Work

Slightly distracted day, today compared to the rest of the week before. Well, c’est la vie. 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. Feedback on this post? Mail me at feedback@janusworx.com P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit. ...

Did a full day. But is this sustainable? I’ll know in a week or so. 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. ...

I use Miniflux as my feed reader, and I love it to bits. It does what I need, it does it fast and it stays out of the way. Well, almost. I have a couple of those—whatchacalit—firehose feeds. And I keep skimming through them by clicking next, next, next on each page. Like so, Except for when there is no next under my pointer. ...

Ok, here’s to learning Kubernetes in earnest, to get that career pivot going. Notes as I learn, over the coming days. This one, is a lot of random thoughts on bringing up a cluster. It is both harder than you think, and easier than you think I did this, because I wanted to run my own cluster, just like the big boys do.1 It’s much easier to run alternatives like kind, if that suits your needs better. Notes to future Jason: ...

I wanted to start learning Kubernetes. So I thought I’d spin up a Ubuntu VM to use as my sacrificial guinea pig. While the normal NAT mode works well enough for most of my networking needs, I wanted the Ubuntu VM to show up and work as a machine on my host’s network.1 I have two network cards on my desktop and wanted to allocate one of them to this VM. I wanted a passthrough, where the guest OS would see the NIC and then have exclusive access to it. When I tried doing that, KVM complained that it could not do this with PCI devices. ...

Every now and then, I spin up a fresh vm. And being a creature of habit, I use the same username on my play / experimental vms as my normal login. So everytime I try to login to such a vm or pi, I get a Too many authentication failures error. So to just get in and start working, I need to tell ssh to ignore my keys and try using passwords as the authentication mechanism. Like so ...