GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

I'm happy to have some ideas worth blogging about at last!  Here's a really big one I stumbled across if you're in an organization that wants to keep permissions relatively locked down on AWS (in terms of performing actions on resources), but still wants to enable individual users the ability to interact with their own stacks as needed without waiting on admins. The TL/DR Of It Using AWS CloudFormation, you can deploy a stack consisting of a single resource.  This resource is of type AWS::IAM::ManagedPolicy .  Attach all the policy statements you want, then add Users consisting of any IAM users on the AWS account.  Voila, instant permissions to do whatever. More About the Process Let's say you need to tweak various aspects of your AWS setup.  Maybe you have a DynamoDB entry that needs to be manually tweaked, a Lambda function where the concurrency needs to be adjusted, an SQS queue where the maximum age of a message needs to be adjusted, or files sitting around...

Here is some Python code that allows you to generate all combinations of options by choosing one item from an arbitrary number of different lists.  Not only that, but each option is actually a data structure that also includes lots of metadata about the ramifications of the option, in addition to the option value itself. Let's say you're looking to run performance testing on different types of tables and underlying data arrangements in Amazon Redshift Spectrum.  You can devise a template SQL query that can be configurable in multiple ways.  For instance, you could choose between multiple tables or views from which to query data (say, if comparing Redshift to Redshift Spectrum performance), and you also want to see the performance of count(1) vs. count(*) to see if one uses more data or works quicker on Redshift vs. Spectrum.  Thus, you already have two lists of options, and need to come up with the four permutations of these options. The Groundwork Basically...

With the reusability and extensibility of modern Web components, I do not look back on the days of jQuery with much fondness.  However,  I haven't paid much attention to Angular since Angular 1.  Since its syntax didn't really appeal to me, I opted to learn Polymer instead.  Well now, given a new opportunity, I am diving into a much more modern Angular and TypeScript.  Unfortunately, I am finding that a lot of articles people write on Angular, when you're diving into a well-established code base, are about as dense as reading toward the end of a book on quantum mechanics.  It's English alright, but the jargon is applied thickly.  (And this is coming from someone who has even impressed some of Google's Tensorflow engineers with their machine learning skillz.) The problem at hand is fairly straightforward.  We want to notify something in the UI upon the outcome of a RESTful request we make to an external resource so that it can display useful info...

To read Part 1 of this series, click here . The Russian Elektronika DVK-3 PDP-11 clone is a very fascinating computer to me, and I want to share it with the world.  Part of that endeavor involves allowing people to actually interact with it and play games on it remotely, not just see videos of me using it.  To get this to happen, I need to actually allow people to input into the system via the keyboard.  I could build a ridiculous robotic action to hit the keys on behalf of remote users, but this would likely introduce a great deal of latency into the system and would not be good for those critically-timed Tetris block rotations.  The best bet is to spoof the keyboard by basically building a whole new one, but instead of keys, use an Internet connection and microcontroller to generate the scan codes. The Elektronika MS7004 keyboard is based on the DEC LK201 keyboard interface , standard for PDP-11 minicomputers.  It utilizes the RS423 serial communication st...