For e.g. https://janusworx.com/blog/using-hugo-variables-to-help-with-mailto-links-in-hugo/ …
was now at, https://janusworx.com/work/using-hugo-variables-to-help-with-mailto-links-in-hugo/

After searching a bit, I found that Hugo supported aliases. For me, it would redirect the original /blog path url to its new location
Ass I had to do, was add an aliases: ["/blog/old-post-slug"] line to each post’s metadata.¹
Line 4 in the snippet below shows, what I added to fix the post above.

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---
title: "Using Hugo Variables to Help With Mailto Links in Hugo"
date: 2024-05-30T18:17:35+05:30
aliases: ["/blog/using-hugo-variables-to-help-with-mailto-links-in-hugo"]
categories: ["work"]
tags: [100WordHabit, Dgplug, Hugo]
summary: Shortcodes! Hugo Variables in Shortcodes!
---

I did not want to do this by hand for 800+ posts.
One stroke of luck for me, was that I let Hugo use its default behaviour of generating url slugs from the file names. So even if the category slugs had changed (from /blog to /work or from /blog to /personal), the url slugs would stay the same. Which meant, I could whip up a script to run through all my markdown posts and add the alias line.
So I did.

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from pathlib import Path

INPUT_FOLDER = Path("old-posts-folder")
OUTPUT_FOLDER = Path("modified-posts-folder")

for each_file in INPUT_FOLDER.iterdir():
    with open(each_file, 'r') as file_to_read:
        alias_derived_from_file = each_file.stem
        contents_as_list = file_to_read.readlines()
        contents_as_list.insert(3, f"aliases: [\"/blog/{alias_derived_from_file}\"]\n")
        with open(Path(OUTPUT_FOLDER, each_file.name), 'w+') as file_to_write:
            file_to_write.writelines(contents_as_list)

It takes all the posts from my old folder, inserts the alias line and puts them into a new folder.² In essence, take each file, figure out the url slug from the file name, read in the contents as a list, insert my alias at position 3 (fourth actually. zero based indexing) of the list (below the title and date) and then write it all out to a new file.

I ran it, published the site and then went to check on the old urls with bated breath.
Hurrah, it all worked :)

I want to slowly increase my French vocabulary, so I got this comprehensive frequency word deck from Shared Decks section of the Anki website.

I keep forgetting to look it up during the day, after my morning session and the only way I can get those stubborn words¹ to stick in my mind, is if I keep doing the deck 4–5 times a day.

I know! With all my newfound devops/python skills, could I figure out a way to remind myself to do it? Turns out I can! :)

I already use Pushover, to get notified of darn near anything.²
And I read enough of Anki’s add-on documentation to know I could whip something up.
So a bit of searching on the net, a bit of jiggery pokery with Claude, and some spelunking through Anki’s source code and forums later, I present to you … anki-push-u!³

As long as your Anki’s running, this little add-on will find cards due, at the interval you tell it to, and then notify you wherever you have Pushover running!
No more forgetting due cards!

Find the add-on and instructions over at Github.

My mother gets devotional songs and sermons on cds, which I rip to MP3 files and then dump on her phone for her.¹
She listens to them all the time, and now three of her friends want to do the same too.
I thought of just sticking them in my self hosted Jellyfin instance,² but then I realised, all of them have erratic, slow internet. So the idea of self hosting a podcast feed really appealed to me.

So I quickly used Feedgenerator in conjunction with Tinytag, to whip up a script that’d help me do just that. The code’s up on Github, if you want to go install and play with it yourselves.

Here’s a quick walk through derb.py.³

Setting up house

We set up a place to accept a path containing the files. The feed will ultimately be placed as a feed.xml in the same folder as well We then walk through the folder (after a really basic sanity check) and gather all the files into a list.
The base_url is where the feeds (along with the audio) will be served from.

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base_url = "https://ab.janusworx.com"

book_folder = input("Paste path to audiobook folder here: ")
book_out_path = base_url + (book_folder.split("/")[-1])
file_list = os.walk(book_folder)

# Do a basic check on the validity of the path we get, 
# before we build the audio file list.
try:
    all_files = (list(file_list)[0][2])
except IndexError as e:
    print(f"\n\n"
          f"---\n"
          f"ERROR!: {e}\n"
          f"Have you typed in the right path?\n"
          f"---\n")
    sys.exit("Quitting script!")
audio_files = []
for each_file in all_files:
    each_file = Path(each_file)
    if each_file.suffix in ['.mp3', '.m4a', '.m4b']:
        audio_files.append(str(each_file))
audio_files = sorted(audio_files)

Creating a feed

We now go about the business of setting up the feed proper.
To begin with, we grab the first file we can get our grubby paws on, and create a TinyTag object that’ll give us a lot of metadata. (If there isn’t any, we quit.)
Oh, and by the way, how do I know what data I’d need to create a feed? I just cribbed everything from the Feedgenerator’s excellent documentation. I also looked at the widely linked to, RSS reference page for clarification if I got confused.

We then, instantiate create a feedgenerator object along with the podcast extension.
Following which, we supply the feed a title, an id⁴, feed author details, a language, podcast category and description.

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# Setup a feed
## Grab feed metadata from the first audio file
feed_metadata_file = TinyTag.get(Path(book_folder, audio_files[0]))

## Grab title from metadata file.
## At the same time, break out if there isn’t any.
if not feed_metadata_file.album:
    sys.exit("\n---\nStopping feed creation.\n
		Setup audio file metadata with a tag editor")
feed_title = feed_metadata_file.album

## Creating feed instance
audio_book_feed = FeedGenerator()
audio_book_feed.load_extension("podcast")

## Setting up more stuff on the feed proper
audio_book_feed.id(base_url)
audio_book_feed.title(feed_title)
audio_book_feed.author({"name": "Jason Braganza", "email": "feedback@janusworx.com"})
audio_book_feed.link(href=f'{book_out_path}', rel='self')
audio_book_feed.language('en')
audio_book_feed.podcast.itunes_category('Private')
audio_book_feed.description(feed_title)

Adding episodes and writing out the file

After which it’s then a matter of looping through that audio file list we created and adding them as entries to the feed object we created.
Once again we grab the metadata from each file, using Tinytag, and then set each feed entry’s details (title, id and enclosure).
I’ve hardcoded the mime types, since I know I only have two basic type of audio files. If you don’t know what kind of audio, you might be serving, the mimetypes-magic package should help.
Finally we write it all out to a file.

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# Loop the file list and create entries in the feed

for each_file in audio_files:
    each_file_metadata = TinyTag.get(Path(book_folder, each_file))
    episode_file_path = Path(each_file)
    episode_suffix = episode_file_path.suffix
    episode_mime_type = 'audio/mpeg' if episode_suffix == '.mp3' else 'audio/x-m4a'
    episode_title = each_file_metadata.title
    episode_size = str(each_file_metadata.filesize)
    episode_link = f"{book_out_path}/{each_file}"
    
	audio_episode = audio_book_feed.add_entry()
    audio_episode.title(episode_title)
    audio_episode.id(episode_link)
    audio_episode.enclosure(episode_link, episode_size, episode_mime_type)

# Write the rss feed to the same folder as the source audio files
audio_book_feed.rss_file(f"{book_folder}/feed.xml")

Serving

Once done, I moved it all to my trusty Pi, which runs barebones Nginx with a single bare page, protected by basic auth.

Update (2023-09-15): Guess I’m using it for myself too, now 😂

I could go learn one of those languages. Sure. That’s an option.
And I see no problem doing it for other needs (like if I’m working with a group that uses said language) or for my career’s sake or just for being a polyglot.

But when I write for myself, I’d rather stick to Python.
Its mental model fits my brain. I find writing Python joyful.

So what’s a boy to do?
Since I was writing CLI applications, I went and looked for how to write Python CLIs and I found argparse and Typer and Click and I was confused. They didn’t seem to give me my executable. They had all sorts of other powerful features, but the one I wanted.
And I went looking some more. And the penny dropped.

What I wanted, wasn’t a way to build a CLI, (although that is what I was writing).
What I wanted, was a way to bundle my environment into an executable.
What I wanted, I learned, was a way to freeze my code.

More searching led to Nuitka, PyOxidizer, PyInstaller and their ilk.
I went with Nuitka, because that is what I found first and what I found was dead simple

python -m nuitka --static-libpython=no mastodon-to-moi.py

and boom!
I got myself an executable mastodon-to-moi.bin!
And then I got greedy and did a mastodon-to-moi.bin --help and figured, that’s where the cli/tui frameworks like Typer and Textualize, come in handy. To scaffold and help these interfaces.

But when I ran it on my laptop, which has nothing other than system Python, it hiccoughed. I tried Pyinstaller next, and that too, did not do the trick. It choked on a loop, that worked when I ran it as with Python normally. PyOxidizer scared me off.

This needs looking further looking into, but atleast I know what I need to do now

Afterthought: The one con I do see, is losing platform independence. My binaries will be Linux on Intel only.¹ I could just take my Python source anywhere, set up my environment and go. Well, I still have that option if I need it and in the meanwhile, having binaries affords me a lot of convenience.

Python

• Why use comprehensions? Because it reads better.
  Like I advice the young ones in DPGLUG on writing.
  Write short, choppy sentences.
  They read better.
• With my problem sets …
  • I should stop trying to generalise in advance and solve the specific problem first.
  • Read stuff carefully. Don’t do more than is necessary
  • Solutions take time to understand too. Budget the time

Linux Mint

• Nemo, the file browser in Linux Mint always opens the home directory, when I click on it and there’s no apparent way to change it to a preferred directory. I want it to always open Downloads
• A little bit of web spelunking led to an acceptable work-around.
  1. Right click the main menu button
  2. Click Menu => Open the menu editor => Accessories
  3. Then click Files in the items from the right and click Properties further right
  4. Change the command form nemo %U to nemo Downloads
     And that does it!

Update

• 2023-02-09: Does not work. Will look for some other approach. Right now, with the workaround it opens a Downloads window alongside any other folder I click on 😂

Hugo

• Added a plain, hamburger menu to this blog, using Aditya’s helpful instructions over on the PaperMod Discord.
• With all the extra nav items, I’ve added to the header the menu would overflow on my iPhone (and probably on other folks’ phones too). So if this page scooches narrow enough, it will change the links on top to a plain menu.

Huginn / RSS

• I often have sites that have no RSS feeds, but they’re still interesting enough to me that I want to keep tabs on them for anything new.
• While I wrote a tiny program to scrape and generate a custom RSS feed to get my Poetry fix, I needed something more robust, if I wanted to do this with lots of sites.
• I realised that my Huggin instance could do that for me. Huginn is documented pretty well, that even a slowpoke like me, could figure out a fix for himself, inside an hour
• I also learnt something fun. How do I choose a specific, nested, div on the page when all of them are similarly named? By using the power of XPath! I found it to be a more robust way of picking something from a web page, compared to its alternatives.
• It’s also pretty easy to at least get a basic XPath selection. Just inspect your element in your browser’s web inspector and a right/context click should normally give you the option to copy a link as an XPath. Getting to an href link in the div I wanted, led to something like /html/body/div[1]/div[1]/div/div/div/main/div/div[1]/div/header/h2/a/@href and BAM! I got the link!
• This solves a really big problem for me. So once again, I’m pretty chuffed today as well :)

Urdu

• Got done with the “siin” group of letters today.
• It is getting more and more confusing to read, but I’m sure I’ll slowly get over it with practice.

Physical Fitness

• More Cardio today
• I’ve gotten comfortable doing an hour of active cardio at around 160, without worrying that my heart would burst. Now to focus on doing the same hour at a slower heart rate, over time.
• The pain’s almost gone. Let’s see what the coming days hold.

Python

Got today’s assignment done well in time; and then went out looking for better ways to write it over again.
Writing code is getting exciting now. Just like how I learnt to write in my teens.
Write. And then go figure out, how I’d do it better.

Busywork

Spent a coupla hours doing some busywork for A Thing; that if it pans out will be a good thing for me.

Urdu

Did “chhoTii ye”, “ba.Dii ye” and “chhoTii he”.
Aamozish says, I’m done with the alphabet.¹
Pretty chuffed with myself :)

Physical Fitness

Did an hour of cardio today.
My body seems to have gotten over the hump of all that pain.
Hoping I’m not speaking too soon, though.
If this keeps up, getting weight training to be a habit will get easier.

Python

Did not complete my assignment.
Flunked it again.
But on the plus side, those 45 minutes were some of the hardest thinking and iterating, I have done in weeks. So there’s that.
And on the plusser¹ side, I am proud of having stopped and then looked for help.
That was my biggest learning for the day.

Hugo

• I need to write about what I actually did in another post.
  But I created a custom Table of Contents for my Reading page, by hacking my theme’s template and layout. It was fun.
  Long story short, the theme has the ability to create a table of contents by reading all the headers elements in the page. I restricted it to just the H1 and H2 elements.²

Urdu

• Did the “vaao” group of letters today

Physical Fitness

• Did gym and basic physio for my back.
  Wiped out!

Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com

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Python

• Exercised with dictionaries today.
• Today was the first time, I could not solve my assignment, no matter what I tried.
• Lessons learnt:
  • Stick to a schedule and do hard stops, since Python is only a small part of what I want to learn
  • Learn to quit sooner. I’m like a dog with a bone, when it comes to problems. This approach may have helped me in the past, but it hinders me a lot, when writing code.

Urdu

• Did the ‘re’ group of letters
• Exercised with the ‘re’ and ‘daal’ groups
• I’m learning the alphabet, using the wonderful Aamozish website, in case you folks have been confused about what I was doing with the language.

Webdev

• Watched Webhooks for Beginners
  Sooner or later, I want to customise my dinky little Huginn instance to do a lot more.
  This’ll come in handy then.

Physical Fitness

• Today was the first day, gym felt a wee bit normal.
  Hope this positive phase continues …

Thoughts

• I seem to have got into a good work rhythm.
• Next step seems to prioritise my work and do more of what is needed, to get me a devops job.

Python

• Read about functions, key functions, and asterisks
• Practiced list comprehensions and dictionary lookups
• Learnt and practised some, about decimals and rounding up

Devops

• Devops-ish? Upgraded the BIOS of my desktop to the current the latest available version. I was on v1.5, when I had last done it in July ’21. Now I am on v1.9 from November last year. Fixes plenty of vulnerabilities.
  While I got to know of it last eve, I did not upgrade then, because I wanted my mind fresh and attentive while I did this. I have bricked enough PCs and handhelds in my misspent youth and I cannot risk killing my daily driver to tiredness.
  What do they call it now? UEFI firmware?¹

Urdu

• Learnt the ‘daal’ group of letters
• Today was also the first day, I realised reading right to left is becoming intuitive.
  I read “Daataa”² in Urdu and went to check if I was correct by trying to read the English, and was wondering why they nonsensically called it “aataad”, until my brain switched back to Latin and reading left to right 😂

Physical Activity

• I hope gym gets easier, because I am getting crankier about the pain by the day.
• The better half says I sustained much more pain with physio and bore it longer and more stoically when I broke my back in 2017. Well, that was my body doing it to me and I had no control over it. Right now, I am doing this to myself, ergo the crankiness. I know this is good for me in the long run. Does not stop me from hating the process and its repercussions right now. I’m getting old and grumpy.

Python

• Learning about how to make keyword arguments stick.
• And how to think about structuring programs

Devops

• Deep dive into how to add prow job listings to the dashboard and viceversa; how to go about looking for the job from the dashboard

Urdu / French

• Lots of practice with vowels and the ‘jiim’ group of letters. Since I know Hindi, Urdu progress is much, much, much faster than French. I think that is because, I am forcing my English grammar / vocabulary on another Romance language that has Germanic influences. This is leading to a lot of cognitive dissonance and slow progress.
  Much of my Urdu vocabulary comes from Hindi, which I learnt as a kid, and I definitely did not go looking for the “right” way to speak it. Better to just do French similarly as well. While I cannot do immersion, I can do what I want to do with French. Begin reading what I want to. Whether I understand it or not. I realise this will take me a lot longer than Urdu or Hindi, but that’s ok. Émilie du Châtelet, Montaigne and Dumas are not going anywhere, and neither am I :)
• My frame of learning now, after doing these two languages, as well as the rest of the stuff I am doing, is to just begin doing². And figure out / learn the rules, the grammar, the conventions as you go.

Physical Activity

• They call it chest and arm day. I presume, the exercises are meant to strengthen them. Right now, it’s just a stiff, painful mess.
• I cannot wait for this phase to be over.

Books / Reading

• Finished reading, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy. It’s a hauntingly, beautiful book. A spiritual successor to the Little Prince and a Lindy book for sure.

Python

• Finally figured out what def __init__ (self): does in an class, in a way that makes sense to my mind.
  If I create an class and I want it (i.e. the objects created with it) to take in arguments, then I need to define an __init__ method to set it all up.
  For e.g. if the class definition is just class chantSomeName(): where do I reconcile the fact that I need to pass in a name that needs chanting? In its __init__ method

class chantSomeName():
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name

• Python does a lot for me. My first approach going into any problem should henceforth be,
  • Does Python already do this for me already, natively?
  • I should think of Python less, as a forge where I make my own tools (which it undoubtedly is) and more as a librarian, where I can just ask it for something and it will return it to me. The more I study it, the more I realise just how much it keeps track of and how much it tries to make life easy for me

Devops

• Learnt a bit about how Prow jobs work

English

• Learnt a new (old) word
  • viscid

  Vis"cid (?), a. [L. viscidus, fr. viscum the mistletoe, birdlime made from the berries of the mistletoe; akin to Gr. ?: cf. F. viscide.] Sticking or adhering, and having a ropy or glutinous consistency; viscous; glutinous; sticky; tenacious; clammy; as, turpentine, tar, gums, etc., are more or less viscid.

Urdu

• Working my way through the alphabet. Did the jeem group of letters today

Physical Activity

• An hours worth of cardio. I am really gritting my teeth and hoping all of this pain, pays off.

Django

• Learnt how to docker-ise my tiny Django app, that I’m writing, so I can have a contact form on the website.

Doing some things daily to learn.
To give myself grace
To be kind to my self.

Python Morsels

Getting back into the swing of writing code.
Today was basically just looking at a blank screen and wondering why nothing would come out.

Urdu

Started with module one of Rekhta’s wonderful Aamozish.
I hope to have read at least one Urdu book by the end of the year.

Physical Activity

Went to the gym. Worked with a kindly trainer, who understands my pain and then keeps telling me about all the good things “one”¹ needs to do. I have no legs.²
I hope I get used to this soon.

Devops

Worked with a colleague. Trying to create a presentation.

French

This is something I barely spend 5 minutes on.
But I do it daily.
The only reason I mention it here, because today is Day 100 of showing up.

1. Join the mailing list, here.
2. Come join the #dgplug irc channel on Libera, because that’s where the training will be conducted.

So, what is it?

The summer training is short-ish, couple of months-ish long, series of meetups on irc.¹
Mentors come. Students gather. A cohort forms.
And we learn all about the free and open source world.
If you’re a young person, looking to learn the culture and the tacit knowledge of how the free and open source or someone older or if you feel like someone who is on the outside looking in, all are welcome.

From learning tactical things like communication skills, or basic programming to the more important things like, the importance of our culture, we aim to communicate all of this, so that you get a good grounding in becoming an open source contributer.

This year, will be our 15th cohort.
And folks from all walks of life have come and better their lives and gained opportunities thanks to the skills they’ve learnt.
Even more important though, are the people you will meet on this journey and the friendships you will make.
Pradhvan, Farhaan, Bhavin, Nabarun, Sayan, Trishna, Chandan, Kushal, Anwesha, and Priyanka are all friends, I have made here.²
You could be next friend I make :)

Anwesha has more about past attendees and the mentor’s posts in her announcement post.
Kushal has been writing about his journey through these years on his blog.
Read more about the training on the main website.
And if you decide to take the plunge, here’s a good before you start guide.

Hope to see you all there!
And oh, here’s to the places we will go!

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

The little script I wrote in 2020, to get me my daily poetry fix, died a couple of months ago.
Life got in the way of me, figuring out what was wrong.

I finally got around to it today.
A little bit of peeking under the hood revealed that Cloudflare did not like me using the Python Requests library to check the Poetry Foundation page.
Or maybe it just did not like the useragent string that Requests gave it.
I was in no mood to go down that rabbit hole, so I just went looking for modern alternatives to Requests.
Found HTTPX.¹ and switched over to it.²
And then while I was at it, replaced PyRSS2Gen with FeedGenerator.

And tada! Poemfeed lives again!
Find the updated code, over on Github.

Writing code today, made me realise, how far I have come since I wrote that code.
I figured out the issue, I knew just how I wanted it to work, I went out, researched the code, and then wrote and iterated over the code and got it working in a matter of hours.
Kushal was right.
Writing lots of shitty code, over and over and over again is the best way to get fluent.
Here’s to more contributing and lots more of writing code!

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brew install protobuf #install protobuf

# set various compiler flags
export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL=1
export GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_ZLIB=1
export CFLAGS='-I /opt/homebrew/opt/protobuf/include'
export LDFLAGS=-L/opt/homebrew/opt/protobuf/lib

# install pycld3
python3 -m pip install pycld3

And we’re set!

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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

• We don’t quite know what to do with you.
• You’re too slow.
• It’s us, not you.
• The position just got filled.
• While we don’t want you, we assure you, someone else will.

I understand it’s a process, that everyone goes through, but I somehow still held hope that someone would inject some humanity into what seems to be a pretty inhumane process.
And Scrollstack was exactly it.
While I still haven’t asked the powers that be, why I got in, their process of treating people humanely is what attracted me to them.
They wanted me on, and I’ve joined up as a Software Developer.

And ofcourse, would a guy who loves writing, love to help build tools that helps folk write? And earn, while we’re at it?
Does a bear shit in the woods?
Hell, yeah!

Here’s to upwards and onwards!
And Scrollstack, you have my undying gratitude for helping me start a new phase of my career.

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Kushal Das, for bringing me in, teaching me the ropes and assuring me there was a place for me here

Reuven Lerner, who unravelled Python for me and made me realise that languages were small, and the reason I was struggling was not Python, but because I wanted to understand all of computer science in too short a time frame.¹

David Malan and Brian Yu for the grounding that is CS50.

Dr. Chuck (Charles Severance) for opening my eyes to the wonder that is web programming.
And databases, and Postgresql.
And Django.
And so much more!
You taught me how the pieces fit.

Julia Evans for showing me that being good at sharing knowledge, is not magic, just a lot of hard work and dedication.
And for teaching me oh so much, with your magical zines.

Mark Lutz for his exhaustive, thorough books on Python.

Damian Conway for making regexes make sense.²

Barbara Oakley, for teaching an old dog how to learn.

Cal Newport and Scott Young for helping me put it into practice (deliberately 😂)

Brad Traversy, while he may not have melted my mind, he is the embodiment of everything i learnt from the teachers above. Patient, humble, transparent, persistent, all round hero.

And last, but certainly not least, my young friend and mentee, Priyanka Saggu, for teaching me dogged persistence and for being an unabashed cheerleader on my journey.

All of this to say, good teachers are hard to find, and are worth their weight in gold. For every teacher on the list above, I failed with at least 5 more.

If you ever feel dumb, despite doing your best, like I constantly did, maybe it’s just the fact that the teacher and you are not compatible. The way they teach, might not be the way you understand

Which is why, if you are privileged enough to do so (or are willing to put in the time and the effort), there is no shame in looking for a ‘better’ teacher. No worries in doing the work of finding that someone who can make stuff go ‘click’ in your mind; who can make the world make better sense to you

My experience has been that such folk are hard to find, and when you do luck across gems (like the people above) make sure they know it.
Be grateful that life has brought you to them.
And make sure you learn all you can, to the best of your ability.

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Nikola Upgrade

I use Nikola to generate both my websites.
It is an extremely easy to use, no fuss static site generator, which is easy on my server’s resources.
Version 8.1.2 was released a few hours ago and I hopped on and installed it.
I follow a slightly unconventional upgrade path, because I was terrified of breaking my server in the early days, when I was still learning about how to go about installing things on servers.

• I have Miniconda installed.
• I use that to generate a conda environment, which I then installed Nikola into.
• When a new release drops, I create a new conda environment, install the new release in there and run them against my source folders (after backing them up).
• This lets me revert very quickly to the old data and the older version of Nikola, in case I do something boneheaded and screw things up.
• If all works fine for a month, I delete the older conda environment along with the old Nikola release.
• I have been doing this for quite a while now, and while it may be overkill, it gives me peace of mind.
• As usual, Nikola upgraded with no issues at all.

Pleroma Bot

I always wanted to understand what bots do.
Now I realise they are athromorphic programs that (with the right permissions and the right credentials) look like actual users of a service, doing sets of activities they are programmed to do.
Like your banking app has set of solutions to common queries that it shows you, before it hands off to an actual human, if those solutions don’t fit your needs.
They feel like supercharged scripts to me.
So I decided to see if I could install one.
Since I am learning Python, I love reading the low volume Daily Python Tip Twitter account.
It has surprising, handy, funny, interesting tips and tricks about the Python language and the massive ecosystem around it.
But, I have weaned myself off Twitter for my own sanity.
I only use it sparingly once a day.
And going back to that noise and tumult no longer interests me.
I saw a bot that mirrored tech news accounts to Mastodon and wondered if a bot could get Daily Python Tip to me on my Pleroma timeline.
A quick search led me to Pleroma Bot.
A couple of struggling hours later, (creating a twitter developer account, creating a pleroma account for the bot, figuring out how to get bearer tokens for said accounts) and tada, I got the bot to come alive!
It checks the Twitter account once a day, and mirrors the tweets to the bot account.
You’re most welcome to follow it for a Python tip, daily.
The next thing to do, is to see if I can get a bot to post a tagged pleroma status to my twitter account.
But that is something for another day …
Update, 2020/11/17: figured out how to use the bot to mirror multiple accounts. It now mirrors, Daily Python Tip, RegexTip, and CompSciFact.

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And now I realise why he asked me to do this.
The program itself is trivial.
Here’s the code on my code repo, Gitlab, and Github.
It just consists of me using GitPython to access the current folder via a GitPython Repo object.
And then querying it for its branches.

The important work was done yesterday, when I pored over the documentation and figured out how GitPython actually works.
And I realised that is what Kushal wanted me to do.
Read something and figure out how I could adapt it to my situation.

The other thing I realised, was licensing.
I want my programs to be used, played with and adapted.
So it makes sense for me, to make it as easy to use as possible.
This is why I have decided, that until circumstances dictate otherwise, I shall use the MIT License.
This led me to check if I could then actually license my software as such, if the software that I depend on (in this case GitPython) have different licenses.
My arbitrary and random research suggests that I can do so.
If I learn otherwise, I shall think about what to do next.
If you have anything to suggest, please let me know, by mailing me at jason at this domain.

One other (painful) thing, that I realised is that I cannot focus at all when I am writing code.
This post has come out in a blur of focussed writing.
My academic studies are also something that I can focus for hours on.
Apparently that focus does not translate to programming.
I need to build up this skill for this domain seperately.
Hopefully, this will come with showing up daily.

This was fun to do.
Here’s to writing my way to fluency.

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P.P.P.S. Update, 7pm the same day, The answer to focus, lies in this serendipitous Seth post

A third might be, just for an hour, to turn it off.
All of it.
To sit alone and create the new thing, the thing worth seeking out, the thing that will cause a positive change.

I love it when the universe speaks to me :)

This is a tiny little niche thing, I built all for my ownsome.
It all started, when I got hooked on reading the daily poem, on the Poetry Foundation page.

Learning Python as I am, I wondered if there was a way to have it come to my RSS reader.
And so Poemfeed is a tiny little utility that does just that for me.

It looks up Poetry Foundation’s, Poem of the Day for a new poem.
If there is one, it follows the link to the complete poem, and then gets the link to that page and writes that into an simple RSS entry in an xml file.

I then wrote a simple cron job that executes the python script twice a day, and if an xml file is generated, it moves it to a place that my RSS reader can access.
Et voilà, a brand new poem everyday! (or as often as they publish :))

The code’s here, on my repo, on Gitlab and on Github, if you want to have a look see.

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Aiming to write a tool using this which will show all the git branches in the current directory and the last commit date on those branches (and only the local branches :))

What I did today

I had to carry my phone in to the service centre, so I did not quite have as much focussed time as yesterday, with all the coordinating and carrying, but I learned a few new things

Kushal hinted that I could use GitPython to do what I want.
So I spent a little while reading there.
And then decided to test it out.

And then immediately went yak shaving, because I wanted to solve the problem of how to quickly type iterate in Visual Studio Code.
I learnt lots of Python using Reuven Lerner’s courses and I used a lot of Jupyter Notebooks then.
And I love them.
The trick now, is to figure out how to use them in Visual Studio Code.
To my delight, the Python extension in VS Code has support for notebooks. And all works well for the most part.
The only thing that tripped me up was that when I tried importing a module in the notebook after activating my virtual environment, the Jupyter server hiccoughed and threw up some error about not finding the module (which I knew was definitely installed) and then something about it not being in the PYTHONPATH (which I had no clue of which places, it was looking in.)
A little snooping and I realised that the extension loads the server with a default kernel in someplace. And I need to tell it about my environment. Once I told it to use the kernel from my venv, all was fine.
VS Code went and installed a ton of things and found what was already there and everything was hunky dory.
A from git import Repo worked just fine.

I felt good about this piece of dawdling, because I know this is something I am going to do every day and better I spend some time figuring it out, right at the start.

I learnt that I could use the ! mark as a prefix in Jupyter to run shell commands! A !ls will show me the contents of my folder :)

I skimmed the GitPython documentation.
I kind of got what I want.
This will require lots more work, which I shall have to put in.
But even a cursory glance, showed me that GitPython was an exhaustive wrapper, that would let you do practically anything you would want to do with Git.

More tomorrow …

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I also managed to improve an old program I wrote for myself, but I’ll write about that in the next post.
All in all, a day well spent. A journey well begun.

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This time, I will focus on building tiny projects.
I realise my life is too chaotic for #100DaysofCode.
But I can do this, one tiny thing at a time.

Wish me luck!

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Not quite a good day.
Calling it quits early.

Reflections and Experience

• I really need feedback, when it comes to programming. I cannot face a blank page. I always seem to start with printing something out to screen and then my brain kind of kicks into gear. Everything after that is just type, print, is this what I expected, if not then fix, type, print …
• Exercise 3.1 and I think, I am finally getting good handle on comprehensions.
  • from something that would take me at least 10 lines of code to just expressing it concisely in 1!
• I can read Python messages and take a gander at what I need to do next.
  • I see a '_io.TextIOWrapper' object and know I can iterate over it.
  • I see AttributeError: '_io.TextIOWrapper' object has no attribute 'strip' and realise that it cannot be stripped into parts. I need another way to skin that cat.
• And then I took it too far (just like this sentence), and nested a comprehension in another one, in where, I had to learn how to put in a conditional in the form of a ternary operator, in Exercise 3.2 (the commented for loop is much simpler!), but that was very good practice. Really stretched me!
• I caught myself getting distracted a lot. I needed to set a 30 min timer and I spent about 15, looking for where the timer app in my Mint Desktop was, instead of just setting the darned timer on the phone.
• Took an hour to figure out the comprehension for 3.2 and about 20 minutes to do it for Exercise 3.3. Practice helps!
• Watching the solutions, and I realise, I got them right in principle, but that I need to be more aware of what happens to an object in memory, so that I can simplify code. I was able to remove one level of comprehension, which I used just to get the end of a string.

• Take a list of domains (one per line) from a text file as input, find the IP address for the domain using the standard system level DNS, and then check against DoH answers from both cloudflare and google. and say if all answers match properly or not.

Notes

What do I need to do? (checklist)

• Get a list of popular websites, (probably Alexa)
• figure out a way to read them in
• loop through each line, and look up its ip
  • with the local dns (use the sockets module)
  • with Google’s DoH json endpoint (use the requests module)
  • with Cloudflare’s DoH json endpoint (ditto like Google)
• Compare all the values.
• Print if they match or not.

Experience

• I should commit my work often. This took me two days, because I lost all of yesterday’s progress in a computer hiccough.
• The program runs well. It intentionally limits itself to only the first result in the Google and Cloudflare lookups.
• I should learn to focus more on what is at hand and not overthink the program.
• I should be learning to build primitive little, handy dandy tools, not giant cathedrals.
• I spent two hours fiddling with a way to create another program that would process files for me. (and abandoned it)
• I need to read the documentation across sites very carefully.
  • They are written with experienced programmers in mind, and not beginners like me.
  • For e.g. When I was trying to look up domain names with Cloudflare, I blindly copied the example and then wondered why it was not giving me the appropriate replies. I then realised I was missing a seperate parameter, &ct=application/dns-json which was quite clearly listed above, but not in the example below. (which in truth was listed, but as part of the command at the command line and I, like a dumbass, just copied the requisite code to adapt to my Python program. Lesson: Cargo cult with extreme caution)
• Which leads back to the fact, that I should stick to what is assigned, because just doing that much at this stage is taking me a long time. Improvements and features can wait until I am much more fluent.
• I realise I am trusting autocomplete too much, and I should at least look at what I am completing. I spent 40 minutes, wondering why my comparisons were not working, when in fact, I was using the wrong variables.
• Lost loads of time with typos.
• Be more intentional. More slow.

Code.

Put your sitenames into a file called dumpsites.txt Run check-ip.py

Gitlab / Github

Getting the hang of how to sit and program and work through things I do not know.
Gaining a bit of experience with the workflow now.
I have the basics in hand. I know what I want to look up.
So check problem, work a bit, look up, try, fail, repeat, gain incremental success, work some more.
Love the feedback loop too.
With other stuff I try, I have to wait days, weeks, months.
Here, it’s immediate.

Beginning to love the work, as I get more familiar with it.
Tomorrow is another day :)

Tomorrow is another day :)

So I have kept Emacs as my regular editor for nearly everything text.
And switched to the community edition of Pycharm for all my Python projects.

I am also grateful to all of you, who gave me problems to practice on.
These will help me grow.