gvalkov · HackerTrans

mese scorsodiscuss

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mese scorsodiscuss

The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on.

Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(

gvalkov

4 mesi fadiscuss

In zsh you can bind "push-line-or-edit". In bash and all readline programs, you can approximate it with C-u followed by C-y (i.e. cut and paste). My history is still full of '#' and ':' (csh trauma) prefixed command-lines like you described though ...

gvalkov

11 mesi fadiscuss

I'm using that case with with a 200mm fan front-panel mod[1]. Despite its size, it gets pretty cramped. It's just hard to keep it organized without a dedicated SATA backplane.

[1]: https://www.printables.com/model/866109-200mm-fan-front-for-...

gvalkov

12 mesi fadiscuss

In Python 3.8 - https://peps.python.org/pep-0572/

gvalkov

12 mesi fadiscuss

This is nitpicking, but this is a good usecase for the := operator:

  if not (API_KEY := os.getenv("API_KEY")):
      ...

For internal tools I just let os.environ["API_KEY"] raise a KeyError. It's descriptive enough.

gvalkov

anno scorsodiscuss

We're still serving a cgi-bin directory at work for the occasional quick and dirty internal web app. The ergonomics are great as long as you keep it simple. The fact that it's cgi doesn't mean you have to print http/1.0 to stdout manually. For example, in python the builtin wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler lets you run any wsgi app as a cgi script:

  import wsgiref.handlers, flask
  app = flask.Flask(__name__)
  wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(app)

The way we run the scripts is with uwsgi and its cgi plugin[1]. I find it simpler and more flexible than running apache or lighttpd just for mod_cgi. Since uwsgi runs as a systemd unit, we also have all of systemd's hardening and sandboxing capabilities at our disposal. Something very convenient in uwsgi's cgi handling that's missing from mod_cgi, is the ability to set the interpreter for a given file type:

  cgi = /cgi-bin=/webapps/cgi-bin/src
  cgi-allowed-ext = .py
  cgi-helper = .py=/webapps/cgi-bin/venv/bin/python3  # all dependencies go here

Time to first byte is 250-350ms, which is acceptable for our use case.

[1]: https://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/CGI.html

gvalkov

anno scorsodiscuss

I recently built something[1] similar, though with far less effort and sophistication than the author. The goal was to have a plug-and-play audiobook player for an elderly family member with impaired vision. In retrospect, it would have been better to adapt an old phone or tablet with a macropad rather than build this on top of an espmuse speaker[2].

I keep thinking that a cassette player would be the ideal interface for something like this. The controls are as obvious and as tactile as it gets and the whole analog-mechanical experience is familiar to folks from that generation. If only tapes could hold more than two hours of audio ...

[1]: https://www.printables.com/model/1269288-audiobook-player

[2]: https://raspiaudio.com/product/esp-muse-luxe/

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