I’ve published a new book (is still work in progress at 25%): Python 3 exercises for beginnings. Albert Ballart and Sandra Soriano coauthored with me. Thanks!.
The company has provided me and the members of my Team with unlimited Cloud capacity for testing and developing. That’s very nice. I plan to run some nice workloads to asses the performance of several solutions.
I’ve had tons of assignments from the university and with the classes to my students I had no much time.
The Health Department and the universities (CIT and UCC) offered free PCR for the students. I can only say Kudos again for Ireland.
They also offered certain more vulnerable students to vaccinate with Pfizer. More Kudos.
I bought some cases for Raspberry Pi 4.
I’ve bought a Wi-fi Mesh TP-Link to repeat the Wifi signal to zones of the house it was arriving weak. I’m very satisfied with this signal repeater.
This little buddy also provides an Ethernet to connect to a laptop or to a switch.
So far I have only tested with a laptop and works great.
I also released CTOP TAG v.0.8.4 and fixed some bugs in upcoming CTOP v.0.8.5 and added a new feature to display the File Descriptors in use and the Max FDs set in the Kernel. This feature needed some work as I did calculating all the FDs per process but Kernel has another value that comes from /proc/sys/fs/file-nr so I finally implemented this last value, fixed a bug in conversion of units with decimals (KBs without the decimal part) and added Unit Testing to check this cases. I was satisfied to release v. 0.8.5.
I have updated CTOP.py so now it detects if is running in a Google GCP instance.
So the list of instances/type of virtualization detected is:
Amazon AWS
Google GCP
OpenStack
VirtualBox
Docker containers
LXC
I’m working in detecting Raspberry Pi, models running CTOP, and in enabling the plugins system so anybody can easily expand the functionality of ctop.py.
v.0.7.8 Commented annotations and type hinting, to make CTOP compatible with Python 3.5.0. Added Available RAM. Added Google GCP detection. Inform if it doesn't have permissions to decode DMI. Print the userId (numeric) and the User (string), like: 1000 carles or 0 root. Logic for swappiness <= 10 Ok, >10 and <= 30 warning, >30 red (alert). Reduced digits for swap to 2, to avoid confusions.
I have updated my book Python 3 Combat Guide, with another full cycle, step by step, to convert an ugly script that escapes to shell to a nice OOP code with Unit Testing, step by step.
I have updated my book ZFS for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, adding how to create a pool and Datasets for home, sharing NFS for the Media Player.
If you like Star Wars and the Mandalorian, you may laugh has much as I did with this video:
As you see I’m writing more articles about Windows, Mac Os X, and proprietary Software. Some of my colleagues work in companies and use proprietary Software, so I’ll be writing more articles about those ecosystems. I spend more time now with colleagues working on all kind of projects, and with students that have other problems too, so I help them. However my main focus is Open Source, Architecture, Scaling, programming in Python and Java.
Is something very simple, but will help my student friends to validate Input from Keyboard without losing too many hours.
The Input Validation Classes I create in PHP for Privalia or in my PHP Catalonia Framework, are much, much, more powerful, allowing the validation of complete forms, rendering errors, etc… although they were created for Web, and not for Keyboard input.
It recursively goes to all the subdirectories looking for .py files, and then it counts the lines.
I updated the price of my books to be the minimum allowed by LeanPub, to $5 USD, and created a bundle of two of them for $7 USD.
So people can benefit from this during the lock down.
I’ve updated the Python Combat Guide book with a sample of using Paramiko Libraries for SSH, and increased the Object Oriented Programing and Unit Testing, sections. I also added some books to the Bibliography.
I’ve read the postmortem initial analysis from Slack’s incident. It’s really interesting.
I cannot share it, but I guess that at some point they will publish it on their blog:
I tried to continue following it since I left Sanmina. ZFS is really an amazing Software and it’s lead by an amazing Community of super cool Engineers and companies. I would like to continue contributing ASAP.
I bought some new hard drives in order to work a bit on this. You don’t need to have dedicated hardware if you want to test features. You can run in a VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation.
I received more books about DevOps and Python
None is perfect. I see flaws in all of them and bad architecture practices*, however from all I learn interesting things.
You know, I study every day. At least 30 minutes, after work. As part of my healthy routines.
But I also study and learn during the work, as we have time available for this.
I’m very fortunate that Blizzard gives me time every day to study. That’s amazing. They also send us to events paying the ticket, travel, hotel, expenses… now with covid-19 we only go to virtual events, but the company still pay for this and give free days. Is a very nice company.
I continue having purchases of my book, and I’m very happy about that. I’m working on improving it and providing more contents and samples going from the scratch, with step by step code samples. From spaghetti code reading CSV files, to OOP with Full Coverage.
My application for a Higher degree Computer Science Cloud Computing (Level 8) has been accepted. The Irish government pays me 90% of the degree, and Blizzard will pay me the other 10% after I pass the first year course.
I’m really grateful to this beautiful country, Ireland.
Having an Irish degree is something that brings me an special illusion.
I have updated CTOP.py with some interesting features
It allows to pass a fixed width and height for the terminal render. That’s very useful when you run CTOP in a Docker non interactive session, or from a Cron, with the –iterations=1 so the output can be captured programmatically.
Jetbrains has provided me with a Free License of all their products, in order to support my work in Open Source projects. That’s very nice. I’m using now mainly PyCharm and PhpStorm.
At the beginning of the covid-19 I wrote a simulator in Python. That’s why I was able to anticipate that the number of cases and deaths would be very much higher when nobody around me knew what was going to happen. My first simulations were simple, and the algorithms were growing in complexity until I had a full rich Object Oriented modeler. Maybe I’ll write an article about this someday.
I studied the evolution of several countries and I was working with simulations in Spain until their government started blocking the information and stop providing transparent and accurate metrics.
I’m seeing how the covid is affecting and transforming several kind of business:
Meetup.com I see meetups with more than 1,000 users closing, as they are no meeting anymore
Airlines, obviously
Hotels, offering less services
Metasearchers and OTAs (Online travel agencies)
I can imagine the impact on airbnb
Discos, nightclubs are closing doors
Restaurants, they will lose the Christmas season (with families and companies doing lunch and dinners)
At the same time, other companies are hitting records in sales
Videogames companies
Hardware is being sold, to accommodate WFH and remote working.
Companies like Amazon or Overstock.com are delivering well where people before were buying into stores.
VPN solutions for Remote Working are being implemented in those places that had not enabled Remote Working.
After doing a Masterclass to some colleagues about Refactor, Code Reliability, Quality, The non-happy path and Unit Testing, I’m preparing some contents that I’ll publish to the Community soon. So far I created this repo, where I added the source code for lesson 0: starting to program in Python videos that I created few months ago to help beginners.
I also added some contents to lesson 1, where we refactor pure spaghetti code with no error control, to something more elaborated with unit testing and full code coverage. Still procedural, but I will jump to next class in two weeks, where we will move to OOP and Dependency Injection.
If you are using Git Submodules, is very probable that at some point you will create you own libraries. Probably those libraries will have their own structure, even with their own tests/ folder and you’re adding into a subfolder into your new project and maybe you have problems using relative imports.
This is a trick you can use to add the relevant root folder of your project to the System Path, so the libraries are found, specially when you call by command line from anywhere in the filesystem. This works for Python2 and Python3.
#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import os
s_path_program = os.path.dirname(__file__)
sys.path.append(s_path_program + '../../')
from clib.src.argsutils import ArgsUtils
from clib.src.datetimeutils import DateTimeUtils
from clib.src.fileutils import FileUtils
After some work reviewing it and ensuring it has the expected quality, I finally published my book Python Combat Guide.
Is an atypical creation. Is more a Master Class to my best friend, it could be a SDM, TL leading a small Software Development department, a Coder or a Scientist wanting to join IT as programmer and to learn a lot of stuff very quickly, than rather a formal Python Book for learning. Absolutely is not for beginners.
If you want to buy it, to explore the TOC, extended description…
