Drafts

The default keybinding for copy-mode <prefix>-[ is one that is just so awkward for me to hit that I end up not using it at all. I was on a call with my buddy Nic this week and saw him just fluidly jump into copy-mode in an effortless fashion, so I had to ask him for his keybinding and it just made sense. Enter, that’s it. So I have addedt his to my ~/.tmux.conf along with one for alt-enter and have found myself using it way more so far. Setting copy-mode to enter # [1] To do this I just popped open my ~/.tmux.conf and added the following. Now I can get to copy-mode with <prefix>-Enter which is control-b Enter, or alt-enter. bind Enter copy-mode bind -n M-Enter copy-mode More on copy-mode # [2] I have a full video on copy-mode you can find here. tmux copy-mode [3] References: [1]: #setting-copy-mode-to-enter [2]: #more-on-copy-mode [3]: /tmux-copy-mode/

In python, a string is a string until you add special characters. In browsing twitter this morning I came accross this tweet, that showed that you can use is accross two strings if they do not contain special characters. https://twitter.com/bascodes/status/1492147596688871424 I popped open ipython to play with this. I could confirm on 3.9.7, short strings that I typed in worked as expected. waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ a = "asdf" waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ b = "asdf" waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ a is b True Using the upper() method on these strings does break down. waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ a.upper() is b.upper() False waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ a = "ASDF" waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ b = "ASDF" waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ a is b True If You can also see this in the id of the objects as well, which is the memmory address in CPython. waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ id(a) 140717359289568 waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ id(b) 140717359289568 waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ id(a.upper()) 140717359581824 waylonwalker ↪main v3.9.7 ipython ❯ id(b.upper()) 140717360337824 Finally just as the post shows if...

One thing about moving to a tiling window manager like awesome wm or i3 is that they are so lightweight they are all missing things like bluetooth gui’s out of the box, and you generally bring your own. Today I just needed to connet a new set of headphones, so I decided to just give the bluetoothctl cli a try. It seems to come with Ubuntu, I don’t think I did anything to get it. bluetoothctl Running bluetoothctl pops you into a repl/shell like bah, python, or ipython. From here you can execute bluetoothctl commands. Here is what I had to do to connect my headphones. # list out the commands available help # scan for new devices and stop when you see your device show up scan on scan off # list devices devices paired-devices # pair the device pair XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX # now your device should show up in the paired list paired-devices # connet the device connect XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX help # [1] Here is the output of the help menu on my machine, it seems pretty straight forward to block, and remove devices from here. note ctrl revers to the bluetooth controller on the machine you are on, and dev refers to a device id. Menu main: Available commands: ------------------- advertise A...

I often run shell commands from python with Popen, but not often enough do I set up error handline for these subprocesses. It’s not too hard, but it can be a bit awkward if you don’t do it enough. Using Popen # [1] import subprocess from subprocess import Popen # this will run the shell command `cat me` and capture stdout and stderr proc = Popen(["cat", "me"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE) # this will wait for the process to finish. proc.wait() reading from stderr # [2] To get the stderr we must get it from the proc, read it, and decode the bystring. Note that we can only get the stderr object once, so if you want to do more than just read it you will need to store a copy of it. proc.stderr.read().decode() Better Exception # [3] Now that we can read the stderr we can make better error tracking for the user so they can see what to do to resolve the issue rather than blindly failing. err_message = proc.stderr.read().decode() if proc.returncode != 0: # the process was not successful if "No such file" in err_message: raise FileNotFoundError('No such file "me"') References: [1]: #using-popen [2]: #reading-from-stderr [3]: #better-exception

Samba is an implementation of the smb protocol that allows me to setup network shares on my linux machine that I can open on a variety of devices. I think the homelab [1] is starting to intrigue me enought to dive into the path of experimenting with different things that I might want setup in my own home. One key piece of this is network storage. As I looked into nas, I realized that it takes a dedicated machine, or one virtualized at a lower level than I have capability for right now. Humble Beginnings # [2] To get goind I am going to make a directory /srv/samba/public open to anyone on my network. I am not going to worry too much about it, I just want something up and running so that I can learn. Install samba, open the firewall, and edit the smb.conf sudo apt install samba samba-common-bin sudo ufw allow samba sudo nvim /etc/samba/smb.conf I added this to the end of my smb.conf [public] comment = public share, no need to enter username and password path = /srv/samba/public/ browseable = yes writable = yes guest ok = yes Then I made the /srv/samba/public directory and made it writable by anyone. sudo mkdir -p /srv/samba/public sudo setfacl -R -m "u:nobody:rwx" /srv/s...

A super useful tool when doing PR’s or checking your own work during a big refactor is the silver searcher. Its a super fast command line based searching tool. You just run ag "<search term>" to search for your search term. This will list out every line of every file in any directory under your current working directory that contains a match. Ahead/Behind # [1] It’s often useful to need some extra context around the change. I recently reviewed a bunch of PR’s that moved schema from save_args to the root of the dataset in all yaml configs. To ensure they all made it to the top level DataSet configuraion, and not underneath save_args. I can do a search for all the schemas, and ensure that none of them are under save_args anymore. ag "schema: " -A 12 -B 12 References: [1]: #aheadbehind

I’ve ran a Minecraft server at home since December 2017 for me and my son to play on. We start a brand new one somewhere between every day and every week. The older he gets the longer the server lasts. In all these years, I’ve been popping open the command line and running the server manually, and even inside of Digital Ocean occasionally to play a more public server with a friend. My buddy Nic has been sharing me some of his homelab [1] setup, and it’s really got me to thinking about what I can run at home, and Dockerizing all the things. Today I found a really sweet github repo that had a minecraft server running in docker with a pretty incredible setup. I ended up running the first thing in the Readme that included a volume mount. If you are going to run this container, I HIGHLY reccomend that you make sure that you have your world volume mounted, otherwise it will die with your docker container. Docker Compose # [2] With the following stored as my docker-compose.yml in a brand new and otherwise empty directory I was ready to start the server for the night. version: "3" services: mc: container_name: walkercraft image: itzg/minecraft-server ports: - 25565:25565 en...

Installing rust in your own ansible playbook will make sure that you can get consistent installs accross all the machines you may use, or replicate your development machine if it ever goes down. Personal philosophy # [1] I try to install everything that I will want to use for more than just a trial inside of my ansible playbook. This way I always get the same setup across my work and home machines, and anytime I might setup a throw away vm. reccommended install # [2] This is how rust reccomends that you install it on Ubuntu. First update your system, then run their installer, and finally check that the install was successful. # system update sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade # download and run the rust installer curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh # confirm your installation is successful rustc --version Ansible Install # [3] The first thing I do in my playbooks is to check if the tool is already installed. Here I chose to look for cargo, you could also look for rustc. - name: check if cargo is installed shell: command -v cargo register: cargo_exists ignore_errors: yes I first check for an existing install so I can re-run my playbooks quickly filling in only missing...

In looking for a way to automatically generate descriptions for pages I stumbled into a markdown ast in python. It allows me to go over the markdown page and get only paragraph text. This will ignore headings, blockquotes, and code fences. import commonmark import frontmatter post = frontmatter.load("post.md") parser = commonmark.Parser() ast = parser.parse(post.content) paragraphs = '' for node in ast.walker(): if node[0].t == "paragraph": paragraphs += " " paragraphs += node[0].first_child.literal It’s also super fast, previously I was rendering to html [1] and using beautifulsoup to get only the paragraphs. Using the commonmark ast was about 5x faster on my site. Duplicate Paragraphs # [2] When I originally wrote this post, I did not realize at the time that commonmark duplicates nodes. I still do not understand why, but I have had success duplicating them based on the source position of the node with the snippet below. from itertools import compress import commonmark import frontmatter post = frontmatter.load("post.md") parser = commonmark.Parser() ast = parser.parse(post.content) # find all paragraph nodes paragraph_nodes = [ n[0] for n in ast.walker() if n[0...

Creating a minimal config specifically for git [1] commits has made running git commit much more pleasant. It starts up Much faster, and has all of the parts of my config that I use while making a git commit. The one thing that I often use is autocomplete, for things coming from elsewhere in the tmux session. For this cmpe-tmux specifically is super helpful. The other thing that is engrained into my muscle memory is jj for escape. For that I went agead and added my settings and keymap with no noticable performance hit. Here is the config that has taken ~/.config/nvim/init-git.vim source ~/.config/nvim/settings.vim source ~/.config/nvim/keymap.vim source ~/.config/nvim/git-plugins.vim lua require'waylonwalker.cmp' ~/.config/nvim/git-plugins.vim call plug#begin('~/.local/share/nvim/plugged') " cmp Plug 'hrsh7th/nvim-cmp' Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-nvim-lsp' Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-buffer' Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-path' Plug 'hrsh7th/cmp-calc' Plug 'andersevenrud/compe-tmux', { 'branch': 'cmp' } call plug#end() ~/.gitconfig [core] editor = nvim -u ~/.config/nvim/init-git.vim References: [1]: /glossary/git/

For an embarassingly long time, til today, I have been wrapping my dict gets with key errors in python. I’m sure I’ve read it in code a bunch of times, but just brushed over why you would use get. That is until I read a bunch of PR’s from my buddy Nic and notice that he never gets things with brackets and always with .get. This turns out so much cleaner to create a default case than try except. Example # [1] Lets consider this example for prices of supplies. Here we set a variable of prices as a dictionary of items and thier price. prices = {'pen': 1.2, 'pencil', 0.3, 'eraser', 2.3} Except KeyError # [2] What I would always do is try to get the key, and if it failed on KeyError, I would set the value (paper_price in this case) to a default value. try: paper_price = prices['paper'] except KeyError: paper_price = None .get # [3] What I noticed Nic does is to use get. This feels just so much cleaner that it’s a one liner and feels much easier to read and understand that if there is no price for paper we set it to None. paper_price = prices.get('paper', None) We can just as easily set the default to other values. Let’s consider sales for instance. If there is not a record f...

I was listening to shipit37 [1] with Vincent Ambo talking about building fully declaritive systems with nix. Vincent is building out Nixery and strongly believes that standard versioning systems are flawed. If we have good ci setup, and every commit is a good commit the idea of a release is just some arbitrary point in history that the maintainer decided was a good time to release, and has less to do about features and quality. Since many things still want to see a version number, there is one automatic always increasing number that is a part of every single git [2] repo, and that is the commit count. Nixery is versioned by commit count. When counting on the main branch there is no way for two points in time to share the same version. The git cli will count all commits by default so you have to be careful to only include commits from the branch you want to version/release from. git rev-list main --count References: [1]: https://changelog.com/shipit/37 [2]: /glossary/git/

BeautifulSoup is a DOM like library for python. It’s quite useful to manipulate html [1]. Here is an example to find_all html headings. I stole the regex from stack overflow, but who doesn’t. Make an example # [2] sample.html Lets make a sample.html file with the following contents. It mainly has some headings, <h1> and <h2> tags that I want to be able to find. <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <body> <h1>hello</h1> <p>this is a paragraph</p> <h2>second heading</h2> <p>this is also a paragraph</p> <h2>third heading</h2> <p>this is the last paragraph</p> </body> </html> Get the headings with BeautifulSoup # [3] Lets import our packages, read in our sample.html using pathlib and find all headings using BeautifulSoup. from bs4 import BeautifulSoup from pathlib import Path soup = BeautifulSoup(Path('sample.html').read_text(), features="lxml") headings = soup.find_all(re.compile("^h[1-6]$")) And what we get is a list of bs4.element.Tag’s. >> print(headings) [<h1>hello</h1>, <h2>second heading</h2>, <h2>third heading</h2>] I recently added a heading_link plugin to markata, you might notice the 🔗’s next to each heading on this page, that is powered by this exact techniq...

I keep my nodes short and sweet. They do one thing and do it well. I turn almost every DataFrame transformation into its own node. It makes it must easier to pull catalog entries, than firing up the pipeline, running it, and starting a debugger. For this reason many of my nodes can be built from inline lambdas. Examples # [1] Here are two examples, the first one lambda x: x is sometimes referred to as an identity function. This is super common to use in the early phases of a project. It lets you follow standard layering conventions, without skipping a layer, overthinking if you should have the layer or not, and leaves a good placholder to fill in later when you need it. Many times I just want to get the data in as fast as possible, learn about it, then go back and tidy it up. from kedro.pipeline import node my_first_node = node( func=lambda x: x, inputs='raw_cars', output='int_cars', tags=['int',] ) my_first_node = node( func=lambda cars: cars[['mpg', 'cyl', 'disp',]].query('disp>200'), inputs='raw_cars', output='int_cars', tags=['pri',] ) Note: try not to take the idea of a one liner too far. If your one line function wraps several lines down it probably deserv...

stow -R --simulate -vvv git

I’ve never found a great use for a global .gitignore file. Mostly I fear that by adding a lot of the common things like .pyc files it will be missing from the project and inevitably be committed to the project by someone else. Personal Tools # [1] Within the past year I have added some tools to my personal setup that are not required to run the project, but works really well with my setup. They are direnv and pyflyby. Since these both support project level configuration, are less common, and not in most .gitignore templates they make for great candidates to add to a global .gitignore file. create the config # [2] Like any .gitignore it supports gits wildignore syntax. I made a ~/dotfiles/git/.global_gitignore file, and added the following to it. .envrc .pyflyby .copier-defaults .venv*/ .python-version markout .markata.cache Once I had this file, I stowed it into ~/.global_gitignore. cd ~/dotfiles/ stow git Always stow your dotfiles, don’t set yourself up for wondering why your next machine is not working right. stow note # [3] Note, the reason that it is a ~/.global_gitignore and not a ~/.gitignore is that I was unable to stow a .gitignore file. They must be ignored by ...

Today I discovered a sweet new cli for compressing images. squoosh cli [1] is a wasm powered cli that supports a bunch of formats that I would want to convert my website images to. from the future > Unfortunately, due to a few people leaving the team, and staffing issues resulting from the current economic climate (ugh), I’m deprecating the CLI and libsquoosh parts of Squoosh. The web app will continue to be supported and improved. I know that sucks, but there simply isn’t the time & people to work on this. If anyone from the community wants to fork it, you have my blessing. https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh/pull/1321 Web App # [2] First the main feature of squoosh is a web app [3] that makes your images smaller right in the browser, using the same wasm. It’s sweet! There is a really cool swiper to compare the output image with the original, and graphical dials to change your settings. CLI # [4] What is even cooler is that once you have settings you are happy with and are really cutting down those kb’s on your images, there is a copy cli command button! If you have npx (which you should if you have nodejs and npm) already installed it just works without instal...

As you work on your kedro projects you are bound to need to add more dependencies to the project eventually. Kedro uses a fantastic command pip-compile under the hood to ensure that everyone is on the same version of packages at all times, and able to easily upgrade them. It might be a bit different workflow than what you have seen, let’s take a look at it. git status # [2] Before you start mucking around with any changes to dependencies make sure that your git status is clean. I’d even reccomend starting a new branch for this, and if you are working on a team potentially submit this as its own PR for clarity. git status git checkout main git checkout -b add-rich-dependency requirements.in # [3] New requirements get added to a requirements.in file. If you need to specify an exact version, or a minimum version you can do that, but if all versions generally work you can leave it open. # requirements.in rich Here I added the popular rich package to my requirements.in file. Since I am ok with the latest version I am not going to pin anything, I am going to let the pip resolver pick the latest version that does not conflict with any of my dependencies for me. build-reqs # [4] ...

I am a huge believer in practicing your craft. Professional athletes spend most of their time honing their skills and making themsleves better. In Engineering many spend nearly 0 time practicing. I am not saying that you need to spend all your free time practicing, but a few minutes trying new things can go a long way in how you understand what you are doing and make a hue impact on your long term productivity. What is Kedro [1] Start practicing # [2] practice building pipelines with #kedro today Go to your playground directory, and if you don’t have one, make one. cd ~/playground get pipx # [3] Install pipx in your system python. This is one of the very few, and possibly the only python library that deserves to be installed in your system directory, primarily because its used to sanbox clis in their own virtual environment [4] automatically for you. pip install pipx make a new project # [5] From inside your playground directory, start your new kedro project. This is quite simple and painless. So much so that if you mess this one up doing something wild, it might be easier to make a new one that fixing the wild one. pipx run kedro new # answer the questions it asks I u...