How big can be a variable (float, integer, string)
Operations performed, like +
MT Notation I use
The order in which the instructions are performed (top to bottom).
Declaring a variable
We can call thinks that were previously defined up (like functions)
Loops will send the execution pointer up
Operations with integer variables
Additions
Operations with Strings
Language syntax and tricks (write a Notebook with your own notes)
Pre-created solutions, like reverse an string with for
Open a file, read the contents by lines to string, split the strings to arrays by a separator, like tab or space, get what you want by position.
with open(s_filename) as file:
for s_line in file:
print(s_line)
# Show Exceptions
# Show hexadecimal of the text:
# cd /home/carles/Desktop/code/carles/python-classes/2021-11-11
# hexdump -c text.txt
# remove enters, spaces at the end of the file with s_line.rstrip()
The blocks and functions
Indentation
Typical error missing :
Functions are for reusing code and reducing errors
As they are for reusing, they are flexible (parameters)
The while loop
The condition True
The condition in a variable
The condition in a if
Break
Pattern counter inside a loop
Building a Menu for user selection in text mode
Input
Validation
Questions
As part of the questions, a question about the mental process to Build the solution was raised.
TODO: Was explained
The importance of keeping Notes with snippets of code that you normally use one time and another
How to search in Google to find explanations in Python sites
A question was raised about how menus could be implemented using OOP
A parent Menu class, with a MenuAdmin class inheriting was demonstrated. The MenuAdmin inherits the menu options from the parent Menu, and adds Admin only options.
Only 2% of the viewers donate, so I answered the call every time it was made.
This is my 5th donation to Wikimedia.
I consider that Freedom is very important.
I bought these new books
One of my secrets to be on top is that I’m always studying.
I study all the time, at work and in my free time.
I use Linux Academy and I buy books in paper. I don’t connect with reading in tablets. I think information is stored better when read in paper. I use also a marker and pointers to keep a direct access to the most interesting points on the books.
And I study all kind of themes. Obviously I know a lot of Web Scraping, but there is always room for learning more. And whatever new I learn helps me to be better with my students and more clear writing my books.
I’ve never been a Front End, but I’ve been able to fix bugs in the Front End engines from the companies I worked for, like Privalia. I was passed a bug that prevented the Internet Explorer users to buy just one hour before we launching a massive campaign. I debugged and I found a variable named “value” so the html looked like <input name="value" value="">. In less than 30 minutes I proved to the incredulous Head of Development and the CTO that a bug in Internet Explored was causing a conflict when fetching the value from the input named value. We deployed to Production the update and the campaign was a total success. So I consider knowing Javascript and Front also a need, even if I don’t work directly with it. I want to be able to understand all the requirements and possibilities, and weaknesses, so I can fix bugs and save the day. That allowed me to fix scalability problems in Nodejs and Phantomjs projects too. (They are Javascript Server Side, event driven, projects)
It seems that Amazon.co.uk works well again for Ireland. My two last orders arrived on time and I had no problems of border taxes apparently.
Nice Python article
I enjoyed a lot this article, cause explains part of what I did with my student and friend Albert, in a project that analyzes the access logs from Apache for patterns of attempts of exploits, then feeds a database, and then blocks those offender Ip Addresses in the Firewall.
The article only covers the part of Pandas, of reading the access.log file and working with it, but is a very well redacted article:
Normally if we need to refresh a config in a Container we will spawn a new one, or we will access with sudo docker exec -it /bin/sh mycontainer for instance and force a reload, or we will have to restart the Container.
What if we want to be able to reload the config at any moment without restarting the process, or to trigger a process in our Container (like a dump or a flush) in another way than implementing an API?.
An unexplored way, for many, to communicate with your Container’s main process is to send Signals.
So basically I will show you how you can trap Signals within a Python process which is the main process for your Docker Container, and send them from your Hypervisor with the command:
sudo docker kill --signal=SIGUSR1
I choose to use SIGUSR1 as it is reserved for user defined Signals.
You can clone the project or get the source code from:
FROM ubuntu:20.04
MAINTAINER Carles Mateo
RUN apt update && apt install -y python3 python3-pip vim less && apt-get clean
# This will make sure printing in the Screen when running in dettached mode
ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1
ENV DOCKERSIGNAL /var/dockersignal
RUN mkdir -p $DOCKERSIGNAL
COPY *.py $DOCKERSIGNAL
WORKDIR $DOCKERSIGNAL
# Again to enforce printing to the Screen when running dettached
CMD ["python3", "-u", "/var/dockersignal/dockersignal.py"]
The dockersignal.py file
# By Carles Mateo https://blog.carlesmateo.com
import signal
import time
def handler(signum, frame):
print('Signal handler called with signal', signum)
if signum == 10:
# 10 is the equivalent to SIGUSR1 for most x86/ARM (not for Alpha/Sparc, MIPS, PARISC)
print("Simulated action: Reload config")
if __name__ == "__main__":
print("Waiting for a Signal")
# Listed for this signal, so can listen for more
signal.signal(signal.SIGUSR1, handler)
while True:
# Do Whatever
time.sleep(1)
A shell file to build and run the Container like a pro
#!/bin/bash
DOCKER_CONTAINER_NAME="docker-signal"
DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME="docker-signal"
printf "Removing old Container %s\n" "${DOCKER_CONTAINER_NAME}"
sudo docker rm "${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"
printf "Removing old Image %s\n" "${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"
sudo docker image rm "${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"
echo "Creating Docker Image"
sudo docker build -t ${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME} . --no-cache
retVal=$?
if [ $retVal -ne 0 ]; then
printf "Error. Exit code %s\n" ${retVal}
exit
fi
echo "Running Docker Container ${DOCKER_CONTAINER_NAME} based in image ${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}"
sudo docker run --cpus="1.0" --name ${DOCKER_CONTAINER_NAME} ${DOCKER_IMAGE_NAME}
Here is the complete history of why I migrated all the services from my 11 years old Amazon account to other CSP.
Some lessons can be learned from my adventure.
I migrated my last services from Amazon to GCP
Amazon sent me an email on October 6th, this year 2021, telling me that they will disable EC2-Classic by August 2022. I thought I would not be able to keep my Static Ip’s as in the past VPC Ip’s and EC2-Classic Ip’s were not transferable, so considering that I would loss my Static Ip’s anyway I started to migrate to some to other providers like Digital Ocean.
Is not cool losing Static Ip (Elastic Ip in AWS) Addresses as this is bad for SEO, so given that I though I would lose my Static Ips that have been with me for years, I started to migrate certain services to providers much more economic.
Amazon is terrible communicating, and I talked with some product managers in the past about that, when they lost one of my Volumes, and the email was so cold and terrible that actually that hurt more than Amazon losing my Data. I believed that it was a poorly made Scam and when I realized it was true I reached one of my friends, that is manager there, as I know they care for doing things right, and he organized a meeting with two PM so I can pass my feedback.
The Cloud providers are changing things very fast, and nobody is able to be up to date with the changes, unless their work position allows plenty of time to get updated. Even if pages of documentation are provided, you have to react to an event that they externally generated forcing you to action. Action to read all the documentation about EC2-Classic migrations, action to prepare to have migrated by August 2022.
So August 2022… I was counting that I had plenty of time but I’m writing a new book about using the Amazon SDK for Python, boto3, and I was doing some API calls and they started to fail in a very unusual way, Exceptions with timeout, but only for the only region where I had EC2-Classic.
urllib3.exceptions.NewConnectionError: <botocore.awsrequest.AWSHTTPSConnection object at 0x7f0347d545e0>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno -2] Name or service not known
But if I switched to another region name, it would work:
region_name='us-west-2',
I made a mistake in here, the region name is “us-east-1” and not “us-east-1a“. “us-east-1a” is the availability zone. So the SDK was giving a timeout because in order to connect to the endpoint it uses the region name as part of the hostname. So it doesn’t find that endpoint because it doesn’t exist.
I never understood why a company like Amazon is unable to provide the SDK with a sample project or projects 100% working, with the source code so people has a base that works to build up.
Every API that I have created, I have provided it with documentation but also with example for several languages for how to use it.
In 2013 I was CTO of an online travel agency, and we had meta-searchers consuming our API and we were having several hundreds of thousands requests per second. Everything was perfectly documented, examples were provided for several languages, the document and the SDK had version numbers…
Everybody forgets about Developers and companies throw terrible and cold products to the poor Developers, so difficult to use. How many Developers would like to say: Listen Mr. President of the big Cloud Company XXXX, I only want to spawn a VM that works, and fast, with easy wizards. I don’t want to learn 50 hours before being able to use your overpriced platform, by doing 20 things before your Ip’s are reflexes of your infrastructure and based in Microservices. Modern JavaScript frameworks can create nice gently wizards even if you have supercold APIs.
Honestly, I didn’t realize my typo in the region and I connected to the Amazon Console to investigate and I saw this.
Honestly, when I read it I understood that they were going to end my EC2 Networking the 30th of October. It was 29th. I misunderstood.
It was my fault not reading it well to the end, I got shocked by the first part telling about shutdown and I didn’t fully understood as they were going to shutdown EC2-Classic for the zones I didn’t had anything running only.
From the long errors (3 exceptions chained) I didn’t realize that the endpoint is built with the region name. (And I was passing the availability zone)
botocore.exceptions.EndpointConnectionError: Could not connect to the endpoint URL: "https://ec2.us-east-1a.amazonaws.com/"
Here is when I say that a good SDM would had thought and cared for the Developers more, and would had made the SDK to check if that region exists. How difficult is to create a SDK a bit more clever that detects a invalid region id?. It is not difficult.
It is true that it was late in the evening and I was tired of all the day, and two days of the week between work and zoom university classes I work 15 hours and 13 hours respectively, not counting the assignments, so by the end of the week I am very tired. But that’s why it is very important to follow methodology and to read well. I think Amazon has 50% of the fault by the way they do things: how the created the SDK, how they communicate, and by the errors that the console returned me when I tried to create a VPC instance of an EC2-Classic AMI (they seem related to the fact I had old VPC Network objects with shorter hash than the current they use) and the other 50% was my fault for not identifying the source of the error, and not reading the message in their website well.
But the fact that there were having those errors in the API’s and timeouts made me believe they were going to cut the EC2-Classic Networking the next day.
All the mistakes fall together in a perfect storm.
I checked for documentation and I saw it was possible to migrate my Static Ip’s to VPC Static Ip’s.
It was Friday evening, and I cancelled my plans, in order to migrate the Blog to VPC in an attempt to keep running it with Amazon.
As Cloud Architect, I like to have running instances in several CSP as it allows me to stay up to date with the changes they do.
I checked the documentation for the migration. Disassociating the Static Ip (Elastic Ip in AWS jargon) was easy. Turning into VPC as well.
As I progressed, what had to be easy turned into a nightmare, as I was getting many errors from the Amazon API, without any information, and my Instances were not created.
I figured out that their API could have problems with old VPC objects I created time ago, so I had to create new objects for several things.
I managed to spawn my instances but they were being launch and terminated instantly without information. Frustrating.
When launching a new instance from the AMI (a Snapshot of the blog), I was giving shown options to add more volumes without any sense. My Instance was using 16GB from a 20GB total Space, and I was shown different volume configs, depending on the instance, in some case an additional 20GB volume, in other small SSD, ephemeral and 10 GB for the AMI (which requires at least 16GB).
After some fight I manage to make it work after deleting the volumes that made no sense, and keeping only one of 20GB, the same size of my AMI.
But then my nightmare started to make the VPC Instance to have Internet access and to be seen from outside. I had to create a new Internet Gateway, NAT, Network, etc…
As mentioned the old objects I was trying to reusing were making the process to fail.
I was running out of time, and I thought in few time they were going to shutdown EC2-Classic network (as I did not read correctly), so I decided to download everything and to migrate to another provider. For doing that first I blocked all the traffic, except for my Ip.
I worked in parallel, creating the new config in Google Cloud, just in case I had forgot something. I had created a document for the migration and it was accurate.
I managed to do everything fast enough. The slower part was to download all the Data, as I hold entire VM’s for projects like Cassandra Universal Driver.
Then I powered off my Amazon Instance for the Blog forever.
In GCP I blocked all the traffic in the firewall, except for my Ip, so I could work calmly.
When everything was ready, I had to redirect the DNS to the new static Ip from Google.
The DNS provider I used had implemented some changes in their API so I was getting errors replacing my old entry ‘.’ (their JSON calls returned Internal Server Error). Finally I figured it out how to workaround it and I was able to confirm that the first service was up and running.
I did some tests to make sure there were not unexpected permission problems, entries in the logs, etc…
Only then I opened the Google Firewall. I have a second firewall in each instance where I block or open at Ip tables level what I want. Basically abusive bot’s IPs trying to find exploits or brute force by dictionary passwords.
I checked with my phone, without Wifi that the Firewall was all good. (It is always a good idea to use another external Ip, different from the management one, to check)
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 made a Donation to The Document Foundation, which makes the OpenOffice.
I use OpenOffice suite for writing my books and other documents, so I think it’s fair to contribute with their operating costs.
I’ve installed a plugin to add Code Highlighting
It also allows me to add blocks of Code, like this:
if CodeHighlighting.b_is_installed == True:
return VisualImprovement.update_to(10), "It's easy to read"
else:
return VisualImprovement.get_still_the_same_difficult_to_read(), "The blog lives in the medieval age"
Or Inline Code like print(self.awareness) which is also great
I’ve improved a bit, visually, the blog
I modified a bit my template. The changes consist into adding an id attribute to the table for the Quick Selection of the articles, and modifying my template: the styles in the file css/blocks.css and modifying the version in functions.php to reflect the new timestamp.
I also made that when the mouse goes over a link it is displayed in blue, and the already visited in a slightly darker blue.
#articles_selection a:hover {color: #2222FF;}
In the images below you can see the before, the intermediate, and the final.
I’ve also added a button to hide or show the Quick Selection
If you have a WordPress and jQuery does not work for you, with error:
TypeError: $ is not a function
$(document).ready(function(){
This is because for compatibility reasons you have to do different in WordPress:
jQuery(document).ready(function($){
I created several videos of 5 minutes to learn Unit Testing in Python 3 with pytest
The new PSU arrived and I replaced it on Saturday 16th
After 5 days working nonstop, with no problems, it seems clear that the failing item was the expensive, 850W, Corsair PSU. Sometimes it happens that a new component comes defective, but I paid overprice expecting quality, and it seems that the PSU was defective. Since the beginning the computer powered off every few hours max, so I have to finally assume that effectively it was the PSU. Disappointed with Corsair.
Firewall. This month I’ve blocked around 2,000 visitors that were mainly bots searching for exploits
I review the logs several times every day.
Actually I’ve blocked many more Ip’s in the firewall, as when I identify a company source of bots, I block all their range (Imagine, as I block entire class C addresses, there are 256 Ips each class C /24). This has translated into 2,000 visitors less per month to the blog, that were offenders.
I added some rules / guidelines to the Leave a Reply section
I moderate all the comments to keep the blog an useful and healthy place.
And I don’t publish Spam, or Marketing messages.
Abusive comments are blocked. Competent Engineers and nice human beings share their points and doubts with data, with technical arguments, with education, in a respectful and polite way. People that cannot observe a minimum decoration are not welcome.
I published this book to help developers to understand and use Docker.
It is not targeted to SysAdmins, is aimed to Developers that want to get an operative know how by examples very quickly, and easy to read.
My other books have also updates not yet published, however an update has been published for Python 3 exercises for beginners book.
University classes are restarted, and I fixed my tower.
For the Cloud computing degree this semester VMWare is used intensively.
I have a dedicated tower with an AMD Ryzen 7 processor, a Samsung NMVe drive PCIe 4.0, which provides me a throughput of 6GB/second (six Gigabytes, so 48 Gbit/second), SAS drives and SATA too. It’s a little monster with 64 GB of RAM and 2.5 Gbps NIC.
It was not starting.
The problem was in the Video card, which made loosely contact to the motherboard.
I had to disconnect everything until I found what it was, but after moving the video card to another PCI slot, it worked.
I knew it was some sort of short circuit / bad contact as the fans were turning for a second and turning off immediately.
After this, the computer works fine but it will poweroff in about 4h and 12 hours. I’ve been testing and removing each component until I believe is the PSU. I’ve ordered a new one from a Dutch provider with web store in Ireland that my former colleague Thomas showed me one year and half ago.
Since England leaved the EU, it is impossible to buy from amazon.co.uk without experiencing problems in the border and delays.
If you want to learn how to assemble a PC, fix the problems and upgrade your laptop, I wrote this book:
If you are curious about what I use in my day to day:
A tower for developing and reading my email, with Linux, Intel i7 7800X (12 cores) and 64 GB of RAM, with Nvidia graphics card
A tower for holding Virtual Machines, with Linux, AMD Ryzen 7 3700x (16 cores) and 64 GB of RAM, with Nvidia graphics card
An upgraded HP laptop for programming in the cafe, is a Windows 10, with 16 GB of RAM
Raspberry Pi 4 and 3, from time to time
A laptop for programming, for Work, 16 GB of RAM
A tower for programming, for Work, at the office, 32 GB of RAM
I also had a Dell computer which battery inflated elevating the touchpad, an Acer 11.6 Latop very lightweight which screen died cracked apparently (it’s a mistery to me how this happened as I removed from the bag and it was cracked. That little laptop accompanied me during years, to many countries, as for a while I carried it with me 100% of the time. At that time if the companies I worked for had outages they were losing thousands of euros per hour, so as CTO I fixed broken stuff even in a restaurant. Believe when I recommend you and your teams to use Unit Testing) and a 15.6″ Acer with 16GB of RAM that was part of the payment of an Start up I was CTO for, and which screen flicks intermittently and I managed to fix it by applying a pressure point to a connector, so I managed to use as fixed computer at the beginning of being in Ireland. I was not using it much, as I had two laptops from work when working for Sanmina, a Dell with 16 GB of RAM and Core i7 with two external monitors and an Intel Xeon with 32GB of RAM, heavy weight, but very useful for my job (programming, doing demos, having VMs…).
I’ve assembled all my PC from the scratch, piece by piece, and I force myself to do it so I keep up to date of the upcoming technologies, buses, etc…
My students are doing well. Congrats to Albert for getting 8.67 from 10 in his university programming course exams!.
Diablo 2 Resurrected is published and I am in the credits :)
I’m in the credits of all our games since I joined, but I’m happy every time I see myself and my colleagues on them. :)
This release includes SubProcessUtils which is a class that allows you to execute commands to the shell (or without shell) and capture the STDOUT, STDERR, and Exit Code very easily.
I’ve used my libraries for a hackaton PoC for work, for Monitoring one aspect of one of our top games side, and I coded it super quickly. :)
They loved it and we have a meeting scheduled to create a Service from my PoC. :)
You may like some of other graphs that can be easily generated with matlib package.
I’ve been always working on BackEnd and APIs and I don’t work on FrontEnd, although I programmed some videogames by myself and I’ve fixed some huge bugs in JavaScript in some of the companies I work, but they considered myself the last resource, so I would fix a FrontEnd bug when nobody else could. But even if you work 99.9% of your time in BackEnd, Scaling, Architecture… like me, it is useful being able to draw graphics, for example, when you create a tool that shows the number of players per minute, and its evolution over time, or web visitors in real time, etc…
