Category Archives: Updates from Carles

RAB El nou món digital 2022-05-09 [CA]

This content is available in Catalan language only.

Aquest és el guió per al proper programa El nou món digital a Ràdio Amèrica Barcelona, a emetre Dilluns 9 de Maig de 2022. 2022-05-09 14:30 Irish Time / 15:30 Zona horària Catalunya / 06:30 Pacific Time.

This is the excerpt of my radio program at Radio America Barcelona on Monday 2022-05-09 14:30 Irish Time / 15:30 Catalonia time / 06:30 Pacific Time.

Podeu veure el programa a partir del minut 35 a Twitch:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1479235573

Previ

Vam comentar sobre com els governs escocès i irlandès subvencionen estudis a estudiants estrangers, i a treballadors que volen estudiar carreres d’IT.

Notícies

  • Volkswagen i BP faran partnership i instal·laran milers de punts de càrrega ràpida per a cotxes elèctrics a Alemanya i a Regne Unit.

https://www.engadget.com/vw-bp-fast-ev-chargers-gas-stations-192019692.html

VW and BP know they’ll both have to embrace electric vehicles, and they’re ready to work together to ease some of the transitional pain. Autoweek reports the two companies are teaming up to install thousands of VW’s Flexpole 150kW fast EV chargers at gas stations in Germany and the UK. Within two years, there will be as many as 2,000 charging units (4,000 charge points) in place at BP stations in the UK and Aral locations in Germany.

The expansion should help BP expand its charging network to 8,000 connections by the end of 2024.

  • Rel·lacionat amb això, cal felicitar al govern irlandès, que el 4 de Febrer ha reeditat una iniciativa molt reixida on subvencionen els taxistes que comprin un cotxe completament elèctric amb 10.000 € més 2.500 € addicionals si el converteix en accessible per a cadira de rodes.

Si s’entrega un cotxe antic, més contaminant o amb molts kilòmetres, els imports subvencionats són el doble: 20.000 € i 5.000 € respectivament.

https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/f1623-up-to-25000-for-taxi-drivers-to-buy-electric-vehicles/

  • Xbox està enllestint la seva plataforma d’streaming de videojocs

Amb l’streamming no cal que tinguis una consola o un ordinador potent.

Ells t’envien la imatge i el so a l’ordinador i tu envies els moviments del comandament o el teclat. Això permet de retransmetre videojocs visualment impactants sense haver de gastar-se els diners en una consola o un ordinador molt potents.

Hi ha altres plataformes que fan això com: Google Stadia, Playstation Now (amb jocs de PS4), NVIDIA’s GeForce Now.

Això lliga una mica amb l’escassetat de processadors que fa que s’hagi d’esperar mesos per a aconseguir una consola d’última generació.

Amazon te una plataforma de subscripció per a Pc i Windows, que no és d’streamming, i que et permet de jugar a jocs gratis i tenir certes avantatges anomenat Amazon Prime Gaming.

Realment les empreses adoren els serveis de subscripció perque els permeten de predir quins ingressos tindran i no s’han de preocupar de la logística de fabricar i d’enviar coses.

https://www.engadget.com/xbox-game-streaming-device-tv-app-samsung-report-201006642.html

  • El CEO d’Intel va esmentar que el shortage de microxips s’allargarà durant el 2023 fins el 2024.

Degut al covid s’ha aturat molt la producció de microxips. Això s’ha vist reflexat en llargs temps d’espera per a comprar consoles com la Playstation 5, Ordinadors Mac, cotxes, o mòbils.

Nogenysmenys Intel està construint dues plantes gegantines a diferents indrets d’Estats Units.

https://www.engadget.com/intel-ceo-chip-shortage-continue-2024-141154415.html

Trucs

  • Starlink

Si viviu en zones rurals on no us arriba fibra, o teniu Internet de 6 Mbits, us pot interessar Starlink.

Starlink proporciona Internet molt ràpida, per satèl·lit, amb baixa latència.

És un servei create per Space X, és a dir, d’Elon Musk, el mateix propietari de Tesla, i ara de Twitter des de fa tres dies.

Operen a molts països. 32. Són a Amèrica, i a Europa. Amb problemes a la Índia pel govern no atorgant la llicència. Tot just han començat a Puerto Rico. Alguns amics meus a Irlanda l’utilitzen i estan súper contents. I molts terminals van ser distribuïts a Ukraïna per a que no es quedessin sense Internet quan Rússia els va envaïr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

Les velocitats que podem esperar per a Starlink depenen de la tarifa, però sol estar entre el 100Mbps i els 500Mbps per a baixada i de pujada des de 12 a més de 25 Mbps amb un preu bàsic de $99 USD mensuals.

Acaben d’aprovar-lo a Perú https://trome.com/tecnologia/starlink-gobierno-autoriza-a-la-empresa-de-internet-satelital-de-dar-servicios-en-peru-elon-musk-mtc-tecnologia-noticia/?ref=tr

Starlink també permet endur-se la connexió Internet, si viatgem pel mateix continent, si anem de camping, etc..

https://www.engadget.com/starlink-portability-internet-spacex-141228324.html

https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-performance-q4-2021

I Hawaian airlines vol oferir Internet amb Starlink als seus vols:

https://www.engadget.com/hawaiian-airlines-spacex-starlink-free-internet-131056087.html

L’únic que s’ha de vigilar és amb les possibles baixades de velocitat causades per… :)

https://www.starlink.com/

Humor

Un oient va comentar que cada cop que diem “tinc que” enlloc d’haig de, mor un gatet.

Així doncs vaig fer aquest Meme. :)

News from the blog 2022-03-22

Support to Ukraine

I’m Catalan. In 1936 the fascist military leaded by franco raised in arms against the elected government of the Spanish Republic. The Italian and nazi German fascist in power bombed the Catalan population. Hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens were assassinated and millions of Catalan and Spaniards had to exile. The sons of those that were ruling with the dictator have been insisting in naming it a “civil war”, but it was the military lead by a fascist, revolting against the legitimate Republic and ending a democracy.

The dictatorship lasted until 1975, when the dictator died in the bed. The effects of the repression never abandoned Catalonia, and nowadays in Catalonia people is still detained by the Spanish police for talking the Catalan language in front of them, and our Parliament decisions are cancelled by the Spanish courts, for example to force the exit of a President of Catalonia that they didn’t like, or to force the Catalan schools to teach 25% of the time in Spanish attacking the Catalan teaching system.

During WW2 millions of Jews were mass murdered, also people from all the nations were assassinated.

Russian population suffered a lot also fighting the nazis.

Now we have to see how Russia’s army is invading Ukraine and murdering innocent citizens.

That’s horrible.

I know Engineers from Ukraine. Those guys were doing great building wealthy based on knowledge and working well for companies across the world. Now these people are being killed or Engineers, amongst all the brave population, are arming themselves to fight the invasion. Shells destroy beautiful cities and population are starving, and young soldiers from both sides will never be seen again by their mothers.

I wrote a small article on how to identify and block in the Ubuntu firewall the Ip’s from Russia and Belarus until Russia leaves Ukraine.

Let music play in solidarity with Ukraine. First is a Catalan group. Second is a famous Irish band in this epic song dedicated to the brave International Brigades, volunteers that fought the fascism in Spain and in Catalonia trying to make a better world.

The Blog

I’ve updated the SSL Certificate. The previous one I bought was issued for two years, and I renewed as it was due to expire.

I wrote a short article about how to update the SSL Certificates for Apache 2 in Ubuntu 20.04.

Articles

I published a small Python script to show the local datetime and the Unix Epoch Time.

Open Source

carleslibs

On the 6th of January I released carleslibs v.1.0.7

https://pypi.org/project/carleslibs/1.0.7/

The new version contains these improvements:

  • Modified OsUtils.get_total_and_free_space_in_gib() to return float instead of Integer.
  • Added HashUtils class with md5 for unicode Strings.
    • Produces the same as md5sum Linux tool.
  • Created FileUtils.create_folders() which creates all the subfolders in the path deep.
  • Unit Testing:
    • Added test_get_inodes_in_use_and_free() to test_osutils.py
    • Added two tests more to test_osutils.py
    • Added test for version.py
    • Tests for HashUtils class.

My books

Python 3 Exercises for Beginners

I have updated the book, offering solution to exercises 11.1, 11.2 (simple and encapsulated in a function) and I’ve created exercise 11.3.

If you purchased the book before, you can download any update for free.

Amazon AWS

I got an offer by a super editorial to publish my book Automating and Provisioning with Amazon Python 3 SDK boto3.

Honestly, my ego was flattered. It is a lot of reputation.

Although in the past I got an offer from another monstrously big editorial to publish world wide my book Python 3 Combat Guide and I also rejected, and an offer from a digital learning platform to create an interactive course from this same book.

I’ve rejected it again this time.

If you are curious, this is what I answered to them:

Hi XXXX,

I'm well, thank you. I hope you are doing well too.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your conditions to me.

I feel flattered by your editorial thinking about me. I respect your brand, as I mentioned, as I own several of your titles.

However, I have to refuse your offer.

Is not the first time an editor has offered to publish one or more of my books. For all over the world, with much higher economic expectations.

I'll tell you why I love being at LeanPub:

1- I own the rights. All of them.
2- I can publish updates, and my readers get them for free. As I add new materials, the value is maximized for my readers.
3- I get 80% of the royalties.
4- If a reader is not happy, they can return the book for 60 days.
5- I can create vouchers and give a discount to certain readers, or give for free to people that are poor and are trying to get a career in Engineering.

The community of readers are very honest, and I only got 2 returns. One of them I think was from an editorial that purchased the book, evaluated it, and they contacted me to publish it, and after I rejected they applied for the refund.

I teach classes, and I charge 125 EUR per hour. I can make much more by my side than the one time payment you offer. The compensation for the video seems really obsolete.

Also, I could be using Amazon self publishing, which also brings bigger margins than you.

So many thanks for your offer. I thought about it because of the reputation, but I already have a reputation. I've thousands of visits to my tech blog, and because of the higher royalties, even if I sell less books through LeanPub it is much more rewarding.

Thanks again and have a lovely day and rest of the week.


Best,
Carles

The provisioning in Amazon AWS through their SDK is a book I’m particularly proud, as it empowers the developers so much. And I provide source code so they can go from zero to hero, in a moment. Amazon should provide a project sample as I do, not difficult to follow documentation.

Teaching / Mentoring

As I was requested, I’ve been offering advice and having virtual coffees with some people that recently started their journey to become Software Engineers and wanted some guidance and advice.

It has been great seeing people putting passion and studying hard to make a better future for themselves and for their families.

I’ll probably add to the blog more contents for beginners, although it will continue being a blog dedicated to extreme IT, and to super cool Engineering skills and troubleshooting.

For my regular students I have a discord space where we can talk and they can meet new friends studying or working in Engineering.

Free Resources

This github link provides many free books in multiple languages:

https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books

Tricks

Zoom can zoom the view. So if they are sharing their screen, and font is too small, you can give a relax to your eyes by using Zoom’s zoom feature. It is located in View.

My health

After being in the hospital in December 2021, with risk for my life, and after my incredible recuperation, I’ve got the good news that I don’t need anymore 2 of the 3 medicines I was taking in a daily basis. It looks well through a completely recovery thanks to my discipline, doing sport every day several times, and the fantastic Catalan doctors that are supporting me so well.

Since they found what was failing in me, and after the emergency treatments I started to sleep really well. All night. That’s a privilege that I didn’t have for long long time.

Humor

Sad but true history. How many super talented Engineers have been hired and then they were given a shitty laptop/workstation super slow? That happened to me when I was hired by Volkswagen IT: gedas. I was creating projects for very big companies and I calculated that I was wasting 2 hours of my time compiling. The computer did not had enough RAM and was using swap.

JavaScript fun (or not)

Yes, this works like this.

You can try yourself:

<html>
<body>
<script>
    console.log("11" + 1)
    console.log("11" - 1)
</script>
</body>
</html>

As you can see if you open the Browser Developer tools (in Linux and Windows press F12 key):

My Sites are under Maintenance

2021-11-08 Update: There is a Postmortem analysis of what happened with Amazon here.

TLTR: I’m undergoing a Maintenance on all my sites.

The main reason was that I was getting unexpected API Exceptions on the AWS SDK for Python (boto3), so I connected to the AWS Console to get more information.

Then I saw a message indicating that they will stop EC2-Classic today 30th of October. (Please read the Update on the Postmortem analysis as I understood incorrectly that banner message)

I already started migrating my Services, some I move to other providers like Digital Ocean. Other I had plant to keep in Amazon.

EOL (End of Life) was scheduled for 2022 August, so when I saw the message from Amazon the evening of the 29th, I decided to migrate my EC2-Classic Public Ip’s and Compute to VPC. Trying to deploy from an AMI, Amazon APIs were returning many internal errors, and as I figured out where their failures would be I was able get instances being launch without being Terminated immediately without an explanation. Still I had many problems with the Internet Gateway, VPC NAT, etc… after hours fighting with their errors, and their console, that is more a bunch of pages to manage Infrastructure rather than a user/developer friendly Cloud Tool I decided that I had enough.

After 11 years using Amazon AWS, including a trip to Dublin to be hired as Manager for Cloud Watch, and giving them the idea to add AutoScaling (I was told the project was too easy for me and that I would get bored in a year or too so I was not hired), I decided to move my Services to Google Cloud and to Digital Ocean.

I’m very polite and I saw that when I told to one Manager that the User Interface was terrible he didn’t like, but I have to speak up and say that tools for developers cannot be cold as your evil girlfriend. Cannot be API alike, stand alone pages to manage infinite parts of Architecture. Web providing services for developers cannot be created like in cold SysAdmin style. If the infrastructure is hard to manage and internally you use APIs, build nice Wizards in Javascript. I was leading a Team of Developers with infinite less resources than Amazon or Google and we wrote a Multi-Cloud product, with nice, and clever, and easy to use Wizards, and they were infinitely more better that those giant CSPs. We won a prize at European level at that time. But it was 2013.

I’ve migrated everything, moved all the data, statics, VMs… but I’m completing the adjustments for certain services like Cassandra nodes, web sites, bootstrapping some of my sites based of my PHP Catalonia Framework, adding Firewall rules to GCP, doing changes for Ansible provisioning, deploying the Server scripts from IaC, Docker, etc…

I’ll be posting updates in Twitter.

Released Python CarlesLibs version 0.99.2

I’ve updated my pypi carleslibs package to version 0.99.2.

The addition I made to this version is StringUtils class which offer functionalities for handling amount conversions (to different units), number formatting, string formatting and align (left, right…). I added a 85% of Unit Testing Code Coverage.

Here you have some general information about how to install and how to use the package:

https://blog.carlesmateo.com/carleslibs/

Remote working is here

So remote working is here.

After years in which many Engineers requested to the companies to be able to Remote Work, with most of answers No, now it happens that not only is good for the company, is the only way to ensure continuity of business, of many businesses.

One of my colleagues from Denmark, which government has shutdown the country by sending all the public servants to home, in order to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, told me:

“Yes, remote working is here, but has been necessary the four horsemen of the apocalypse”

It is curious, how Remote Working has arrived, no thanks to that was obvious, but due to external emergencies. And I’m glad that my company was prepared for business continuity.

I’ll be staying home, working remotely, in order to contribute to non-spreading the virus, specially among old people. I’m perfectly healthy but that’s a use case, many people will not develop the symptoms and still be able to spread to others.

So I have some plans related to technology to do at home, including few improvements to the blog. What are your plans?.

Update: 2020-03-13 23:16 UTC I’m thinking in all those business which are forces to close, and all the employees that will not get a salary, or will be fired, or will get a salary and the business owner maybe ends in bankrupt as is paying the salaries and no income is being generated.

Update: 2020-03-19 10:58 UTC Some of my friends, even in Human Resources/Recruiting, are starting to remote work for first time. So here is some advice:

I would recommend to get an external monitor, at least 22″, so you neck is not forcing position looking low and your eyes don’t suffer, good light (don’t in dark), a nespresso can be a good friend in the morning, and to have your hands and arms aligned correctly so you don’t suffer from a bad position. Watch the position of the wrists, your arms should be comfortably at the same level than the table, similar in an L, and your eyes be aligned to the top of your monitor. Finally I would recommend to follow a routine, like if you were going to work, so dress like you would do. Don’t stay at home all day in pijamas! ;)