April 24, 2020

Trump

Trump owes millions to state-owned bank in China https://www.salon.com/2020/04/24/newly-revealed-financial-records-show-trump-owes-millions-to-state-owned-bank-in-china-report/

trump will rip off anyone even if he says he’ll pay https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/i-sold-trump-100000-worth-of-pianos-then-he-stiffed-me-a7335951.html

March 18, 2018

Pinterest invades google

Pinterest is awful.

This has been growing for years. Here is the typical situation I think more people run into than you think. When you are looking for an image on google image search and find what you are looking for by thumbnail, and click through just to be taken to pinterest.com. Once you land here, you do not see any fragment of what you came for. Instead, you are confronted with a sign up page.

December 6, 2017

screenshot

Screenshot is a simple python script that has evolved over time. It started out as a shell script which called import -window root screenshot.png and has evolved into a full featured application.

Github page - https://github.com/sigmonsays/screenshot/blob/master/README.md

The point of this post is to demonstrate how to setup screenshot and how to use it to achieve a few things

Installation

git clone https://github.com/sigmonsays/screenshot.git
sudo apt-get install -y xclip imagemagick
cd screenshot
sudo pip install .

Configuration

November 16, 2017

why use the go programming language?

I have been a go programmer before go 1.0 was released, I think that brings me back to beginning writing go code around 2011. as en exercise I wrote a simple daemon to handle some backend work where concurrency was key and have enjoyed developing it for quite some time. It replaced a python process where many actors needed to operate on a workqueue. This daemon is actually still in produciton today =P

October 16, 2016

random musings

Would you rather fight 100 duck sized horses or one horse sized duck?

Bill Murray weights in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THUGHEJjjGc

September 20, 2016

golang FAQ

Sections

Network Programming in go
Installing golang tools
Errors are values

Network programming in Go

http://whispering-gophers.appspot.com/talk.slide#1

installing golang tools

is there any way i could install my go binaries wherever i want using go tools?

answer

typical solution is to install tools in a different GOPATH

export GOPATH="$HOME/go"
export PATH="$GOPATH/bin:$PATH"
go get -u golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports

The only portions you should add to your shell environment (ie ~/.bash_profile) is just the PATH portion. Do not export GOPATH by default as a security measure. Any remote shell exploit could in theory instruct the go tool to install and run arbitrary code!

April 11, 2016

hitler uses docker

video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivpCKEiQOQ

transcript
-------------------------------

we pushed the images to dockerhub, then used docker-compose to deploy to the cluster

we mounted data volumes on these nodes

and linked app container here

finally we've updated the DNS records


hitler: so we're running 20 containers on every node now. when can we get rid of the excess servers?

mein fuhrer...

the kernel... 
A 3rd party container caused a panic...

we've lost 70% of the cluster and the data volumes

.... hitler loses his shit ....

hitler: if you never used docker in production, leave the room now

hitler: isolation my ass!

hitler: what were you thinking?

hitler: who the hell uses public containers from docker hub?

hitler: for all you know they were made by russian hackers!

hitler: you might as well use `curl | sudo bash`

hitler: you think everything in public rpeo is secure because it's OSS?

hitler: you're a bunch of node.js hipsters that just HAVE to install everything you read on hacker news!

but docker allows us to run our applications anywhere!

hitler: you use a VM just to run docker on your laptop!

mein fuhrer, docker-machine uses a lightweight VM!

hitler: do you hear yourself? why do we need docker if we're running a VM?

hitler: a container inside a container!!!

hitler: you archived a whole linux O/S then used CoW storage becaues it's too big

hitler: Just so you can deploy a 10MB go Binary!

hitler: Dont even talk to me about resource constraints

hitler: all that cgroups black magic and it still can't stop a simple fork bomb!

hitler: and if the database needs all the resources on the server, how exactly will docker allow you to run more programs on it?

hitler: before docker, I just picked the right size VMs. 

hitler: Suddenly people talk to me about datacenter efficiency and "hyperconvergence"

hitler: everybody thinkst they're google!

hitler: you don't even run your own machines anymore!

hitler: people run docker on GCE, in VM instances that run in linux containers on Borg!

hitler: people even think docker is configuration management

hitler: they think docker solves everything!

hitler: even microsoft has containers now

hitler: i'm moving everyone to windows!

dont cry, you can run bash on windows 10 now

hitler: docker is supposed to have better performance

hitler: yet that fucker userland proxy is slower than a 28.8k modem

hitler: and for what

hitler: just bind on port 0

hitler: even enterprises want to run docker now and they still have red hat 5 installed

hitler: you idiots think docker will help your application scale

hitler: use openstack for all I care

March 2, 2016

programming exercise

I heard from a friend about an interesting interview question that I thought would be easy.

The problem

the goal of this program is to find the shortest number of stickers used to make a another word given that you have thousands of stickers

for instance, with the word “WPENGINE” printed on them to make for example “WWW” would take 3 and another example is “WINE” would take 1.

The programs logic is really quite literal and was enjoyable to write.

February 9, 2016

enlightenment

Update: August 2019

I have switched to i3wm (for some time now) exclusively due to its speed and lightweight. I’ll have to write a post about that experience some time.

e20

enlightenment has been my window manager of choice for a very long time maintly because of its speed. I used to run window maker and then fluxbox before I made the switch to enlightenment (0.16 at the time iirc).

January 31, 2016

paste, an hour long project

I’m sure anyone who has been on IRC or any type of chat understands the concept of a no paste service.

It has always been bothersome to me that any paste, or “no paste” command line client has to be needlessly complex. Some i’ve tried to use in the past have required installing ruby gems which I despise. So to scratch an itch, I wrote my very own which requires nothing more than curl. Its code is on github [1] and the client is rediculously simple: