need to pay closer attention to the doctrine he’s taught, but we’re going to give it a go.

The second big issue arose after I popped my head up into the attic for my annual (well… less than that because I’m lazy) check of the crawl space and attic. I discovered obvious mold. I stared at it for quite a while before acknowledging that there was no way to ignore this and hope it went away. Thankfully, we found a contractor who has been great to work with and the remediation plan is well underway. We caught it plenty early so that no structural damage was done and there were no health concerns. Once we finish the remediation plan, there will be a lifetime warranty that gets transferred to future owners so I feel pretty good about the situation.

During the decision making processes, there was no avoiding the fact that both choices could have dramatic and long-reaching effects on our future. The school one was obviously more important, but making the wrong choice with the house could easily cost us tens of thousands of dollars in the short term or when we sell the house. Through it all, my prayer was always “Lord, you know the path I should take. I feel like you’re leading me to this choice. Please make it obvious if I’m supposed to choose something different.” God has it all planned out for us and it can feel like a shock when he reveals some of the bumps to us, but there’s comfort in knowing that he’s going to make it all work out for the best. (Romans 8:28, Jeremiah 29:11)

benmartens February 12, 2019 Commentary

Cord Cutting the Super Bowl

We canceled cable last summer and for the most part, our antenna has filled our needs. We get great reception on FOX, but not great on NBC. CBS and ABC are somewhere in the middle. Since we host a party every year, reception of the game is kind of important.

CBS had been working fine in the days leading up to the game so I wasn’t too concerned, but then it started snowing (for the first time this year) a couple hours before the game. Since we’re kind of on the fringe with our reception, the snow was just enough to start messing with the signal a little more. If it was just me, I wouldn’t have worried about it, but it’s not fun having 20 people watching a glitchy signal.

Thankfully CBS was streaming the game for free and they even supported Chromecast so I used that on the projector. Our experience there was generally good but it probably buffered 10 times and once I had to restart the stream completely. Downstairs I needed it on the Roku so I signed up for a free trial of CBS All Access. (I used a privacy.com temporary credit card number so that I don’t have to worry about forgetting to cancel my subscription!) I didn’t watch that TV but the people downstairs didn’t ever see it buffer and didn’t realize that it wasn’t a “normal” TV feed.

So it was definitely not as easy as traditional cable, but it was pretty good. I think next time I’d use my Xbox to stream the game through a paid service (like CBS All Access) instead of using the free stream from the website and I suspect that would have gotten rid of the few problems that we did have.

benmartens February 5, 2019 Gadgets