We had a great New Year's eve dinner at mama Visco's house, with (e:mike) and (e:libertad). She made all the delicious things - the dandelion patties, the mushroom and artichoke dish, apfelkuchen. We even tried 45 year old wine that Paul's dad brought out of the basement. It had some kick to it.

The best part of the evening I think was hearing about Mike's Staples fiasco. He needs to do a full write up because I can't do it justice.

I've been working on the redeveloping the Squeaky Wheel website and coming up with a brand new member management and equipment app for them. Most of the project is not that interesting but I have learned something new - Docker.

Basically there are containers that use parts of the host machines kernel, that then combines them with other services you want to run isolated from the rest of the machine. You can build images of different configurations and version control them with git. Everything configuration can be described by docker files. Its basically a more lightweight and flexible virtual machine. I felt behind for not having used this before but it's pretty awesome.

In my set up, I wanted to have a virtual machine running the member app, and a front end running WordPress. (e:Paul) didn't want to use two IPs and I don't want to run a frequently exploited app like WordPress on the host, so docker was a good solution to isolate it.

In the end I based an container off of a prebuilt CentOS image, with PHP, MySQL and Apache installed and went through the configuration. I could pull the MySQL data store out into its own persistant data container by running

docker run -v  /etc/mysql centos mysql-data

. This lets the data be reused across multiple containers.

Next I set up a WordPress directory on the host VM, so that I could version control changes with git. After this, the WordPress container can be spun up by mounting the data container and mapping with MySQL, mapping the host wordpress directory into the Apache's root document folder and forwarding another port on the host machine to port 80 and 443 to the container. I will post the command once I'm on the computer.

All I needed to do after that was set a VirtualHost proxy to the container. The best part after this was how easy it was to spin up a second Dev environment for someone else - I just cloned the Wordprsss directory and ran the command another time with a different port and name.

Now that I have done this I think spinning up apps will be so much easier. Maybe I can pick start doing more server admin work like Paul.

Funky Monkey was pretty blah until (e:terry) busted out his moves for "Turn Down for What". Booties were shaking.



The rest of the night we had a good time hanging out with Jeremy, (e:Robert), Mickey and Mark. here is Robert lost in (e:Paul)'s VR world.

(e:mike). the drone you gave (e:Paul) is fucking awesome.

Yesterday we flew the drone (AR Drone 2.0) out at the church. its very difficult - you fly it using your phone, looking through the HD camera on the drone. Plenty of crashes, and thankfully it takes a beating.

Today we flew it with Jeremy - it turns out that since my phone was in German, we missed the settings for indoor vs outdoor flight, and calibrating the accelerometers on flat ground. He was a lot better at it.

I really think there's so much potential for this. There's an SDK and you can also preprogram flights. Imagine flying around and getting a birds eye view of the neighborhood, or following your bike ride. (e:libertad) thinks we could even inspect his roof.

I need to practice this. Much better than driving a car.

Testing Paul's new drone:

After Christmas eve, we decided to open presents. (E:Paul) and I got (e:terry) a PlayStation. They got me a new case of nut butters. And (e:terry) and I got Paul the Samsung VR goggles. I have a feeling we will never see his face again - the glasses are so cool.