Ephes Blog

Miscellaneous things. Mostly Weeknotes and links I stumbled upon.

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Weeknotes 2022-05-30

, Jochen

Short work week, but didn't get much done besides work. Spent a lot of time outsides which is good.

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Weeknotes 2022-05-23

, Jochen

Haven't done much besides work and spending leasure time outside due to the good weather. Managed to record a podcast episode about European XFEL X-ray laser. Went to Japantag, wow, where have all those people been? In the evening Charan-Po-Rantan with Kankan Balkan played on the main stage. This was the first live concert I attended after more than two years and it was great.

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Weeknotes 2022-05-16

, Jochen

Trying to export a HDR video from my phone led to unexpected results. The colors were really washed out and the video was slightly overexposured. Using HandBrake I finally got a good looking mp4, but then someone uploaded this file to dropbox, and it looked bad for people downloading it from there. Strange.

Docker Desktop on Mac just broke during update and I couldn't restart it. Had to re-download it. Wow, this is some next level brokenness.

My PR to fix a bug in jupyterlab was merged. I couldn't find a solution to the "you cant mock a function which you call from another function in the same module" problem. Instead Frédéric Collonval circumvented the issue by using a test helper that dismisses the openen dialog instead of trying to mock it, thanks a lot.

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Papers

  • Note on Distributed Computing | Someone posted this on a twitter thread discussing why HATEOAS is a newer and more innovative concept than all this "modern" SPA solution being basically good old client/server/RPC architecture which attempted to compete with the web several times (CORBA, SOAP, etc), but failed each time.

Podcasts

  • #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Some nice anecdotes
  • Über Können, Nichtkönnen und den Weg dazwischen (Was denkst du denn?)
  • Revision 529: Richtig schätzen (Working Draft) | Hmm, there are quite some areas where I would respectfully disagree. For example: This notion of avoiding to spend too much time on optimizing your code. In reviews I rarely see code that is "too optimal" or has "too few bugs". In my experience people often say things like that when they mean to say: Optimizing this code is just not worth the effort. Which is a business decision. And if programmers make those decisions without telling a soul they make it impossible for the business to adapt (yes, this is bad). The same problem arises if you optimize for being correct on your estimations (good for you) by just doing small or simple stuff (bad for business).  Of course, when your customer is never ever talking to you - maybe because it's a pharao resting peacefully in a pyramid - it might pay off to cut some corners 😉.
  • Warum Java für die Cloud so gut ist, mit Adam Bien (programmier.bar) | Rather funny episode starting with the question: Why is Java so popular? Making a really long lived entity like a programming language (if successful) depend on a rather ephemeral entity like a company never resonated with me. Even before oracle hit the fan. But good marketing can do wonders. And I never got this whole serverless thing. The best explanation I saw is: serverless means pay by usage. Which might appeal to the needs of people coming from the host world, because hosts are so fucking expensive you have to be able to assign the blame. But there's a reason why hosts are dead. Personally I would prefer to make a service cheap enough you dont have to care instead of paying magnitudes more to be able to write more detailed bills. And there's always on premise, which I like too. But kubernetes and rancher being "perfect for on premise"? Wow, I think there's another marketing wonder in progress.
  • WR1362 Ernergiespeicher, Schwarze Löcher und Sex (WRINT Wissenschaf)
  • Episode 1 - Origin Story (Sad Python Girls Club) | New Python Podcast 🤩, lets see how it goes..

Weeknotes 2022-05-09

, Jochen

Attended Beyond Tellerrand 2022 which was a lot of fun. The wather was really nice this week, so I spent a fair amount of time outside. The new macro-capabilities of my phone camera are really nice (or scary, depending on the motive):



I finally started fixing the jupyterlab rename bug I stumbled upon the week before. The main problem implementing the fix is how to mock the shouldOverwrite function in the dialog.ts module. It's easy to mock functions with jest if you just want to mock the function you are calling in a test. But if you call a function that calls a function from the same module which you then want to mock, things get complicated. I commented on this issue two years ago, let's see how often I have to revisit it, until finding a fix 😌.

And then I released  kptncook 0.0.7 increasing mealie login timeout.

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Beyond Tellerrand 2022

, Jochen
Went to my second conference this year 🥳. The first one was PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2022 a few weeks ago and it was great. But beyond tellerrand has a very different vibe to it which I would describe as being more comfy and stylish at the same time. It's also a lot smaller. The talk videos will arrive bit by bit in this channel, I think.



This was the first beyond tellerrand I attended which had a live stream running for the complete event. Which turned out to be really great, because I was watching over our kids every second talk. It only occurred to me on day two that I just could use my phone to listen to the live stream of the talks while parenting (at least partially) and then being able to participate in the discussions after the talk. Really cool.

One of the main topics this time was accessibility. I was surprised by how bad the user experience of screen reeders still is. Coming from a machine learning background I expected screen readers to be able to just generate descriptions for images. But the state of the art seems to be still "don't forget to put alt tags on your images". I understand that building self driving cars is more rewarding than trying to fix screen readers, but there's a lot of potential for improvement.

Maybe there's also a business opportunity: Amazon makes a ton of money for improving the accessibility of buying stuff online. They already have all the required data so they can reduce the effort to just clicking the "buy" button. For most other shops, you have to jump to a lot of hoops to finally buy something. Reducing that to clicking a button or saying "buy x via shop y" is a very similar task from a technical perspective. Hmm, I guess I have to revisit this whole shopco idea at some point in the future 😉.