Suppose I have two regions in a wave medium where the speed is different and the wave is not coming straight on at that boundary edge. So suppose you have a boundary edge like this and waves travel at one speed on one side and a different speed on the other side. But the wave is not coming straight on. If the wave was coming straight on, then if the speed went up, then this wavelength would just go up. And if the speed went down, the wavelength would just go down. But what happens if it comes into an angle? Well, let's look at it. So remember, the wavelength over on this side has to be smaller. Which means these crests have to be closer together. You can imagine what would happen if you were in a line of people along a line and then at one point, a whole bunch of them went into a slow area. Maybe you were walking and they walked into mud or something and started going really slow. What would happen is the line would have to change angle. And you can see if we change the angle like that. So this is assuming that the speed over here is slower. If we change angle like that, then what we've got is that the wavelength here is smaller as we need it, than the wavelength over here. If these lines were straight, then obviously the wavelength would be exactly the same. So that angle has to change. So the wave has to change direction. So when you're going through a boundary between two different speeds, what you find is that the wave changes direction and that's called refraction.


The floor may not be in your old box. Clocks. Have you ever thought there was more to time than that? Always sitting there, happily ticking away. They're everywhere. At home, in school, shops, doctor's surgeries, and stadiums, the list goes on. Always telling us when to leave and how long until something finishes. Handy little things. David doesn't need a watch or Clocks in his apartment.  The night when it happened was a quiet one. Only the occasional car driving by and the sound of the light rain gently drumming against the double glazed windows that keep out the sound of Big Ben's chimes. But because of the quietness, David was woken up by the midnight chimes.  He muttered as he blinked the sleep out of his eyes. May as well see Watts on TV. He grabbed a beer and sat down on the sofa, stifling a yawn as he reached for the remote. As the screen switched on, a man appeared in the middle of nowhere. He wore a jet black tailored suit and held a silver pocket watch in his right hand. He did not speak, he just stared. Stared and stared. There was a ticking noise in the background, nothing else. Just silence. Cheesy horror movies. David changed the channel. The channel name appeared, the channel was changed, but the same image. The same man, the face, the suit, the pocket watch. There was one difference, he had edged mirror only slightly, but he had. David changed again and again, but nothing changed, but he still came closer and the ticking noise was louder. Louder and louder. Big Ben began to chime outside. David had stopped pressing channel up, but the channel was still changing. Sky One, Gold, Dave, Comedy Central. When at last, all could be seen was the man's face. Big Ben chimed one last time, definitely loud, and David lost his grip of the remote and it smashed, but he couldn't see it. All he could see was the floor, coming closer to his face, and then he blacked out.


Today we're opening Konami's newest set, Cyberstorm Access. What's up guys, we're back with another new Yu-Gi-Oh opening. Today we have two boxes of Cyberstorm Access First Edition which should be releasing at your locals today and it'll be available everywhere in a couple of days on Friday. But before we hop into the opening, the giveaway is every card we pull in this video. I want this to be the very first time we pull a star light out of one of these two early boxes for you guys so you guys can win it. Just like the video, be subscribed, turn on notifications, let me know what you think about Cyberstorm Access and let's hop into it. So before we get into it, I want to read off the five star light rays you can get in here just so you guys know because I know you guys like to know what all the star lights are. So the first one is Despion Lulualith or something like that. These names are kind of crazy so come and subscribe. Then we have the new Firewall Dragon Singularity card. So it's a new Firewall card. Then Gold Pride Cherry at Kerry. We saw that reviewing when Revs pulled two on Twitch. We were reviewing his video. He pulled two star lights in two boxes. It was insane. So we've known that one for a while. The Guiding Quim, the Virtuous Starlight Rare. I don't know how you say that one. And then the Visa Star Frost is the new reprint or the Legacy Starlight. So it's actually a pretty new card. I think it's from Diffo maybe. Yeah, not that old. Not like a crazy old one like we normally hunt, but still some pretty cool cards in here. So let's get into the opening. Funny enough, the most expensive non-starlight card in here is a Chaos card. It's called Chaos Angel. So potentially going to be pulling some Chaos cards out of here. So it's actually a crazy good card obviously because it's the most expensive card, but pretty weird to see like there's a Kulia. Chaos cards be really good these days. You know, it's like, whoa, Chaos is back. Yeah, there's, I mean, you remember last set there was actually a lot of Chaos cards as well. What was the last set by the way? It was, I can't remember. It was a side set, right? We've got a nice, oh, Maze. Maze. Yeah, Maze had some Chaos. Was it Maze? Wait, that doesn't seem right. Didn't we have an April set? No April set was, I can't remember, guys. I'm losing it. I feel like the last core set was, there's a branded card sign at circuit. Oh, a secret rare. Beastful Planet Calarium secret. That is nice. This is all apparently the second best secret rare. That's just how we do it. All right. According to pre-orders, remember guys, the full like prices, everything's going to really figure itself out on Friday once it's not just release in OTS stores. Keep that in mind. The TCG player is not going to allow any normal guys, normies like us to sell cards on TCG players. So there's going to be a lot less supply for these cards until Friday. Once Friday happens, that's when you can really figure out this is a new Trap Tricks card or the, it's like a, man, I can't remember anything's name anymore. Oh, there's a Firewall Phantom. Cool. And then another super rare. Trap Trick, not Trap Tricks. There's Trap Trick, the Trap card. That is the new one of those, the Trap Tracks. Okay. I'm already losing what I was saying, but yeah, Friday is when you need to actually check out the prices to figure out what they're going to be. We're going to have them popping up because, you know, for entertainment value and stuff like that. But keep in mind, a lot of the time they're going to be going down. What a bee. What in the world? We got Bee Movie Action going on here. That is a wild looking card. All right. Next pack. I feel like I was trying to say something earlier and trying to remember something and I can't remember what it was. So I guess we're not remembering it. Oh yeah. Photon Hypernova. That was the last core set, right? There hasn't been one since then has there? It was three months ago. Did they really like, wasn't that February? Wow. Does it really take that long for new core sets? It feels like it doesn't, but I guess we had legendary collection in the middle. We had side set maze and memories, sweet dreams. We had Dynamorphia, Phantom, Manadium, Fallen, Pig Iron. Oh, we got Pig Iron versus Pig Pin. That's a lit card. My contact is now going crazy. All right. Next pack. We have Cyberstorm Access. We had some contact issues. I don't know where my contact. Yeah. I don't know if you guys wear contacts. You guys know the pain of like you're just sitting there. Everything's fine. And then all of a sudden, boom, you can't see anything. It's your contact is like falling out of your eye for no apparent reason. So there's a bonus. I really like this card because it is such a short name. It just reminds me of old school Yu-Gi-Oh. Like it's like, oh, this card is like completely like randomly short name.  You know, not nowadays. It's like this. It's the Moisa Knight, the Comet General. And that's like a short name these days, but then we got Votis. Just a weird random name.  Next pack. All right. We're battling through the contact because right now it is very blurry. My right eye is not seeing very well. So we're just going to have to do what we can. We have motorbike. This is what you do guys. Look, if you can play through injury and NBA, you know, they don't do. But if some of them do, there we go, cherry carry. Very nice. Maybe it's like the playoffs here. I can get through this. I can battle through the opening. We will see a starlight rare with one eye, maybe not to pendulum. We have the monk bunny ear enthusiast. That is a space jam to card double hooking. We have Gungotsu ship and a Kitsuni and then the Adularia of the June moon. Okay. Interesting stuff so far. Just is that just one secret rare? And that's it besides supers, which are guaranteed. Very interesting. So we have not pulled like an ultra yet or anything we've reinforced. We have golden cloud, virtual world, super every samurai. Interestingly enough, super every samurai is crazy. If you noticed in my recent video where I pulled a super every samurai super rare or another ultra, the gold pride, no, wait, no, we did pull. We pulled the captain carry. That's an ultra, but we pulled a super every samurai unlimited super out of I think core. It was seven bucks. And at the time I was like, why is this so expensive? It's because there's new support in the set. Super heavy samurai has pendulum cards, which yeah, pendulum guys. It's yeah, more pendulum. Okay. New pearly card. It's a common. So for all you pearly fans, very easy to get this time fallen. And then we have a kiddie tale, mystical beast of the forest. Let's go. One, two, three, four. We have new frontier, Namellia, cash, Tira, Hatsugia, pig iron, virtual world, the signets want to be. I don't want to be enough. Oh, sorry. Okay. Next up. Can we get a starlight rare? I've never pulled a starlight when opening like the first two boxes like we do on a Wednesday, usually of the release date. I've never pulled a starlight. So I would love to do that at some point. One, two, three, four. I mean, it'd be crazy because we always give away the polls in the very first opening. So if we were to pull a starlight and give it away, it'd be pretty cool. We have pulled a ghost rare doing this before. Another pearly and ultra rare. Menadium, rhom, rhomheart, Menadium. That reminds me of Palladium, Oracle, Mahon. But yeah, that'd be pretty awesome if that happened because yeah, I think you guys would be hired to be able to win a starlight, you know, especially one that I pulled on the video. Super heavy samurai, more super heavy samurai. Wow, a lot of super heavy samurai's in here. Beetrooper. Let's go. The cruel Saturnus. Let's go. Our Beetrooper support is here. It's a fusion. You love to see it. We played a lot of the Beetrooper stuff on MasterDool because we were trying to sell them pecanium off in the Perfectly Ultimate Great Mouth. You guys saw it in the 10 minute testing video. Go watch it. Yeah, it was an incredible video. I mean, definitely 100% our style of video. Not a meme or joke at all for sure. Pearly Lee. Pearly Lee. Pendulum and the S-Force Night Chaser. All right, access. Give us access to the starlight. One, two, three, four. Here we go. We want to access the starlight. The problem with this set, I literally have not been able to remember the name. Cyberstorm. I always think it's cybernetic. And I started saying cybernetic. I'm like, that just can't be right. They've already used cybernetic horizon revolution. I was like, I don't think it's cybernetic again. And I can never remember what it is. And I sit there for like 10 minutes, kind of like today where I can't remember anything's name and cut me some slack. It's pretty early in the morning. Okay. Slightly early. So I'm trying to get this video out today. You know, that you see this day I recorded it. Yeah, there's a little bit of sleepiness involved.  Nate in. We have trap tracks.  That's my favorite card. And then the super every samurai commander. Shana woe. Super rare. Very nice. All right. One, two, three, four. I don't know what, like when we do the starlight rare opening, I guess we're going to go for the Star Frost. I guess we could go for the firewall. I don't know. There's nothing like, oh no, here's my favorite card. How did I get here with a warrior digreffer? This is an amazing card. Look at him. He's like, whoa, how did I get here? It's pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome. Okay. Another cat, a cat chariot carry, whatever it's called, just like rats, except both of his were starlights. So it makes more sense. So let me know which one should we go for? Because normally there's a crazy starlight that we want to like start us or something like that. You know, it's old school. It's throwback. This time, not so much firewalls like at this point, six years old. So a retrain of that's kind of cool. Want to be anything other than a starlight and a booster pack. One, two, three, four. So yeah, I'm not totally sure what to go for. I mean, we're probably, I'm leaning toward those two that I mentioned earlier. The cybers and a protect code talker, more code talkers, as if we needed that. All right. Wow. Whoa, beat up pack right here. Maybe that's a sign. It's an all starlight pack that was replaced in the factory with all starlights for some reason. I don't know why they would want to do that, but maybe they intended to come back and buy this booster box themselves. Pearly. We have the pearly sweet memory. Oh, the chaos angel. And this is the best card that I was talking about. A chaos card. This card is amazing. Yeah, this card's pretty insane. Stats are crazy. The effect is awesome. So we have pulled the top two cards on the set officially. And we're like halfway through or something. Maybe slightly past halfway through. Both secret rears have been insane. So this is going to be a pretty good giveaway for you guys. Fusion duplication duplex. We have big pin, quintery, symphony, and the wish. Whoa, the wish dragon. This card's sick. Wish dragon. I like that card. That might be my new favorite super. There's always a super. I really like any sets. I think wish dragon might have just taken the lead as my favorite super. That's a cool one. All right, let's see if we can pull more of it. We have pendulum moon, the brightest blazing gung and sushi, pendulum, imperial cybers and the manadium me. All right. Yeah. So the guy at local told me that he pulled insane out of like just two packs. He pulled a chaos angel and it was another like new card that I didn't completely recognize, but he said it was apparently good. So apparently him just being around those boxes gave us some insane luck because it worked out. Here we go. We have the dual avatar, the super every samurai, manadium, sword soul, signet, firewall, Sakatama, the super every samurai, and the super every samurai brave Masuralo. Very nice ultra rare super every samurai. They have synchros in here. They have pendulums in here. There's a lot going on with the super every samurai stuff. And so far we've pulled a lot of it. We have another there's more amazement stuff in here, which I've not seen in a very long time since they're, what was their set they came out in the amazement attraction and stuff like that. It was around, I feel like it was like 2021. It wasn't Donna majesty. Was it? Was it the set after that?  Super rare. Will we get okay. So really, only two secrets have been pulled, which is pretty wild. So we should get two more. Hatsu guy, the pearly Lee, the double hooking, the virtual world, etude, and a bestial this pater. That's a lot of ultras I feel like, isn't it? A lot of ultra rare is one, two, three, four. Here we go. We have monadium new frontier, the amazement more amazement, a shattered pearly sleep, pendulum, bunny ear enthusiasts from space jam, double hooking and the monadium. Obsession. What are we at? Maybe 12 to 15 packs left. I'm just guessing because I'm bad at guessing. Here we go. We have reinforced the nerly the shattered sorts old punishment. I wonder if that's a good card. Saluga, Saktima, Mausa, and dreaming. Nebleria. There we go. Sounds like malaria. That's kind of scary. Okay. We have super every samurai, sweet dreams, brightest, monadium, cybers, pearly, masa, sulfa cord and baromet, the sacred sheep shrub. This is also a pretty awesome card. It looks like a Pokemon card. I'm not at least the artwork does last probably quarter of our opening. And we still have two secrets, I believe one, two, three, four. I don't think we pulled more than two. I'm pretty sure we just pulled the two good ones. Maybe we'll just pull them both twice. Imagine bunny ear. We got Looney. We've got etude and the Votis and actually Votis might be up there for my favorite super that and though, what was the other ones? I've got a dragon. It's like a little dragon. I don't know what it was. The monadium Makanko amazement. A lot of different archetypes in here. It feels like golden trap tricks, soulful course. He's even soulful core beater. It's like so many different like support cards for random archetypes. That's pretty cool. One, two, three, four. Beechooper is pretty epic. We have Makanko, Dinomorphy Impact, Hooli, Pearly, Super Eversamurai, Double Hooking, how to die get here. And another secret rare, Despion, Lulu Weilalith. Lulu Weilalith. This is a starlight. This one not right here, but this card can be a starlight. This is like a $20 card at the moment. So one of the best secret rare is in the set. It's not top three. I think it is. It appears to be the sixth best secret, but I also just noticed there's an ultra rare that's apparently really good. The Lord of Swords is what I'm going to say. He has an actual name. Then the Bistial Dis that we pulled. Discards like 16 according to this. That's insane. So it's Bistial. It makes sense. Wow. There's actually big Ultras in here. So if we could get that Lord of Swords as well, the Ultras, this would be one of the best openings you can have out of the set. Cyber Sage Dream Tower. These have been really good boxes. Not going to lie. Gold Pride. We've got Fallen and the Dreaming Malaria again. So a few packs left. Still another secret rare in here somewhere. So I mean, there's secret rare three through five that we could pull that we haven't pulled yet. Gungan Tsu ship, Katsuni, Golden Cloud, and a Sinet Rollback coming out toward the end. Still starlight as well. I haven't even thought about that. I mean, that would really turn this up. That would turn this up crazy. New Frontier, Gold Pride, Cerberus Samurai, Gold Pride, Cybers, Firewall Phantom, Minadium, Minadium Meek. Give us a chance at the end to pull something crazy. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed this video so far. If you have and make sure to subscribe to the channel for more new Yu-Gi-Oh openings, old Yu-Gi-Oh openings, middle Yu-Gi-Oh openings. I mean, literally any Yu-Gi-Oh opening. Ice Jade. Okay, we know that's not good. It's Ice Jade, but maybe one day Ice Jade stuff will actually get enough support to be good. And then some of the cards will actually be worth something. I'm not even going to bother looking at that one because I know it's not going to be great. We have Fallen. Pig Iron versus Pig Pin. Burnly. We have Double Hooking and the Harvest Angel of Doom. We are down to, I think, six packs left out of 48. So we're getting there toward the end. We are down to one-eighth of our packs. Suship, Minadium, we have Trap Tracks, and the Bistial Eluber. I wonder if the Bistial Super is any good. I wouldn't be surprised because, I mean, you remember the original Bistials? They were super rare, so they were crazy money. They got 20 bucks for one of them, and then like 12 for the other one. Shattered, Cyber Sage, Double Hooking, How Did I Get Here, Golden Cloud Super of Samurai, and the Ice Jade, the same exact Ice Jade card. Wow. It's really trying to turn this opening from amazing to just not as amazing right now. That's what it's doing. One, two, three, four.  Same exact card. Cyber is Fallen. Pig Iron versus Pig Pin. Burnly, Double Hooking, and Teller Knight. Loran, three packs to go. I dropped the pack. Don't worry. We got this. We will recover. We've been fighting through injury this entire time. One, two, three, four. Will there be a secret rare? I mean, I think we need one more, don't we? We have the Dual Avatar. Will it come down to the last pack? It could happen. Gunk and Suship, Trap Tracks, and Super Every Samurai. Wow. It's coming down to the last two. Do we have a secret rare in the last two packs? Wow. This is going to be interesting. One, two, three, four. I feel like we always pull them early out of these, and it's, this time it's not happening. It's a little bit later. We have put Pendulum. Kitsu- That is a super ruxen special if I've ever seen one. And look at this artwork. This guy is awesome. Secret rare, the Lord of Swords. Wait, I thought he was an Ultra. Oh, it's, that's the sneak preview. That's what it is. It's the sneak preview Ultra. It's not actually pullable in the set. Makes sense. And apparently this guy is a terrible card. He's only two bucks, but he looks amazing. We'll take that. All right, our last pack. This definitely has a starlight rare, right? I'm not going to lie. That's probably one of my favorite artworks of the set so far. That guy looks really cool. We have Minadium, Super Every Samurai. Come on, last pack. Give us a starlight rare. Let's do it. Been a pretty crazy couple of boxes so I can't complain. This is insane. Our last secret rare was the second to last pack, and our last pack was a starlight. And yes, this will be in the giveaway. Oh my goodness. You can't get much better than that opening. We got the best Ultra, the best two secrets, and then a starlight rare with no price at the moment. So I don't know if it's the best starlight, but either way, wow, what an opening. If you guys enjoyed this, you have to subscribe, guys. We're almost at 200K, and that was our best new opening yet. Shout out to Toenfo Show, Daxer JT, Joe Puffins of Doom, Ernesto D'Ande, Dizzy Hoppest, Choice333, Miss Ikel, James Jantz, TCG Trust of Cards, America Deutzer, Supreme Sage 21, Anand Natai Show, Ian Musa, Junior Barting, Mimic Gecko, and Thomas McClain. Thank you guys for supporting the channel. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.


conversion or the security team patches the stable package. But basically, you only have to do the fix once. That's the idea. So how do we leverage the work that Debian maintainers and the security team put into Debian and build on top of this for our web applications? Well, that's why I want to talk to you about this site that I work on called Libraratire.org. Now, interestingly enough, the first time I talked publicly about Libraratire was at Debconft 10 in New York. So it's nice to be back here to talk about Libraratire again. But basically, what that site is, is that it is a federated version of Gravatar if you know what that is. So it delivers avatars, so profile photos to third-party websites, and this one is a GPL as opposed to proprietary with Gravatar. Now, this is what it looks like. So if you follow a bug on the Debian BTS, and you have an avatar, it will show up here right next to your name and email address. So it does that automatically if you have one. Here's another example. Mozilla Reps also uses it. So the Reps will go and upload their photos to Libraratire and it shows up on their site here. This website does not have to host any of those photos. The stack for Libraratire is pretty simple. Apache, Django, Python, Postgres, Gearman, pretty standard thing for a Django application. The architecture is a little bit special, but not very much. Basically, there's a master server that is the Django application. That's where users create an account and upload their photos. Then there's a bunch of mirrors that will receive the photo from the master, and then they are the ones who are actually serving it to third-party websites. Now, the thing to point out here is that the mirrors are all basically static. They don't have Django running, all they do is serve static file from this, and the entire logic of the application is basically for the serving part is contained in Apache Mod rewrite rules. So it's very nice, clean, and maintainable. But it means that, for example, if you'd like to volunteer a little bit of this space and bandwidth, not very much, you can have your own mirror here, and talk to me afterwards if you're interested. But basically, it's just an Apache config file and a few other things. For websites that want to use the service, all they have to do is follow the Gravatar protocol, because basically I wrote a replacement for it, and I decided to use the same protocol that they pioneered. It works like this. You take the email address that the user enters, you lowercase it, you hash it, and then you turn that into a URL by adding the base URL in front of it. So gravatar.com.avatar and then the hash, and that gives you an image. So you stick that inside an image tag and there you go. So we use the same thing for Libraratar, except that it's a federated alternative to Gravatar. So we look up the base URL in DNS. So if you control a domain, say you're the owner of gmail.com, then you can add this SRV record that points to avatars.gmail.com, or avatars.debian.org would be a better example, and then that's the avatar server that will be used for this domain. So websites will do the DNS lookup and then use that as the base URL. If you don't use it on your domain, like if you don't expose that DNS record, then we fall back to the centralized service here, centralized fallback service. So it works for all domains that people can decide to self-host for the domain if they want to. So overall, it's a pretty simple web application, pretty simple Django thing. Now, when we started the project, we decided to add a few roles to simplify the maintenance burden that we were going to have running this thing. First one was only use Python packages that are packaged for Debian. So if I want to use a library and it's not in Debian, a Python library, well, I need to find another one that is in Debian or package it myself and wait until the next release or something like this. Secondly, only use the version that's in the latest Debian release, which means that right now I don't use Django 1.6, which is the latest stable release with Django. I use 1.4 and all agree to 1.6 whenever I upgrade to Jesse. So that's what it means in practice. Now, I also include backports in there since backports became official. Another thing to note is that in terms of deployment, everything is done using Debian packages. So we start from an upstream make file that has a build rule that will minify the JavaScript, the CSS. It will compress it using GZip so that it's not done on the fly, that's pre-computed, and then we compile the PO files as well for translations. It's got a test target that will run a bunch of linters for Python, unit tests, etc. And that creates a number of different packages. So there's a package that you install on the main application because that's the only one that uses Python, Django, and so on. And then there's other packages for the mirrors that are really just the patchy files and a few Chrome jobs. This is managed using RepRipro. So we've got a separate private package repository. And on the computers that I manage, so few of them but not all of them because the mirrors contributed by other people, I use Fabric to easily keep machines kind of up to date and run commands there.  Basically, you can say I want to run these commands over this class of machine. So it's kind of a very, very lightweight version of something like Salt or Ansible or whatever. But the comparison is not quite fair because it does very little and just runs on your own machine. But if you don't want this super heavy weight thing, you can use something like that. It's quite nice. So a Python script that runs shell commands, but some on your system, some on others. So I'll just repeat what Enrico said. A Python script that runs commands either on your machine or over SSH on a bunch of different machines. This is how you keep mirrors up to date. So basically, you do nothing else than to keep the system up to date. As long as the people that run mirrors have a repository in their sources file, then they just need to keep the system up to date and it'll pull in automatically the new versions of the stuff that they need to run. I will get back to it. Yeah. Question was do you use unattended upgrades and I refuse to answer now. Okay. So how did it go? Because it's coming pretty soon. How did it go? Well, it turns out that because of my first rule, I'm limited by the choice of libraries that I can use. For example, when I started this, I was running on squeeze and I needed to use, so I choose Gearman as a queuing system, and I needed a Python library to interface with it. Now, the really nice one is the one at the bottom. It's a very Pythonic library, and it's what you expect from a Python library. The top one is Python bindings for the C Library. It's a little bit rough, not as pleasant to use, but it was in Debian, so that's the one I picked. Now, the other one is actually in Weezy now, so I could switch. But the first one worked, so that was okay. But in practice, it turns out it's not such a big problem. Most of the Python stuff that you want to use is in Debian, to be honest. There's quite a lot of Python packages. The most common libraries are likely to be in Debian already, or in backboards sometimes. The other thing is, you can't use, that was pointed out to me, you can't actually use all the new features that are in Django 1.6 because you're running Django 1.4, for example. That's true. But I started on Django 1.2, because I started on Django 1.0, and then eventually 1.2 made it to squeeze, I upgraded that. Now I'm on 1.4, and it's great. There's lots of cool 1.4 features. I don't know yet what's in 1.6, so we'll see when I upgrade. So yeah, it's not a big problem for me. If I were used to doing this, then it might be a problem, but yeah. This was a little bit scarier, the upgrade from squeeze to Weezy. Because all of a sudden, I was upgrading from major versions of Apache, I think it was 2.0 to 2.2, and then Postgres, and Gearman, and Django. Django was going from 1.2 to 1.4, so skipping at one full major release. So it was scary because it was a big change. But it turned out that it was actually pretty easy. Django has really good documentation for how to move from one version to the next, and everything else in the system pretty much worked. But the thing is, it's a big upgrade because you're changing everything at once, so it's a big deal. You want to set aside a little bit more time than you think you're going to need. But it's really not that bad in practice. That's what I found. Maybe I'll change my mind when I upgrade to Jesse, but so far it's been pretty good. So overall, I would say that Libre Avatar is a really low maintenance service, which is great because it's a site project, and I don't want that to turn into an unpaid full-time job. So it's working out really well from a maintenance point of view. I have very little to do in terms of maintenance. Now, here are a couple of problems that I ran into. The first one is that I obviously optimize for sysadmin in this service. It's really great to sysadmin because everything is nice, packaged, and it gets updated automatically. But I did not optimize at all for developers. So it's a little bit tricky to get a development environment running, for example, because I fully take advantage of the fact that I'm running in Debian. I have cron jobs all over the place, shell scripts that do all sorts of things. I use different users to limit the potential. So for the things that run as root, they're really small scripts, and I've got different users to limit privileges.  It's documented, but it's a bear for new developers. It prevents drive-by contributions. What I've started to do is to turn my instructions into a script, a vagrant script that new contributors will be able to run. Ashish braves about vagrant, and he's convinced me that that should fix the problem. But basically, when you optimize for sysadmin, you get something that's quite hard for developers. You have to think about something else to make it easy for people to contribute to your project. The other problem that I ran into is that if you depend on something from the system, like a system package, then you're going to be exposed to their bugs. For example, jQuery, so this is libjs.jquery, had a bug where someone discovered, I think it was between Squeeze and Weezy, that we were shipping a minified copy of jQuery that was compiled by upstream into Debian, without rebuilding it ourselves. So that's of course an RC bug because we're not building from source and who knows who could be in what could be in there. So it was removed before Weezy. So in the Weezy version of that package, there's just two copies of the real source file. So that means that all of my users are getting the full version of jQuery which is not ideal, but because I'm relying on that system package as a dependency, I have no way of actually minifying it myself, because the minification happens in my build step for my package and jQuery is pulled in at install time. So I can't actually touch it. So the way to fix it would be to either do a backboard where I revert that change, stick that into my own repository, or to actually fix the bug in Debian and then get it pushed out in time. Now, this is fixed in jQuery, but it's just an example of how you could be affected by a bug in Debian basically. So you want to keep an eye on the dependencies in Debian, to make sure that you're not going to run into something major. So this is a slide that I made for Zach. It turns out that, so unattended upgrades for those who don't know, is basically a package that will run at getUpdate, at getUpgrade all the time. So some people may think that that's not a good thing, you should actually log into your box to keep it up to date.  So unattended upgrades is great, but the thing is Django has a habit of sometimes having security fixes that actually remove features because there's no way to make them secure. You run into this, right? So you can't just automatically install the package, the latest package that Luke pushed, because it might actually break itself. You have to read the changelog and or go take a look at the advisories that Django released, make sure that you're not using one of those features. In one of the ways, usually they don't remove the whole feature, but they'll disable part of it feature or something like that. Yes, hopefully it will make it to the news section for the package. But basically, you can't just blindly apply updates for Django. You have to test it before we go. Did someone think about using breaks? I don't know. So can we add that to breaks to sort of indicate that something bad might happen? It's kind of tricky because the feature is exploitable on your server. So it's kind of broken in a different way. It's not clear what the right answer is. Well, actually, so the right answer for me is that I use APTCRON instead of unintended upgrades. And that's an email that I will send you. Whenever it detects that there's a package that needs to be updated and hasn't been, it will email you. So every day until you actually fix it. And so that works quite well. At least you get a notification that you need to go in, update the package, test it, and then be happy. Another thing that was pointed out to me is that sometimes security updates are not always timely in Debian. Now, that's not to criticize Luke or anybody else that maintains one of my dependencies. But sometimes, there's lots of vulnerable stuff in the archive, and it takes time to go around and fix them all. And so it can be, sometimes it will be a couple of days, and sometimes weeks, especially if nobody notices, before the Debian package is updated. Now, there's kind of two cases. The first one is that you actually notice that a package is out of date in Debian, and there's been a security fix upstream. And you may notice because you're already following the RSS feed from upstream, or there's security newslet, or something like that, in which case, you can help out with backporting the fix or testing the fix. Because sometimes, for some of these things, the security team, for them, it's actually pretty hard to just go and fix a web application if they don't know how people use it. If it's like a web framework or something like that, and it'll have an easy way of testing it, then just offering to test it. To test their package would be a really good thing. But also, if you end up hacking a fix on your own machine, why not submit that fix to Debian? So if you do notice, that's what I would say. If you don't notice, because you can't possibly keep track of the 250 dependencies that I showed you on one of my first slides, well, then it's better late than never. If you can't keep up with all the upstream things that you have, or they don't all have security learning lists, or RSS feeds, or whatever, then it's much better to rely on system packages, because it only takes a single Debian user to file a security bug for a Debian to actually start the process of fixing it. So this is another problem. The approach that I took is kind of different from the recommended approach that web developers have nowadays, which is basically to push all your stuff to GitHub, have a bunch of proprietary services, connect to it, do all sorts of things, and test it, and commit to it, and whatever, take your code and push it to your server for you. I don't know how to fix that problem. I don't see it as a problem myself. But it is kind of weird to describe that approach to other people. Something to keep in mind. Finally, another thing that I ran into is that Libraratar has actually been picked up by a couple of community sites on the Fedora site. And that made me realize that the fact that Debian is such a central component of the whole infrastructure would be a little bit of a problem if a Fedora person came up to me and said, hey, I'd like to run a mirror. Can I help? Because I would be like, oh, I have to build an RPM for you now. Which I'm willing to do if I have a real offer for that.  But yeah, when you rely on system things like this, you are a little bit locked into Debian, which might be good for you, but in general. So is this approach realistic? Or am I just crazy? Because I'm basically ignoring conventional wisdom, conventional web-dev wisdom. Well, it turns out that a few hours after this blog post got published, so when they announced the first batch of talks that were accepted at Debian Conf, I got an email from a guy who runs these services. Sky DNS is a Russian service. And the safety DNS is the American equivalent. And what was really interesting about that email is that this guy has exactly the same approach as I picked on the Bravatar. And we never talked to each other before. He runs Django using Luke's package. All of the dependencies are system libraries. And he even packages the whole thing using Debs. And this is a real commercial website with paying customers and everything. So yeah, I mean, I realize that's anecdotal evidence. But there's at least two of us that are doing it that way. Yes? Three. Oh, there you go. All right, the anecdotal evidence is piling up. So what would be a good fit for that kind of approach? Well, I think if the site you're working on is not your full-time job, like it's a side project like the Bravatar is for me, that's really good, because it reduces your maintenance burden. And you don't want maintaining a service is kind of boring.  You want to do development or make the service better or something like this. You don't want to just keep up, read like, announce lists for dependencies and keep stuff up to date. So that would be my first sort of criterion. The second thing is I would say, if you want to use something like this, make sure that you're using a mature framework. Because for example, until recently, if you were using Node.js, you probably didn't want to run the Debian packages for them. Probably wanted to go and get it from source or WGet the script into sudo bash or something like this, as recommended. But basically, if you've got the Debian packages, there's too old. There was two versions ago of Node.js, and it changed so much that nothing would work. Django is actually really quite good for that. I'm sure when I upgrade from 1.4 to 1.6, it's not going to take me three days to actually figure out. So yeah, SiteProject is a really good example of something that I think works well with this. But the other one is related to what I used to do before my current job, which I was working for a catalyst, one of the sponsors this year's DevConf. And they're a consulting company, and they run lots of small websites for lots of clients, and lots of large websites as well. But the small client website kind of example is a really good one, because you don't want to spend much time working on their sites, because they don't have that much money, and they don't want to pay for stuff that's not visible, like security updates and things like that. So you want to minimize the amount of work that you'll have to do there. And if you have to deal with completely different code bases all the time, different versions of the Vansys, it becomes a nightmare really quickly. So I think it's worthwhile to do something like this. But whatever you do, remember this horrible list. And also remember that when you're bundling code inside your own application, you become responsible for them. If there's a security vulnerability in any of this stuff, we have to issue a new version of our application and deal with it. So pick the approach that you want. But I think it's worth considering the approach of limiting your options to help reduce the maintenance burden. Are there any questions? Yes, Enrico? Yeah, it's on. First of all, thank you. I subscribe to everything you said. I work in exactly the same way. It pays my bills. It makes me happy. I wrote a blog post about it that hit Planet Debian some time ago called DebOps, which I think is a good summary of the same idea. And one of the companies I work for is a services company that maintains about. We have more than 10 websites deployed. And we keep making new ones, all for small customers. And if we started to maintain the whole jumble of dependencies embedded in each and every single one of them, we'd be dead by now.  So we need to cut on what we can't afford to have dedicated sysadmins, one for each application. And one application could be application-serving, language learning games for Italian-speaking schools in the German-speaking part of Italy, which can't afford dedicated sysadmins. So it's definitely cost-effective. Development-wise, as long as the developers know and are saying it's not a big deal, because that's part of the specifications. And the developer that can't read specifications is not worth that name, in my opinion. It helps if upstream has some release policy. So yes, doable in Django. No, not doable in turbogears. Thank god that died. And we use backports a bit more. We're already on Django 1.6 that's in backports. It helps to reduce the size of upgrade jumps. And it's good that Python Django maintainers are doing an excellent job of maintaining it also on backports. So hands up. Yes, thank you, Luc. And for scripting maintenance things, I've written a Django app called Django Housekeeping that's currently in Debian, although testing, I think. So not stable, not backports. Sorry. Which allows every Django application to create management tasks that are run nightly. And that simplifies a lot all deployment, because then you just schedule one com job, and applications can do their own checks, backcups, housekeeping. And since nice report. Cool. What does it call again? Django Housekeeping. Django Housekeeping. All right. Coming soon in, Jesse. So I'm currently upstream of our web app, which is Debian Sources. I think I know my way around Python packaging, even so I've been doing that in a while. And I wrote the tutorial now to maintain mini install installation on people in the BNR. But still, I find that this scaffolding for doing all the automatic deployment as Debian packages is kind of very heavyweight. So right now, Debian Sources is deployed from the checkout of some specific deployment branch of the upstream Git repo on the machine. So I wonder if you have suggestions based on your experience on how we can make it easier to have make targets that just create Debian packages, push them to some repository somewhere, and avoid that everyone which have to be at the box essentially rewrite his own scripts and rather ad hoc. Yeah, I've got my own, that's cool. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I don't have a solution to it. But yeah, in my make file, that's where my packages get built. And I run the package build package at some point in there. And then I use fabric to update my repo sign everything and then actually it's a station to the machines and install it. So there's something that could be factorized and shared with others? That's a good question. I would have to look, I mean, I can show you what I'm doing and maybe you have ideas on how much of it you could use and then maybe that would help us decide whether or not there's things, parts that we can split out. So I'm a web developer, but some of my best friends are. And at work I'm responsible for the sort of sysadmin side of some web apps. And so we have this sort of discussion within the team where the web developers always want the latest version of everything, and I'm very lazy. So I don't want to end up having to maintain all these packages myself. So the compromise we tend to come to is if there are things that in Debbie and Winnie Newer version, I'll make a back port. And then for new bits of Django, because it's usually Django we use, I make some of my own packages and maybe I'll push them into new when I've got a bit more time. And that sort of works for us because it means hopefully, again, we're outsourcing as much this effort to Debian and not doing it all in-house. And we can contribute to Debian because we increase the set of Django libraries that are in Debian, but we still get enough of the stuff that my web dev colleagues are happy. And we do packaging for everything except the actual app itself, which we use Ansible to push out from a Git repository. And so, yeah, that's a sort of compromise between we'll only do things that are in stable and we'll just download any old junk off the internet. And that kind of works for us. Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. You don't have to go all the way necessarily. I mean, I went all the way because I'm the assessment for that service, and I want to minimize that as much as possible. And that's the trade-off that I made there. But if you have more people on your team, you can afford a little bit more maintenance, then you can actually have a sort of hybrid approach where you rely on Debian as much as possible, but then you backboard a few things. Well, I'll also just comment on a similar use case, not exactly the same because you're all doing development and just integrating bits that are already done. But I ended up adopting Drupal because, well, I have several Drupal sites at my university. And I built DH make Drupal that, well, allows me to convert any Drupal module into a Debian package. Of course, at the beginning, some people, me included, uploaded some of those modules to Debian. In the end, we decided, well, not to because the quality of the modules is not homogeneous. But well, yeah, I mean, of course, I have a huge repository of all the modules I've ever used. Even I can tell you it's a very dirty app repository because I don't purge the old versions. They're just piling up there and, well, taking space. But of course, also, the DH make Drupal is written in Ruby because I would not be able to standard-written PHP. But well, yeah, it's a huge time server for us. Yeah, and the interesting thing there is that you picked up the maintenance of Drupal because you were kind of doing that work already as part of your work. And that's a similar story to what Luke was telling me. He was using Django in his previous company, and they were using system libraries and stuff. So might as well maintain it for everyone in Debian. I'm sorry if I missed some of this answer at the beginning of the talk. But how, if at all, do you pass configuration information to the web app? And is that something you store in Debcon, like the database URL? I also noticed that you said that it's hard to live in a world of unintended upgrades. Perhaps what that means is it should be easier in your deployment plan to have a staging site, and then you have a separate VM that does the unintended upgrade. You'd send n% of the traffic there. If it crashes, you don't send traffic there. I wonder if you've thought about that, basically, also. Yeah, so the answer to your first question is yes, I use Debcon. That's where I put all of the stuff. So when I upgrade, if there's no extra questions, then nothing happens. In terms of having a staging site, run unintended upgrades, and then maybe run the full regression test suite, that would be great if I had a regression test suite. I have some tests, but it's mostly manual testing for a lot of it. I think that it would only be possible. There's not much point in me doing unattended upgrades if I'm doing manual testing to verify that it worked. I mean, just to respond to that briefly. One thing you could do is do the unattended upgrade on a different VM, send n% 10% of the traffic there. And if the error log has new exceptions, or rather, if the error log is non-zero at all, undo that. Yeah, so to outsource your testing to your live users. So I'm upstream for North Federal, which is a social networking platform between Ruby and Rails. And we have all the same issues. So we also target Weezy, or better, the latest Debian stable. And now we also have the problem of upgrading from one version of Rails to the next one, just as much pain for jungle. And that was just to share my pain with you. And then on the GitHub issue and on the opinion on proprietary services, something that works, for me at least, is using GitLab, which is free software and has everything you'd need from GitHub, like visibility for the repository, initial tracking system, and measure requests, and all this stuff. And there's a slight chance that's going to be in Debian for Jesse, but I wouldn't count on it. I'm just going to mention that the web devs I know often run into the situation of running something like WordPress and having a bunch of looking at some of the plugins and some of which are proprietary. And using the Debian archive to actually build your web app has the benefit of actually being compliant with the Debian free software guidelines, so that now you know you can actually deploy this and not have to worry as much about licensing, at least that's what I would assume. Right. Hi, anecdotally, I'm not a web app developer, but when I do develop web apps, this is more or less the same workflow that I use. So my question is, on one of your slides, you recommend to use a mature framework, and you also imply that you should also use a mature language. And you show app cache search results for Python X, many thousands of packages, or modules packaged in Debian. I was wondering what you or anyone else in the room thinks about newer, less mature languages that have a more aggressive, more tightly integrated language-specific package manager, such as the Go for any language. Yes, I mean, I can comment on Node.js because I was working on Node.js application. I looked at whether or not I could use the same approach there, and there was not enough stuff in the archive. I would have had to use NPM to install almost everything anyways. And at the time when I looked, and also the Node.js itself was not the right version. The version that was in Debian was kind of broken in lots of ways because it was a little bit early. So I suspect that the younger languages will have these sorts of problems. So it's probably not a good approach for those ones. But if some parts of your infrastructure are not as mature, say the framework is not that mature, then maybe you can still rely on the Python libraries for other stuff. You can have a hybrid approach if not everything is mature. But sometimes mixing things is a bit hard as well. Right, I noticed on your Node.js slide that your packages had version numbers. And in some cases, these newer programming languages don't have those.  Yeah, and hope for the best. And so are we regressing in this aspect? Well, so those things, I depend on any version of this library, tend not to work very well. Because if you try to NPM install it again, it will be totally different and probably broken if it's a new major version of it. So what I see a lot of web developers use is just hard code the exact versions that they want. And you missed the example from Open Hatch earlier, of your vendor directory. I started with that. But the vendor directory is the same thing. You basically hard code specific versions of packages. I think that's the common pattern. So it's not really an issue of later it will break. It will always work. But I might have vulnerable versions of things. This is a sort of discussion that I've heard repeatedly throughout this DevConf. We had it in the Java bof. We had it with the Haskell team the other day about how you deal with this sort of infrastructure that's growing up where people don't want to use a distribution. And they said they'll just throw random versions or whatever junk happened to be handy when they were writing that app together. And then the result is a maintenance nightmare. And I am primarily a sysmin. This sort of thing gets me really irate. Because you write it once, and then it gets hacked. And you're like, well, where did this library come from? It was dependent on by that thing. And it was just some random version. And there's no stable API. And I'm not quite sure. So far, we haven't seem to come to a good answer. Particularly if we take the approach of, well, this is like how the Node.js infrastructure works. So if you're going to do that on WN, then just download everything from Node.js, we never get to the point where, like the state we have with Django, where there's enough of Django in Debian that using it on Debian becomes practical. So there's a risk of a kind of vicious circle there. I'm not quite sure what the answer is. But this seems to be a common pattern that I've observed throughout this week. I wonder if ignoring the first year or two of a new framework is the solution. Because Node.js is starting to stabilize now. So it's a year or a decade. Yeah, I like to think that those pioneering things are good for a job in a startup, where I built a new website and then changed job. Someone else's problem. But then I think a good way to start is that we are here all saying, yes, I do that. Yes, that makes sense.  And I told them things that I should not repeat because of the code of conduct of the conference. But I've been in RC channels where I look like the weirdo out there. And what then I told myself, I'm probably the only one that has a job in here. Sort of like the distribution pride, if you want. But coming out and saying, I'm doing this, it makes a lot of sense to me. It's something you should consider as long as you want to develop something that's maintainable over time and not just build the thing, put it out there, say, I've done it and moved to something else. And I hope to get acquired quickly. So you don't have to maintain it very long. Anyways, I think that was all the time that we had. So thank you very much.


Hey Aloha and welcome to Mina, Marco and me on Energy. I'm Stan Osserman, sitting in for J. Fidow, my twin brother, on my lunch hour. So if you're having trouble distinguishing between me and Jay, I'm the one with facial hair. He's five by five, I'm five and a half by five and a half, but you know, hey, we're both energy guys, so who cares? So my co-host today and I guess my regular host on this show are giving us details on making renewable energy a reality and it's Mina Merida and Marco Mangelsdorf coming to us from the beautiful town of Hilo. The title of our show today is Cost-Effective Renewables or Renewables at All Costs and Mina and Marco are going to help me sort through the way ahead as we try to make renewables the prime source of energy in Hawaii. So welcome via the wonders of technology Mina and Marco. I'm glad I get to sit in here and chat with you because I love energy stuff and I'm looking forward to our hundred percent renewable here, but some recent happenings in the PUC is what we're really focused on and we're first going to talk about the Huonua over on the Big Island. So Marco, why don't you kind of fill us in on what you know it's pretty late-breaking so I know you're still sorting through some of the details on the Huonua projects over there on the Big Island. Yeah, I'd be happy to. First of all, thank you so much Stan for filling in for Jay and greetings to you on this sunny noon here from beautiful Hilo and I'll always fantastic to be back with my dear friend Mina Merida. So yes we had some pretty big news from the PUC on Friday when they announced that they were approving a power purchase agreement between Hawaii Electric Light Company Helco and Huonua. Huonua has been trying to revivify the power plant which for years and years was Hilo, Hilo Coast Power Company, that burned coal up until a number of years ago when they shut down and Huonua was planned was to restart the plan using Big Island produced biomass in the form of eucalyptus trees which grow along the Makua coast and the decision in order that came out on Friday was essentially an approval stamp of approval from the Commission of the modified and amended power versus agreement which was submitted to the Commission only just two some months ago back in May so they really did it in record time as far as reviewing and coming to a decision and their decision to approve essentially was based on their belief that the levelized cost of energy, the levelized cost of electricity to Big Island electric repairs would actually go down a little a little amount over the course of I believe the 30 year term of the power purchase agreement so in a nutshell they saw enough upside or more upside than downside to bring more renewable energy online here for the Big Island terms of power generation and we're willing to accept that according to the projections proposed or given to them where electric rates would actually go up would go up over the first I believe 11 years of the contract they were persuaded that over the 30 year length of the contract the rates or the rate pairs would actually go down a bit and again that's with a full understanding that the cone of uncertainty in terms of projecting costs beyond a few years once you start getting to five beyond five ten fifteen let alone 30 years there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty in terms of what energy costs will be at that time but all that being said using whatever reasonable assumptions they they used they projected that or they decided that on the whole this was a an agreement of power purchase agreement that was going to be more beneficial than detrimental to Big Island rate pairs and and this plan is is that the one in Onaka no you're you're thinking of huma kua energy partners or HGP that is a fossil fuel burning plants if I believe the largest generation single generation generator on the island and that is in Onaka and that's owned by a mainland company by the name of Arclight so he looked coast power company now who on Noah is in Pepe chaos so it's it's not as far as on a car it's a I don't know 15 minutes just outside of Hilo okay so it's still close enough to all the trees because they're mostly in the huma kua area not too far from Hilo and the power generation is actually closer to most of the users then correct okay so Mina what do you get from the who on the approval are you optimistic that they're gonna be able to stick with pricing me now are you still there you're cutting in and out of me too okay could you tell us what what you think about the approval by the PUC I mean we're just we both just got copies of the decision and order this morning and within the last hour so been looking at it real quickly I guess some of my concerns is that the original PPA that was approved had a low low fixed cost component and a high variable that was to the advantage of the rate pair and low risk to the rate pair and with this new revised amended revised PPA there's a high fixed component and a low variable which is higher risk for the rate pair how does that I've gotten out of this so far okay Mina you've got the time on the PUC how would how would it change like that come in at kind of like the 11th hour I don't think it was so much the 11th hour this has always been the proposal and I think that's what the concern coming from the consumer advocate was that you know you you're shifting the risk from the developer to the rate pair by by it's hot high cost high fixed cost component and so you know my gut feeling tells me this is a very favorable to the rate pair overall hmm well maybe they can switch to albiza trees and make the rate go down I'm not sure because they got plenty of those on the big island too yeah well I tell you what let's switch gears and talk about the power supply improvement plans that the utility companies have also gotten approved recently I mean what do you think about what's come out in those so far yeah what do you think of the PSIP's that have recently been approved okay I'm not sure why it's cutting out on I don't hear any issues with you you know folks are coming through just fine for me but I was asking about the PSIP's that have just been approved about two weeks ago by the public utilities Commission and if we can get any comments from Marco why don't you start off with your thoughts on the PSIP sure I mean it's still of course a work in progress I mean this decision was handed down on July 14th so two plus weeks ago and the the Commission I think was suffering from some degree to a piece of fatigue and that this process had been the piece of process had been underway and going back to when Nina was chair of the the Commission going back to 2014 and the the Commission approved the the last iteration of the PSIP's with a number of notable caveats because I think that it was it was time to move forward one way or the other and they commended the HECO companies on their more near-term focus which I think is worthy of commendation and can interestingly something that hasn't received much play in the media aside from a piece in the Pacific Business News day or so after the the DNO on the power supply improvement plan there hasn't been much discussion of what the projected increase in electric rates will be over the next five and ten years across HECO MECO and in helco service territories and and they're not insignificant they're anywhere from for helco if I remember correctly is 25 percent 25 percent increase in in rates just over the next five years and 42 some odd percent over the next ten years and the Commission seems to be clearly concerned about about race going up and then Chairman Randy Oase has been quoted durochitoli over the past month as being focused on the lowest cost of energy bringing on the new generating sources generation sources being brought on especially renewables of course had the lowest possible cost that's why it is head kind of head scratching to me that's the same Commission would turn around and approve the who knew of our purchase agreement at an all-in-cost it is that is 22 cents a kilowatt hour so I'm a little bit puzzled to press more than a little bit about how there can be this focus stated focus repeated focus on lowest possible costs and yet the this recently approved PPA for who knew I is not at the lowest possible cost but that said it's been having quickly along with Mina trying to digest this the DNO that we just received in the past hour so the Commission makes clear towards the end of the DNO that the Commission concludes that the levelized rate should not be the sole factor to be used in determining whether projects should be approved so I mean which makes perfect sense of course that it shouldn't be the sole factor so then they also put a benefit on the fact that the biomass of being burned in a combustion plant provides firm dispatchable renewable renewable energy and will provide quote ancillary services as well so I guess to kind of try to tie this in these two decisions with the the PSIP and the DNO is that in principle the desire is to bring on the lowest cost possible new renewable energy generation but in practicality that is not the sole determinant and then and nor should it be nor should it be but it just is kind of wild that you have this juxtaposition of two in order so over the course of two weeks one issued on the 14th which is the PSIP you know and then the other issued on the 28th this last Friday which is the new decision in order and it's kind of interesting to see how the lines either disconnect or or converge. Hey Marco do you think that might be tied to the base load of power versus intermittent renewable in some way? No doubt in my mind that there is a benefit that should be factored in in terms of providing a premium for being able to to have firm power which biomass can do and which solar PV with storage at this point is not available to provide I mean the key the folks like you see are pushing the boundaries with their battery storage for this the plant that was installed by Fuller City in Tesla and also the new one going in by AES but that's dispatchable power of five or six hours which is not the same as firm power over a 24-hour period so I get that there is a benefit certainly this should be quantified for having firm dispatchable renewable energy but to what extent it's justified to approve you know it's a subjective determination how much of a benefit how much of a premium should firm dispatchable renewable energy demand in terms of remuneration to the the power provider so I'm kind of like really like here would mean that. And I tell you we're gonna take a quick break here and come when we come back we'll get Mina's take on on the PSIP. All right we'll be back in 60 seconds. One I'm DeSoto Brown the co-host of Human Humane Architecture which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. and with the show's host Martin Despeng we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well so join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Hey welcome back to Mina, Marco and me I'm not Jay today I'm Stan but I'm like Jay almost as good but he's smarter better looking more talented anyway thanks so for being with Mina and Marco and me and we left off talking about the power improvement plans that were just approved by the PUC and Marco gave us his take on it now we're gonna get Mina's view on this on the issue. You know somehow I'm feeling that the Huanua decision is sort of counter intuitive to what the PSIP decision was where the commission appeared to be very concerned about impact to the rate pair cost impacts the rate pair the need for competitive pricing and also the need for flexible generation and this this decision doesn't appear to support any of those findings in the PSIP and what's really curious to me is you know the a facility like Huanua wasn't even analyzed in the PSIP so that's a real head scratcher for me but but I think again you know what is needed on a big island given that the big island has so much renewable base low generation in the form of geothermal for example and and really good wind resources is that what it really needs is some kind of storage or more flexible generation and this Huanua project being steam generators doesn't give them the that flexibility that's really needed in the system so those are some of the quick thoughts I have on how does this particular decision fits into the PSIP and all the stated concerns in the PSIP. Do you think it's possible to talk to some of the folks on the PUC or these I mean these are public hearings generally but the decision-making and final decisions are they as transparent as we'd like so that you can actually discern what their thought process was in approving these and you know like you say it just seems like it's a little bit out of sync with the most recent approval. Yeah you know a lot of this deals with the contract financials which is being done with confidential the review of those kinds of information is confidential so there's not much transparency here on how they arrive in their decision that these costs were reasonable. Okay well as an outsider to this show I'm gonna I'm gonna stretch myself a little bit and say there was a bill that was trying to get through the legislature last session or maybe this session before and it kind of shed some light on just what you talked about what's in the contract and what's in the contract is is pretty much confidential and when I was on Maui I asked the folks on Maui how much they were curtailed every day by Miko and they said you know we don't want to say particularly but it was around 20 and 30 percent every day and I said why can't you just take that power and like make hydrogen and do you know take that curtailed power and do something else with it and they said we can't but they wouldn't tell me why when you get down to it a lot of that stuff's in the contract that none of us can see and that's why I'm saying I think the transparency issue here in some of that I understand the need for privacy in the contracting side and and you know but it seems to be getting in the way of some of the decisions that are being made well what would you say to that Mina I I know when the hydrogen issue came up before the legislature I mean I was still the chair in being able to use excess power production for hydrogen I think some of my concerns at that time as a regulator was you know how how much of this would be pushed off to the rate here and subsidized by the rate here when it goes to other uses other than the electrical electrical system so you know that that but those are issues that need to be discussed and we can work through but you know definitely with the amount of comfort internal information being passed back and forth that that that is a concern on how decisions are made well about Marco have you seen this as you know something to be concerned with where there's certain things in the contract as the PUC is looking at approving or not approving where you'd kind of like to see more transparency to the public on some of these details in the contract that would de-mystify some of the decisions a PUC makes well I'm not in the same type of position in terms of having the expertise to really comment too much on that and again based on a really quick read of the 60s some on-page dnl decision in order for who onua seems to me rather transparent in terms of the commission's rationale their discussion of the various parties positions from who onua helco and the consumer advocate that I don't see any lack of transparency there I mean there is stuff confidential to the docket which is not part of the public record and I guess I'm a position I don't know what I don't know as far as whether that's material in terms of making a judgment from the public's perspective the commission noted that there were 700 public comment 700 public comments on who onua so clearly there was a lot of public interest a number of legislators got involved and gave their their thumbs up to to moving forward so there was there's been quite a bit of a public discussion and one of the reasons apparently that the the commission thought that this would be an okay thing to do and they note that in the decision order that the the previous power purchase agreement that became essentially an all-in-void after who onua was unable to meet a number of milestones and the original PPA was canceled but that all in cost of the original PPA in twenty seventeen dollars was twenty eight point six cents a kilowatt hour twenty eight point six cents so I think that they must have played some factor that this amended and revised PPA which they did improve did approve was coming in a twenty two point one cents a kilowatt hour which is clearly a good chunk less than twenty eight point six so again to go back to your question in terms of transparency I mean at least as far as this particular decision issued on Friday it seems to me that it's it's as transparent as I can tell okay I'm gonna we would need to get on to the next topic but for a quick a quick check on the process Mina does the consumer advocate get a chance to see the contract details if the rest of the public can't or is it still kind of outside of his purview the consumer advocate has access to all confidential materials okay great that's good well if we could do we've got a couple minutes left and if we could talk a little bit about the energy PV projects here on a while that we're also approved any comments there Marco yeah last week was a big week in terms of decisions from the Commission so prior to who knew on Friday dear to prior the Commission approved three utility scale solar projects for a while who that had been in play for several years prior to that these were three projects totaling about 110 megawatts 110 megawatts worth of solar generation on a while who that were originally awarded to a company called son Edison son Edison which was a global company in terms of renewable energy development today they declared bankruptcy last year they collapsed into themselves and Hawaiian Electric was concerned about moving forward with son Edison or successor company to son Edison son Edison today was playing in a bankruptcy court so they essentially Hawaiian Electric heco canceled or decided not to move forward with those projects with son Edison or the the want to be successors to those projects and project developers and Hawaiian Electric took a fair amount of flak from multiple parties for we're canceling that project and not moving forward and now I happen to think that their decision was was the right thing at the right time and I believe that decision has been vindicated in that they are moving forward with another big energy development company called NRG based in Texas to go ahead and move forward with these three projects at pricing reduced pricing compared to the original son Edison contract between 10.4 and 11.4 cents a kilowatt hour which were all these for the three projects cheaper than the original son Edison project so I think it's a win-win for both Hawaiian Electric and more importantly a win for a Wahoo ratepayers who will be getting cheaper power from from solar that is a that is a really good price I gotta agree so Mina you got the last word for the last minute go ahead Mina only a win if if there's economic dispatch right that that these cheaper PPAs can come online and not be curtailed by for example the net meter projects which the utility will have no control over to curtail right yeah so I mean I mean that there are some technical challenges here because where we have keeper power here because it's curtailable or probably get curtailed by the net meter projects in the long run unless there's some way to control the net meter projects and move more towards economic dispatch so you're saying that these 110 megawatts worth of generation when they come online that there will or maybe times during the day when the output of that 110 max will be something less than that max based on the need the system operators need to throttle it back because of largely beyond their control NEM systems which are feeding to the if eating you the grid is that am I interpreting you correctly yeah yeah I just hope that the system does what's what's right for the ratepayers and doesn't just lean too far towards indiscriminate you know curtailing of power or limiting what what those companies can do if they have curtailed power maybe letting them look at other ways to to use that power and generate revenue whether it store it and put it back in the grid or whatever but anyway I'd like to thank Mina and Marco for today's show this has been a complex topic with lots of personalities and moving parts and there's obvious a lot more to work to do and it'll take a bunch of experienced folks like you to actually help us get there so mahalo to you and the studio staff here at think tech Hawaii Ray Sangelang the broadcast engineer and floor manager Robert McLean and thank you so much for watching think tech thanks Marco thanks Mina we'll talk to you next Monday


For the CircuitPython Parsec today, I wanted to show another way to time things that's even more precise than the last one I showed. And this is with using the ticks inside of the supervisor library. So these are similar to the way that we use time monotonic, but even more accurate. So what you can see here, if you look at my console, right now when I run this code, it tells me that basically zero time is elapsed because all I'm doing is checking the time and then printing out the time. So what I'm going to do now instead is I'm going to make one print statement. So you can see my program imports the supervisor library. It checks what's the current supervisor ticks milliseconds. It then is going to do something, going to have it print a line. And then it's going to stop, create a variable that's the end time. And then I'm going to print out the one subtracted from the other and turn it into a decimal, which is a little easier to see. So if I save this, you can see it now takes 0.001, I believe milliseconds to do this. Now by contrast, I'm going to import a fairly robust library. I'm going to import NeoPixel. Watch when I hit save. Now you can see that takes 20 something times more time. Now you may not always need to time such precise things, but one of the interesting things about using these ticks is that they can give you more accurate time over long periods of time, such as running a thing for days. This tends to stay a little more accurate than some of the other methods. And so that is how you can use ticks to time things in CircuitPython. And that is your CircuitPython Parsec.


When you get to the linear metaphor, the value of the script is written, which is in the workbook of A Course in Miracles. Basically, the value is, is you start to open to just that sense of the witness self or the watcher. Because you start to realize that the whole thing of destiny, the whole thing of that you can't really change the script. What that does is it points you into watching your thoughts, mind training, attentiveness, and changing your mind about your mind. That's where the full focus and effort needs to be. Also, once you start to, I mean the value of the script is written is basically saying that everything that you perceive as the past. And if everything's the past, and your only responsibility is to release the past, isn't that fun? Pretty soon you're going to be, if you start to follow this course, you're going to be what? Unambitious. Very unambitious. I mean extremely unambitious. They talk about in America that you gotta have ambition, fight, strive, struggle, achieve, accumulate, win, dominate, conquer. Then Jesus is coming and going, nah. It's not any of that. He's just saying, I need to do nothing. Simply do this, be still. This is a mystic mind that's saying, aren't you glad to know that the ego made all this up? And aren't you glad to know that you can't change it? You can just change the way you look at it. It's really glorious when you start to think about it. Think about all the stress and pressure of trying to make the world a better place. Trying to make your life better. Trying to get into self-improvement. What is the self that can improve? Is it the Christ? The spirit need to have self-improvement classes? The spirit need to go to workshops and seminars and take things over and over and over and over. No, it's the ego. It's part of this self-improvement thing. You have to somehow make a better self. Talk about a hamster wheel. That's an unending thing. Am I smart enough? Am I rich enough? Am I skilled enough? Am I worthy enough? You can see it's just like a trick to keep the mind distracted from the stillness. Be still and know that I'm God. That's the beauty of it. How simple it is. It's more like a surrender. I feel more like John Lennon. Hope one day you'll join us. And the world will live as one. Because it is as one in a healed perception. It's more like when we were talking with Greg that day about the flow and letting go of the doer. It's like you do relax into being done through. It doesn't so much matter what it looks like. You could be picking weeds or mowing the grass or taking a walk or whatever. There's no special forms. It doesn't take a special form where you have to say, I've got to find the special task, the special form that God wants me to do. So God will be so proud of me that I did it. No, no, no, no. It's simpler than that. It's just relaxing. That's what they said. That's like an example of how there's a tip or whatever that's made and it seems to affect a change in that. But all of that was still part of this prearranged script. It's all encompassing. That's the destiny. In the sense that it's all the past and the only way that the mind is freed is by freeing itself from the belief in choice in form. In other words, the choice to take a different route. The choice to put the code on or take the code off or do something different. Even there's a great Star Trek episode where they keep coming and they're kind of like in this time warp loop and they keep coming to this point where the ship blows up and then they go back through the loop again and they're almost like, haven't we done this before? And they keep making the same moves and the ship blows up. And then it goes back around and they're like, something seems really familiar about this and the ship blows up. And they start to go, hmm, what are we going to do here? So they, I think data, they point data, they tell him, watch out for these, they put kind of plant clues for themselves. So then they loop back around.  But once again, those are choices in form that seem to have a significant impact, like the ship blowing up or the ship not blowing up or the president being wounded or not wounded. But what the course is doing, and the course is saying, is a section in the course called The Real Alternative where he's saying all of the roadways of the world lead to death. In other words, it's what I've been talking about this whole thing, like in starting off with Time Traveller's Wites that it's all hypotheticals, it's all potential and it's all simultaneous. And when the mind is in the state of the ego, it can seem to pick different outcomes in form. President getting wounded or not. I was wondering if it was an instance of collapsing time in some way. What happened? The miracle seems to collapse time and rearrange perception, but ultimately where all this is heading is just to go to realize that it's all the past. And once you have that awareness and it's all the past, then your mind obviously will sink into a stillness because you won't try to fix or change the past, rearrange the past, make a better past, make a better configuration of an illusion. You see, that's taking one notch up to what we're talking about is enlightenment and self-realization. And it's beautiful because in that sense it is the witness self, it's like a sense of watching with no sense of trying to make it different. So that was, I mean, I've read the course for many years, but I think one of the most profound lines that really, sometimes you really just get it with a particular line. There was that line, seek not to change the world. Seek rather to change your mind about the world. That was huge. It was like a ton of bricks falling out of all my days of activism and protesting things and opinions telling people, no, you got it wrong. No, we have to save the whales and we have to save, save, save, save, save. And Jesus is like, your mind needs salvation. The world is just a big distractive device so you'll take all your energy and try to make a change where you can't have a change. The script is written and it's all part of a prearranged plan. Why am I wasting my mind's energy trying to change the world? You see how that logic goes.