A cover I designed for the Cooper Group’s work on COF catalysis has been published in Nature Chemistry (article link, screengrab).

After many weekends and evenings of fixing little bugs, cleaning up the codebase, and polishing the build, I’ve finally managed to publish v1.0.0 of jobson.

I open-sourced jobson late November 2017. The version I demoed here was already close to release-grade in terms of implementation (the server had >200 tests, was used in prod, etc.). However, the deployment, installation, documentation, and maintenance needed work.

tl;dr: I used Rust to make this CLI utility for extracting Fallout 1+2 DAT files.

I love the occasional playthrough of Fallout 1 and 2. They were some of the the first “serious” games I played. Sure, DOOM/Quake/Command & Conquer were also “mature”—I played them around the age of ~10, which marked me as doomed (heh) by the kind of adults that would also think eating sweets is a surefire path to heroin addition or something—but F1+2 included prostitutes, drugs, slavery, and infanticide: irresistibly entertaining topics for a teenager.

A cover I designed for the Cooper Group’s latest breakthrough. Modelled in plain Blender 2.79b. Post processing done in GIMP 2.8.18. [raw high-res render] , [cover official link], [journal article]

tl;dr: If you find you’re spending a lot of time integrating various pieces of software across multiple computers and are currently using a mixture of scripts, build systems, and manual methods to do that, look into configuration managers. They’re easy to pick up and automate the most common tasks. I’m using ansible, because it’s standard, simple, and written in python.

Research software typically requires integrating clusters, high-performance numerical libraries, 30-year-old Fortran applications by geniuses, and 30-minute-old python scripts written by PhD students.

So, I just spent an evening + morning refactoring the site into a, uh, “new” design.

I only ocassionally work on this site these days—I now see it as the sparse journal of a madman that also likes to distribute mobile-friendly versions of his CV—but I thought it would be a nice and easy blog post to reflect on how the site has changed over the last 3 years.

The original version of adamkewley.com was launched in May 2015 and was the fanciest design:

I’m currently implementing job resubmission in Jobson UI and found that state machines greatly simplify the code needed to render a user workflow.

I’ve been running several webservers behind custom domains for a while now (plateyplatey.com, textadventurer.tk, and this site) and it never ceases to amaze me how cheeky bots are getting.

For example, certbot recently started complaining that textadventurer.tk’s TLS certificate is about to expire. That shouldn’t happen because there’s a nightly cronjob for certbot renew.

On SSHing into the server I found an immediate problem: the disk was full. Why? Because some bot, listed as from contabotserver.net decided to spam the server with >10 million requests one afternoon and fill the HTTP logs. Great. Looks like I’m finally going to implement some log compression+rotation.

Then there’s the almost hourly attempts to find a PHPMyAdmin panel on my sites. That one always surprised me: surely only a small percentage of PHP sites are misconfigured that badly? Lets look at the stats:

Even if 1 % of them are misconfigured, we’re doomed.

I recently made screencasts that explain Jobson in more detail. The first explains what Jobson is and how to install it. Overall, Jobson seems well-recieved. The first video seems to be leveling off at around 2700 views and Jobson’s github repo has seen a spike in attention.

Will other teams start adopting it or not? Only time will tell.

This is a post about Jobson, an application I developed and recently got permission to open-source along with its UI.

Do any of these problems sound familiar to you?:

I’d like my application to have a UI.

I want to trace my application’s usage.

I want to share my application.

They’re very common problems to have, and are almost always solved by building a UI in a framework (e.g. Qt, WPF), sprinkling on usage metrics, and packaging everything into a fat executable. In this post, I’d like to present an alternative.