#lazeecomet

[windypenguin]

tag people you want to catch up with/get to know better

tagged by: @whats-ursine

last song: Let Me Go by Jonas B Ingebretsen (I just found this album today and it's so good! I think I'm gonna use it for drawing and writing!)

current/last read: The Dungeon Titan by Konrad Ryan bc I'm on a LitRPG kick again

last film: literally just finished The Babadook...which uh sure was something

currently watching: nothing in particular at the moment but I did rewatch the first few eps of Leverage Redemption over the weekend

current obsession: may have finally gotten bf to try dnd over the weekend with a group of friends and his roleplay was glorious. may now be sketching the group on and off

tagging: @nymphofnovels @lazeecomet @sevenseasaurus @cephalodo @jewishdragon @knurdeh and anyone else who wants to!

[sidhewrites]

@lazeecomet I am psychically beaming you a bowl of matzo ball soup. I hope you feel better soon!

What is everyone else up to this weekend? If you’re in the US do you have Memorial Day off and do you have any plans? Are there any new books or media yall have gotten into?

[lazeecomet]

The Story of KLogs: What happens when an Mechanical Engineer codes

Since i no longer work at Wearhouse Automation Startup (WAS for short) and havnt for many years i feel as though i should recount the tale of the most bonkers program i ever wrote, but we need to establish some background

WAS has its HQ very far away from the big customer site and i worked as a Field Service Engineer (FSE) on site. so i learned early on that if a problem needed to be solved fast, WE had to do it. we never got many updates on what was coming down the pipeline for us or what issues were being worked on. this made us very independent

As such, we got good at reading the robot logs ourselves. it took too much time to send the logs off to HQ for analysis and get back what the problem was. we can read. now GETTING the logs is another thing.

the early robots we cut our teeth on used 2.4 gHz wifi to communicate with FSE's so dumping the logs was as simple as pushing a button in a little application and it would spit out a txt file

later on our robots were upgraded to use a 2.4 mHz xbee radio to communicate with us. which was FUCKING SLOW. and log dumping became a much more tedious process. you had to connect, go to logging mode, and then the robot would vomit all the logs in the past 2 min OR the entirety of its memory bank (only 2 options) into a terminal window. you would then save the terminal window and open it in a text editor to read them. it could take up to 5 min to dump the entire log file and if you didnt dump fast enough, the ACK messages from the control server would fill up the logs and erase the error as the memory overwrote itself.

this missing logs problem was a Big Deal for software who now weren't getting every log from every error so a NEW method of saving logs was devised: the robot would just vomit the log data in real time over a DIFFERENT radio and we would save it to a KQL server. Thanks Daddy Microsoft.

now whats KQL you may be asking. why, its Microsofts very own SQL clone! its Kusto Query Language. never mind that the system uses a SQL database for daily operations. lets use this proprietary Microsoft thing because they are paying us

so yay, problem solved. we now never miss the logs. so how do we read them if they are split up line by line in a database? why with a query of course!

select * from tbLogs where RobotUID = [64CharLongString] and timestamp > [UnixTimeCode]

if this makes no sense to you, CONGRATULATIONS! you found the problem with this setup. Most FSE's were BAD at SQL which meant they didnt read logs anymore. If you do understand what the query is, CONGRATULATIONS! you see why this is Very Stupid.

You could not search by robot name. each robot had some arbitrarily assigned 64 character long string as an identifier and the timestamps were not set to local time. so you had run a lookup query to find the right name and do some time zone math to figure out what part of the logs to read. oh yeah and you had to download KQL to view them. so now we had both SQL and KQL on our computers

NOBODY in the field like this.

But Daddy Microsoft comes to the rescue

see we didnt JUST get KQL with part of that deal. we got the entire Microsoft cloud suite. and some people (like me) had been automating emails and stuff with Power Automate

This is Microsoft Power Automate. its Microsoft's version of Scratch but it has hooks into everything Microsoft. SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, Excel, it can integrate with all of it. i had been using it to send an email once a day with a list of all the robots in maintenance.

this gave me an idea

and i checked

and Power Automate had hooks for KQL

KLogs is actually short for Kusto Logs

I did not know how to program in Power Automate but damn it anything is better then writing KQL queries. so i got to work. and about 2 months later i had a BEHEMOTH of a Power Automate program. it lagged the webpage and many times when i tried to edit something my changes wouldn't take and i would have to click in very specific ways to ensure none of my variables were getting nuked. i dont think this was the intended purpose of Power Automate but this is what it did

the KLogger would watch a list of Teams chats and when someone typed "klogs" or pasted a copy of an ERROR mesage, it would spring into action.

it extracted the robot name from the message and timestamp from teams

it would lookup the name in the database to find the 64 long string UID and the location that robot was assigned too

it would reply to the message in teams saying it found a robot name and was getting logs

it would run a KQL query for the database and get the control system logs then export then into a CSV

it would save the CSV with the a .xls extension into a folder in ShairPoint (it would make a new folder for each day and location if it didnt have one already)

it would send ANOTHER message in teams with a LINK to the file in SharePoint

it would then enter a loop and scour the robot logs looking for the keyword ESTOP to find the error. (it did this because Kusto was SLOWER then the xbee radio and had up to a 10 min delay on syncing)

if it found the error, it would adjust its start and end timestamps to capture it and export the robot logs book-ended from the event by ~ 1 min. if it didnt, it would use the timestamp from when it was triggered +/- 5 min

it saved THOSE logs to SharePoint the same way as before

it would send ANOTHER message in teams with a link to the files

it would then check if the error was 1 of 3 very specific type of error with the camera. if it was it extracted the base64 jpg image saved in KQL as a byte array, do the math to convert it, and save that as a jpg in SharePoint (and link it of course)

and then it would terminate. and if it encountered an error anywhere in all of this, i had logic where it would spit back an error message in Teams as plaintext explaining what step failed and the program would close gracefully

I deployed it without asking anyone at one of the sites that was struggling. i just pointed it at their chat and turned it on. it had a bit of a rocky start (spammed chat) but man did the FSE's LOVE IT.

about 6 months later software deployed their answer to reading the logs: a webpage that acted as a nice GUI to the KQL database. much better then an CSV file

it still needed you to scroll though a big drop-down of robot names and enter a timestamp, but i noticed something. all that did was just change part of the URL and refresh the webpage

SO I MADE KLOGS 2 AND HAD IT GENERATE THE URL FOR YOU AND REPLY TO YOUR MESSAGE WITH IT. (it also still did the control server and jpg stuff). Theres a non-zero chance that klogs was still in use long after i left that job

now i dont recommend anyone use power automate like this. its clunky and weird. i had to make a variable called "Carrage Return" which was a blank text box that i pressed enter one time in because it was incapable of understanding /n or generating a new line in any capacity OTHER then this (thanks support forum).

im also sure this probably is giving the actual programmer people anxiety. imagine working at a company and then some rando you've never seen but only heard about as "the FSE whos really good at root causing stuff", in a department that does not do any coding, managed to, in their spare time, build and release and entire workflow piggybacking on your work without any oversight, code review, or permission.....and everyone liked it

[jewishdragon]

lazeecomet answered your question: (more dirk gently icons, but of characters other...

Left

yes i see it now, it is better

[jewishdragon]

@lazeecomet

Aspec men deserve much more respect and recognition in the aspec community than they receive. They often face a different form of aphobia specific to them ("men are naturally sexual they can't be ace" "all men are unromantic that's not unique") this rhetoric is spouted by many, even members of our own community and I hope for a day where that is no longer the case. As an ace and demiro woman (demigirl but that's beside the point) I want to encourage folks to take the time to give the aspec men in their lives support and to the aspec men reading, you are who you say you are no matter what people say and you deserve the world. I'm sorry for the ways in which toxic masculinity has harmed you. You are a valued member of the aspec community and the queer community as a whole. No ace or aro person is broken and neither are you. I'm sorry if anyone has ever told you otherwise.

[windypenguin]

Got tagged by @thesixthstar to name my top 4 movies from my birth year! I definitely went through a list and wasn't sure I'd even seen 4 movies from 1995 but luckily I have haha

Fun fact I think the only other movies from 1995 I've seen are Babe and maybe Free Willy 2

I'm tagging @nymphofnovels @memetrash-coyote @someguywithablog @lazeecomet @knurdeh @eohwyyn and anyone else who wants to do this too!

[fangirlinginleatherboots]

has anyone turned your stained glass drawings into actual stained glass pieces, because some of these are great patterns.

No, most of them are not stable enough to be constructed I think.

[gender-trash]

@lazeecomet suggested:

MY SWEET BABY…

I CANT OVEREMPHASIZE

how bad my cat wants to be on the quilt im assembling rn

ZENOBIA, FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK

[windypenguin]

Tagged by @brainwad

Tagging @nymphofnovels @crunchyxushi @ikallawrites @memetrash-coyote @jewishdragon @memetrashmom @spooky-thaliaai @lazeecomet and anyone else who wants in ^_^

[windypenguin]

Tag Game

Tagged by @ris-d-deridex

Rules: Answer these questions, and tag 20 followers that you would like to get to know better.

Name: Michelle

Nickname: Penguin

Zodiac sign: gemini

Hogwarts house: gryffindor

Height: 5′3

Sexual Orientation: ace

Ethnicity: mix

Favorite fruit: apples, oh and gradually watermelon

Favorite season: ehhh summer

Favorite book series: hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no i love too many ive been rereading the brotherband chronicles lately tho and tamora pierce’s books are always a good pick

Favorite fictional characters: beka cooper, pidge, peridot, steven universe, sokka, the characters from like every book ive ever read

Favorite flower: i...have no idea?  snapdragons are cool

Favorite scents: the paper in books, the ocean

Favorite color: really vibrant blues? also pink

Favorite animal: cats

Favorite artist/band: i dont usually follow one artist or band as much as just specific songs but pink is good, and so is fun

Coffee, tea, or hot cocoa?: hot chocolateeee

Average sleep hours: ehhh close to 8 lately

Number of blankets you sleep with: 1, maybe 2 if its cold. none if its really hot tho

Dream trip: ive never had traveling as something i really *wanted* to do?

Last thing Googled: with the exception of trying to figure out how to pull up my search history: i was looking for the charlie the unicorn gif of “ring ring hello” for reasons

Blog created: i think May 2013?

How many blogs do I follow: 371 (wow i probably should go thru that)

Number of followers: 517...which is funny bc i just reblog random stuff and have virtually no content of my own lol

What do I usually post about: whichever show im freaking out over (atm mostly su), cute things, puns/dumb jokes, things that make me happy

Do you get asks regularly: eh every once in a while ill get a bunch and then not get any for the rest of the time. and usually theyre from people i know irl

What is your aesthetic: boOOoks, either rainy days or really sunny days

Tagging: eh lets see @crunchyxushi @ikallawrites @jewishdragon@nymphofnovels @feragon-dingbat @lazeecomet @ginnypcttcr and whoever wants to do it :)

[jewishdragon]

@lazeecomet replied to your post “I nicked my thumb with a knife last night when cutting a piece of...”

thats not the way to spend a birthday

I got hurt last night 

and not being able to play Halo due to said injury but still being able fully enjoy Mass Effect, and thus play Mass Effect all night

is a great way to spend a bday 

plus i’ll have the energy sword in one hand, a needler in the other, so i can imagine I’m playing Halo XD 

[businesstiramisu]

@lazeecomet hey look it's El Capitan

Yo it's blorbo from my default MacOS wallpapers

[jewishdragon]

I was tagged by @bisexualgambit to post my Favorite selfies of 2017! Wow I had a lot! I tag @lazeecomet @windypenguin @hellohowdareyou @intheheightsandfluff @smolviolin @iheartpkmn @shittyninja @sleepycilantro @rikudera and anyone who wants to do this can claim I tagged them!

[businesstiramisu]

@combat-epistemologist @lazeecomet that's about the time you started cake on Friday, yeah?

is 10pm an insane hour to attempt to bake bread (i have never made bread before in my life)

[windypenguin]

Music Tag! I was tagged by @jewishdragon!

I have to list 10 songs I'm obsessed with and tag 10 people...

Italian Rhapsody by Julie Giroux

Seagulls (from Bad Lip Reading)

I Like Shapes (aka google translate sings of Shape of You

The Muppets' version of Bohemian Rhapsody

Just all of the google translate sings actually

Belgrade by Battle Tapes (Gen:Lock season 2 when????)

Two Birds by Regina Spektor

Voidfish (Plural)

Hey, Soul Sister by Train

HAVE A NICE DAY by World Order

I'm tagging @nymphofnovels @memetrash-coyote @memetrashmom @crunchyxushi @ginnypcttcr @irish-chikorita @someguywithablog @lazeecomet @theceejay @solaireon

[jewishdragon]

My last day of undergrad 

watching anime with my roommates and @lazeecomet

specifically Konosuba, which is hilarious