Teaching the dog about Santa

For the last month or two, Quinn and I have been going out for walks after the kids are in bed. Its quiet, the dog has a great time, and we get to talk for an hour (tonight it was iPad woes and trying to remember this story about the SR-71 and a Navy Hornet). I’ve been feeling better, and am a little smaller, so its a win all the way around!

It is now bunny season. They are everywhere, and they are not smart. They will sit very still, even after Butter sees them. They will sit very still until she’s almost convinced herself that they aren’t really there. That’s when they bolt, and Butter tries to take our arms off bolting after them. The worst part is that they never seem to run into cover, they run along it, so she can see them for the longest possible time.

Bunnies.

So, tonight there was a real winner. He sat, still as a stone, until Butter was about 6 feet away from him. Then he ran, along the road, for about 20 feet (if you’ve ever seen Butter run, you know that’s not nearly far enough) to the corner of a fence. And sat there staring at the dog, who was on high alert and at the very end of her leash. It would be worrying, but her ears flop into her eyes, so she just looks ridiculous.

Quinn says, “I wonder what she would do if I ran after the bunny, and pretended to catch it.” I can see the wheels turning in his head, even in the dark.

“Don’t you dare.”

But the bunny isn’t moving, even as we keep walking toward it (he was between us and home; I don’t torture bunnies for fun). Quinn keeps giggling to himself, thinking about chasing the bunny, and the dog’s reaction. And the bunny still isn’t moving and we’re back to a 6 foot lead.

I sighed. No way around it. “Please chase the bunny.”

So he does. He runs towards the bunny, who is completely confused, and takes a second to start running, too. Butter tried to take off with him, but I was ready for it and she didn’t get anywhere. The bunny high-tailed it towards the back of a house, and Quinn went after it, just into a shadow.

This is where the fun starts, you see. He made growly, eating noises. Butter could not believe it. Quinn caught the bunny and ate it. She spent the rest of the walk looking for her own bunny to catch and eat. (He did not really catch the bunny, but Butter was firmly convinced her dad was a mighty predator tonight.)

Quinn wants to get a toy bunny (safe for dogs) and carry it with him on our walks. He’s going to chase another bunny out of harm’s way, and bring back the toy to give to Butter. She will firmly believe that he’s sharing his kill with her. He says, “It will be like teaching her about Santa Clause!” because she will be firmly convinced that is was bunnies taste like.

I’m not sure if this is going to be hysterical, or the start of many bad times for the local bunnies.

Good thing there’s lots of them.

NiFi HTTP Service

I’m attempting to set up an HTTP server in NiFi to accept uploads and process them on-demand.  This gets tricky because I want to submit the files using an existing web application that will not be served from NiFi, which leads to trouble with XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) and setting up CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing [1]).

The trouble starts with just trying to PUT or POST a simple file.  The error in Firefox reads:

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' missing).

You can serve up the Javascript that actually performs the upload from NiFi and side-step XSS, but you may still run into trouble with CORS.  You’ll have trouble even if NiFi and your other web server live on the same host (using different ports, of course), as they’re considered different hosts for the purposes of XSS prevention.

handlehttpresponse screen shot
HandleHttpResponse processor config

To make this work, you’ll need to enable specific headers in the HandleHttpResponse processor.  Neither the need to set some headers, nor the headers that need to be set, are documented by NiFi at this time (so far as I can tell).

  1. Open the configuration of the HandleHttpResponse processor
  2. Add the following headers and values as properties and values, but see below for notes regarding the values
    Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

Access-Control-Allow-Methods: PUT, POST, GET, OPTIONS

Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Accept, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Language, Connection, Content-Length, Content-Type, DNT, Host, Referer, User-Agent, Origin, X-Forwarded-For

You may want to review the value for Access-Control-Allow-Origin, as the wildcard may allow access to unexpected hosts.  If your server is public-facing (why would you do that with NiFi?) then you certainly don’t want a wildcard here.  The wildcard makes configuration much simpler if NiFi is strictly interior-facing, though.

The specific values to set for Access-Control-Allow-Methods depend on what you’re doing.  You’ll probably need OPTIONS for most cases.  I’m serving up static files so I need GET, and I’m receiving uploads that may or may not be chunked, so I need POST and PUT.

The actual headers needed for Access-Control-Allow-Headers is a bit variable.  A wildcard is not an acceptable value here, so you’ll have to list every header you need separately — and there are a bunch of possible headers.  See [3] for an explanation and a fairly comprehensive list of possible headers.  Our list contains a small subset that covers our basic test cases; your mileage may vary.

You may also want to set up a RouteOnAttribute processor to ignore OPTIONS requests (${http.method:equals('OPTIONS')}), otherwise you might see a bunch of zero-byte files in your flow.

References:

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24371734/firefox-cors-request-giving-cross-origin-request-blocked-despite-headers

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13146892/cors-access-control-allow-headers-wildcard-being-ignored

Weird Al Yankovic, In Concert

Weird Al Yankovic, promotional photoWeird Al Yankovic was a big part of Meghan’s and my childhood, and pretty much anyone in our generation.  You could say he’s a hero of sorts.  When I found out, quite by accident, that his latest tour had dates near us I bought tickets the same day.  The only decision was which venue.

I chose the Lowell Summer Music Series; as Meghan said, if it rains we would be able to say that not only have we seen Weird Al live, but we saw him in a high school gymnasium.  (The high school next door is the rain location.)  It’s outdoors and BYOBlanket; so long as it didn’t rain and move indoors the kids are free.

So, on the appointed date and earliest possible time after work (which was earlier today, as I write this) we packed up the kids and a blanket and headed to the park to stake out a spot.

Mandatory Fun stage background
The stage, shortly before the show started. They waited for dark so they could recreate the roaming camera scene from the ‘Tacky’ video (which was the opening number)

The show was flawless.  It was small enough to be fun, large enough to let the crowd’s energy really flow, and turned-down enough that I wasn’t deaf at the end.  Alpha and Beta spent most of the show in a corner of the park with some other kids, but they enjoyed the show immensely as well.  Their view was better than ours, despite the distance — they could see over the crowd, while we had to contend with the sound booth/tent.

weird al in a fat suit
Weird Al in the fat suit singing ‘Fat’. My childhood has been redeemed. Apologies for the potato quality, all I had was my cell phone and the stage lighting was particularly bright and direct during this song.

There was a good mix of old and new songs over a couple of hours, interspersed with video clips while the band changed costumes.  Among other songs (in no particular order), there was Tacky (the opening number), Dare to Be Stupid, the aforementioned Fat, Amish Paradise, White and Nerdy, an awesome arrangement of Like A Surgeon set to the “unplugged” arrangement of Eric Clapton’s Layla (really), a couple of polkas interspersed throughout (of course), and closing with Yoda.

Mandatory Fun
Cover of Weird Al’s latest album and tour

The girls were buzzing as we left the park, and wide awake despite a) being 10 pm, b) after a regular day of school, and c) on the first week of school.  They can sleep in tomorrow, there’s no school, and Meghan and I aren’t setting an alarm — our jobs are flexible enough that we can afford to be a little late.

Butter has a terrible, no-good, very bad day.

Butter did not have a good day today. She’s been licking her paws and scratching her face to the point she’s starting to lose fur. Sprayed her with some anti-itch spray, and that didn’t help much (but she did put herself in her crate for an hour).

sad pitt bull
She looks so miserable

Off to the vet we go. He looks her over and says yes, it’s allergies, benadryl what she needs, and by the way her anal glands are full.

So, poor Butter is itchy, has been sprayed with nasty stuff, went to the vet, had a finger up her rear to express her gland, and is due to take two pills later.

I said I should just trim her nails to make it complete, but Quinn says that would be too cruel. I think he’s right.

We’ll just let her sleep for now.

Stargazing At MOS

There’s a small, boring backstory: Meghan renewed our membership with the Museum of Science (MOS), then asked me if we should renew it (she asked me via text, so she may have a different order of events).  I said we shouldn’t, since the girls haven’t been interested in going and we basically did not go at all last year — HOWEVER if we were to actually go just once I would be happy to renew while we were on-site.  Despite talking about this all over text, Meghan’s disappointment was evident as she dutifully cancelled the renewal.

I considered my options carefully, as the couch isn’t a particularly comfortable place to sleep, and gently reminded her that the MOS has an observatory that they open on Friday nights to view the stars — therefore it would be open later that night, and I would happily renew while we were there.  All we had to do was get the kids on board with going, or figure out what they would do while the two of us went.  (The girls thought this was a cool idea.  50 points to Gryffindor.)

Saturn
Credit to https://bkellysky.wordpress.com/

A few hours later we found ourselves standing on the roof of the MOS parking garage, waiting for our turn at the telescope.  Sadly, I could not photograph the view from the telescope, but it was a surprisingly clear view of Saturn.  A number of other people have taken photographs that are pretty similar to what we saw.  Happily the docent was informative and happy to answer questions, and didn’t make us feel rushed.  The MOS seems to have crowd management around the telescope down pat.

While we were waiting our turns, we took a few other pictures of Boston and astronomical phenomena, and watched the city bustle around us.

Jupiter and moon
Look to the left and up from the moon, that’s Jupiter. High, thin clouds were moving in, backlighting the view and obscuring the dimmer stars. The photo was taken with my cell phone, apologies for the potato-like quality.

 

Beautiful August Sunset

 

pink and orange clouds after sunset
The clouds caught the sunlight after the sun had dipped below the horizon. Taken from the Market Basket parking lot in Wilmington, MA, hence the street lights.

 

Presidential Politics 2016

This is probably the only political statement I’ll make on the internet this year, and it’s not telling you who to vote for or pushing a particular issue in your face. I want to introduce some perspective.

Everyone is worried about the presidential election this year — will it be Trump or Clinton, I can’t vote for him and I don’t like her, if X is elected it will be a disaster for the country, what about these very fine 3rd party candidates, etc. You’re all barking up the wrong tree, you’ve forgotten how the government really works, and that the occupant of the oval office has limited powers and doesn’t really matter. What matters is the Senate, and we should be talking about senatorial candidates.

The president doesn’t install justices on the Supreme Court, judges on the Court of Appeals, or more than 6000 people onto various agencies, and the president doesn’t decide who sits in their own cabinet. The president may nominate people for these positions, but the Senate confirms those appointments. If the Senate doesn’t consent to a nominee, that nominee will not be appointed.  These appointments have lasting effects long after a presidential term is up so the appointment really matters, but the field of unappointed nominees are irrelevant.

What about the House of Representatives? Their districts are fairly gerrymandered so individual representatives aren’t all that responsive to national politics, and the House’s power is somewhat limited by design. They do play a role in budgeting and legislation, though — along with the Senate.

The president doesn’t set the federal budget, Congress does. The president does proposes a budget (and only does so because Congress can’t be bothered — by law they are supposed to make it and they can always change anything proposed by the president) but the budget is voted on and set by Congress.

You may object that “my senators are fine, and they’re not even up for election this year!” This may be true, but it’s not a good objection. We all have friends and family in other states, you can discuss the issues and candidates across the nation, and persuade them to take an interest and vote. (But never brow-beat or fight, please, that’s neither respectful or respectable.)

So in this election cycle, lets talk about the things that matter. The president isn’t one of them.

Fenway 2016

fenway park
Fenway Park from the grandstands (section 30)

Baba took the whole clan to Fenway to see the Red Sox play the Chicago White Sox.  It was an afternoon game so that the kids could come, too.

del's lemonadeBaba generously bought us stadium food as well – no small sum for hot dogs, pretzels, pizza, and Del’s Lemonade.

The Sox stunk until the bottom of the 5th inning, at which point they came back from 4-0 lead by the White Sox to win 7-8.

Delta fell asleep by the 8th inning, which is surprising given the amount of noise every time the Sox got a run.  Kappa, who’s about a year and a half, stayed awake and in mostly good spirits through the entire game.  Beta was well behaved, and Alpha genuinely enjoyed herself.

We left as the 10th inning was starting so that we could avoid some of the crowds with the kids and headed down the street to get dinner at Wahlburgers.