Ephes Blog

Look, it's not our fault you people are made out of telemetry we can monetize --lcamtuf

Normal work week. Still catching up on my open source stuff:

• Finally released django-cast 0.2.28 which adds a way to provide all the data needed to render lists of posts without hitting the database. At the moment this is only used by the feed view, but more views will follow soon. And Wagtail 6 is now supported, while support for Wagtail 4 and Django < 4.2 is dropped.
• New kptncook release fixing a bug in the json export, thanks to @ton-An
• And a django-filepond release fixing some minor issues

Two weeks ago, I thought I had got my home network problems under control. But I was wrong - after my futile router and switch replacements, my wife's masterful Ethernet crimping skills finally fixed our home network problems.

Articles

• (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)) | Classic
• Python stretches lead in language popularity index
• Breaking Down Tasks | I'm not sure about the value this adds, but knowing about this doesn't hurt, right?
• django-allauth - Grand Plans for 2024 | It's about to implement passkeys, cool!
• Structlog with Django is Awesome! | It is
• Still trying to learn CSS
  • A (more) Modern CSS Reset
  • A CSS project boilerplate
• How fast can we process a CSV file | Nice writeup
• Mental Health in Open Source

Mastodon

• poll: did you know that in a git merge conflict, the order of the code is different when you do a merge/rebase? | Honestly didn't know this, but it explains a lot 😮

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 10: March 04 to March 10 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR | Simon Willison

Software

• django-prose-editor - Prose editor for the Django admin based on ProseMirror | Very cool!
• pywebview is a lightweight cross-platform wrapper around a webview component that allows to display HTML content in its own native GUI window

Podcasts

• The Future of Python - Deb Nicholson (Django Chat)
• Episode 9: Py Day with Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel (core.py) | Good one!

Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game that lets you live out such fantasies as:

- Having money

- Making close friends as an adult

- Travelling the world without crippling debt

- Being able to change the world

- Getting better at something with practice

- Getting 8 hours of sleep each night --Dgar

Normal work week. Attended the PyDDF Python Spring Sprint which was great. I had to stop working on django-cast in January and used the Sprint to finally catch up. It's now possible to fetch all the data needed to render a list of pages (example: the feed) in one go and then pass that data to Wagtail, which then renders the pages without hitting the database. This opens up a lot of possibilities for performance improvements. The original plan was to work on a transcript feature, but this is fine too 😅. Adding transcripts is the next big feature on the list.

Mid-week I stumbled across this Mastodon post that forced me to indulge in some Vietnam travel nostalgia. I Went to an opera performance which was also great. And we released a new podcast episode about freelancing. Oh, and I managed to patch my favorite terminal font MonoLisa with some nerd font symbols because I finally started using Neovim again via LazyVim. Hmm, quite a busy week.

Articles

• STF invests in reimplementing GNU coreutils in Rust | This is surprisingly useful spent tax money, congrats!
• On pip isolation
• From Beeps to Toots: Reviving Pagers with Python and Mastodon
• Making wagtail.org more accessible | Results of an a11y audit
• How to spend less time writing Django tests | Using kolo to generate integration tests. Hmm, I for one actually enjoy writing tests 🤔
• The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken

Videos

• Is UV the FUTURE of Python PACKAGING? 🐍📦 | It depends 😄 - good video!

Software

• wger - Self hosted FLOSS fitness/workout, nutrition and weight tracker written with Django
• djangosaml2 - A Django application that builds a Fully Compliant SAML2 Service Provider on top of PySAML2 library | Got some updates lately
• LazyVim is a Neovim setup powered by 💤 lazy.nvim to make it easy to customize and extend your config | Nice excuse to start playing around with neovim again
• Warp is the terminal reimagined | Shiny new terminal 🖥️
• tox-uv is a tox plugin which replaces virtualenv and pip with uv in your tox environments

Papers

• Mamba: Linear-lime Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces | Alternative architecture

Podcasts

• Cameron Jones & Sean Trott: Understanding, Grounding, and Reference in LLMs (The Gradient Podcast) | Interesting bits on how to test LLMs for theory of mind etc
• Episode 193: Wes McKinney on Improving the Data Stack & Composable Systems (The Real Python Podcast) | Cool episode!

At one point as a teenager I did arrange a physical swap of “hacking” software on floppy disks in a series of posts on a BBS using coded language. We rollerbladed to a laser tag arena and traded the disks inside. Everything I have done since then has been determinedly less cool, so I understand the yearning for the prelapsarian past, even if I recognize the impulse as problematic and reactionary. But we did lose something. --Glyph

Work has been about SSO via SAML2 lately - maybe I should write a blog post about that 🤔. But unlike last month, I made some progress on some small non-work related tasks last week:

• Had to learn that you can use the chatGPT to pay openAI via Apple Pay, when your bank blocks payments to openAI.
• Slowly learning all the features of the banking software I use. The automatic categorization feature is much better than I expected and it is able to automatically download bank statements in pdf format. Had I known about this feature earlier, it would have saved me some really awkward phone calls to my banks to get old statements from microfilm (I'm completely baffled as to why accountants prefer the pdf versions over the csv exports, but they do...).
• My DSL router at home has a tendency to reduce the bandwidth of it's Ethernet ports from 1Gbit to 100Mbit (rendering all my carefully placed Wifi-6 access points useless). At first I thought it might be a hardware failure, but I replaced the hardware and the problem persisted. So now I have all my oddly wired devices connected to a cheap switch and only the switch connected to my router. That seems to work now.

Articles

• What Is A Single-page Application? | Hrhr
• Multilingual Support In Django
• Tailwind vs. Semantic CSS | Hmm, takeaway for me is that I probably should at least learn semantic CSS before relying heavily on tailwind
• Links with Tips and Advice for Public Speaking | Lots of valuable sources
• CSS :has() Interactive Guide
• White House recommends use of memory-safe languages like Python | Weird but fun
• ARCHITECTURE.md | Yep.

Mastodon

• Even though I came to terms with async functions with years, I still can't shake the feeling that something wrong there. 😏
• I aim to code a new toggle switch each day in 2024
• When the impostor syndrome kicks in...

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: Getting ready for NICAR | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 8: February 19 to February 25 | Johannes

Videos

• The CSS Cascade - A (re)introduction

Software

• Lightning CSS v1.24.0 release

Books

• Basiswissen Requirements Engineering

Podcasts

• Macht nix. Wie wir bestehende Machtstrukturen - vielleicht - dekonstruieren können (Was denkst du denn?) | Good one
• WR1572 Sachverständigenrat, Wachstumsförderung (Wirtschaftskunde) | Always entertaining
• The new Parser (core.py) | So good!

tldr: The chatGPT app on iOS allows you to pay openAI using Apple Pay

Last week openAI stopped working for me and I got an error about a billing issue. I use a credit card from bunq to pay openAI, which worked fine for almost a year. When I investigated the issue, I got several misleading error messages from bunq like "your monthly limit is not sufficient" or "you have already added the merchant to your allowed merchants list". I couldn't fix the problem. So I contacted bunq support and they couldn't help either.

Today I thought about using another credit card, but then I found a workaround:

The chatGPT app on iOS allows you to pay openAI using Apple Pay. I couldn't do it with Chrome, and for Safari the Stripe interface lets you choose Apple Pay, but that didn't work either. But the app finally worked 🎉.

unmuting my mic Hey everybody, sorry about my camera, but you all insisted on making this a morning meeting and, y'know, that curse the fortune teller robot put on me forbids me from being visually perceived by "seeing machinations" before noon; I've *told* you this, Stanley. --Dr. Damien P. Williams, Magus

Usual work week. Side projects are still neglected, but I registered a domain for a shiny new side project sigh. At least I'm now up to something again 🤷.

Articles

• What is Utility-First CSS?
• uv: Python packaging in Rust | Hmm, dunno

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2024-02-19 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 7: February 12 to February 18 | Johannes

Mastodon

• Het leven is bitter, het leven is zuur Alles smaakt beter uit de frituur...
• This is not a drill.

Software

• svcs - A Flexible Service Locator for Python / svcs: Robust & TESTABLE Python Web Applications with ANY Framework! - the video 😄
• PageSpeed Insights bookmarklet
• Sorting Techniques | Updated Python documentation

Books

• Every Layout | Another attempt to learn CSS

Videos

• Loose Coupling & Dependency Injection the EASY Way!
• Match all things Python: Parsing structured content with Python's new match statement | Think I've seen this talk at an in-person event in Düsseldorf, just saving it here so I'll be able to find it later...

Podcasts

• Side-Projects: Zwei Entwickler overengineeren einen Podcast (Engineering Kiosk) | Nice, always interesting to see how other people handle this podcast production stuff 🎙️
• Kognitionswissenschaften, wie Sprache und Denken zusammenhängen – und wie nicht (Hörsaal) | Really interesting episode
• RZ120 Ulf Merbold (Raumzeit) | Cool!