Doug Mahugh

RIP, Alaskan Way Viaduct

The Alaskan Way Viaduct closed for good this evening. Next month, the replacement tunnel will open. Here's the announcement that was posted on the viaduct web site [http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/Viaduct/] 20 minutes ago: Earlier this evening, people were celebrating the end of an era:

photography

FFmpeg FTW!

FFmpeg is a popular command-line tool for converting, encoding, decoding, and editing audio and video files, and if you work with audio or video it's a tool you'll find useful over and over again. It's free, fast, cross-platform, widely used, and well supported. In

Ghost

Syntax highlighting with Prism

This post summarizes how to to configure and use Prism [https://prismjs.com/] syntax highlighting on a Ghost [https://ghost.org/]blog. Setup To use Prism, we'll need to load its CSS and JavaScript for each page rendered by the Ghost site. In this example, we'll

social media

Farewell, Facebook

After an amazing 2018, I have big plans for New Year's Eve: I'll be deleting my Facebook account at the stroke of midnight (PST) on Monday, 12/31/2018. > UPDATE: I deactivated my account rather than deleting it, because I learned that deleting would also

travel

Lake Of The Woods, Oregon

We've traveled a lot with our dogs. They've been in our truck for most of its 230,000 miles over the last 8 years, visiting 25 states and 3 Canadian provinces and territories. And I think this may be their favorite spot they've ever

social media

Posting DSLR photos to Instagram

If you like to take pictures with a device other than your smartphone (say, a camera) and you use Instagram, you've probably come across an annoying limitation: when you go to Instagram [https://instagram.com] in a web browser on a PC, Mac, or Linux computer, you can&

Ghost

Hello Ghost!

this is my first post at www.dougmahugh.com, a new web site hosted on ghost.org

photography

Antarctica

In December of 2018, Mom and I took a cruise to Antarctica [https://www.quarkexpeditions.com/en/antarctic/expeditions/antarctic-explorer-discovering-the-7th-continent] on the Ocean Endeavor from Quark Expeditions, thus checking the 7th continent off our life list for each of us. Special thanks to my cousin David Phillips, who sponsored Mom&

photography

Gathering Of The Juggalos 2018

Photos from the 19th Gathering Of The Juggalos, July 18-21, 2018 in Legend Valley, Ohio. All photos by Doug Mahugh, but I don't care what you do with them. Parking Lot Party We arrived in Legend Valley around 6PM the evening before the Gathering began, and spent a

Second City Software

Developer Docs, 80s-style

One of the constants of software development is the need for reference documentation, where programmers can look up the details of their craft. These days, that documentation is on the web, and programmers typically find it with a search engine. But it wasn't always so. IBM PC Technical

Second City Software

Hand-held computing in 1991

In the early 1990s, Second City Software's [https://www.dougmahugh.com/tag/second-city-software/]biggest client was a records storage firm on the west side of Chicago (near Ogden & Western). A massive warehouse at that location held millions of paper files, and the firm offered 1-hour rush delivery

Jamie Samoyed

Dogsitting in Montana

The first week of October 2017, I had the opportunity to spend a few days alone in rural Montana (near Three Forks) with four amazing dogs. Getting There I've been driving across the western US for decades, and it never gets old. Our first stop on the way

travel

Havana, Cuba

Photos from our family cruise to Havana, Cuba. It was a short 5-day trip out of Tampa on Carnival, with only 24 hours in Havana, but we made the most of it! wearing our matching Arnold Family Reunion t-shirts, ready to head out to sea after a day at sea,

python

HTTP in Python: aiohttp vs. Requests

> NOTE: this blog post is about async programming in Python 3.5, but a few things have changed since then. In January 2019, Brad Solomon wrote a great article about async programming in Python 3.7 – Async IO in Python: A Complete Walkthrough [https://realpython.com/async-io-python/]. I recently

python

Recursively traversing Azure CLI help screens

For a simple command line tool, a single help screen (usually invoked with a -h) can show you all of the available functionality. But large complex command line tools may have many subcommands, or even subcommands of subcommands, each with its own help text. The Azure CLI [https://docs.microsoft.

social media

Getting to know a few Trumpbots

We all know that there are countless thousands of bots on Twitter, and today I spent some time getting to know a little more about a few of them. My interest was piqued by a tweet [https://twitter.com/EliotHiggins/status/833729147604234240] from Eliot Higgins, a researcher at King’s

politics

Trump Inauguration 2017 and Women's March

November 8, 2016 was a momentous day, and after recovering from our hangovers on the 9th, we made a spontaneous decision to travel to Washington, DC for the weekend of the inauguration. There were already some rumors of a "women's march" to take place on January

photography

Verifying backup drives

I prefer managing my backups myself on a set of replicated USB drives, for all the reasons I’ve covered before [https://www.dougmahugh.com/my-backup-process/]. This approach works great for me, but it’s vulnerable to human error because I manually copy new backup content to the drives. While

python

Travis CI for Test Automation

This posts covers how to get started with continuous integration (CI) for projects hosted in GitHub repos, using the Travis CI service. CI is a large and potentially complex topic, and I’ve kept the scope here very simple: just the basics of how to make some tests run automatically

photography

Seattle Pride Parade 2015 & 2016

A few of my favorite photos from the pride parade in 2015 and 2016. Dykes on Bikes kicking off the parade ...

Second City Software

Gen-Bar

Gen-Bar was a general-purpose bar-code tracking system from Second City Software [https://www.dougmahugh.com/tag/second-city-software/] that I designed and built after developing several custom systems for large corporate filerooms and records centers. When you develop multiple custom systems in the same domain, you start to notice patterns. In

politics

Coming in 2nd, gracefully

It’s great to see so many Americans paying close attention to the Presidential race, including so many people who are getting involved for the first time. I’ve avoided advocating for any particular candidate on social media this year, because I feel that online political discussions are mostly self-congratulatory

health

Hip Replacement Isn’t What It Used To Be 12 Weeks Ago

Twelve weeks ago, I had a total hip replacement on my right side. In a blog post [https://www.dougmahugh.com/new-hips-for-next-summer/] a few days after surgery, I wrote “I’m only a week into this adventure, and I also have another hip to do in a few months, so

health

New Hips for Next Summer

In 2014, I walked more miles than I’ve ever walked in a year. Megan and I had been taking frequent long walks and hikes with the dogs in recent years, but we really kicked it up a notch when we started preparing for a trekking vacation in Dartmoor National

photography

Creating time-lapse videos

Time-lapse sequences have become de rigueur in many types of video, movie and TV production. As a typical example of their popularity, the hit series Breaking Bad had nearly 40 of them: Time-lapse video clips typically last only a few seconds (although some are much longer [https://www.youtube.com/