Ollivander The curse of the downvote I don't have strong opinions on Facebook - I'm not even a user anymore - but I think that the "like/dislike" mania is going a bit too far. I've
Ollivander Machine Learning: a sound primer How to start with machine learning? Some serious, yet practical, suggestions.
Mostly Unixish Standalone, single-file, editable Python scripts WITH DEPENDENCIES How badly I wanted something like that? The problem: Python for scripting Beside programming and data science, I find Python to be a very useful glue language; I think it's
Ollivander Application authors: please don't force users into your language or packaging details This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not
Mostly Unixish Misaligned Expectations: investigating the expectations gap As some of my followers already know, I'm enrolled in the great Master's program at Georgia Tech, the OMSCS. As a part of my studies, I'm doing some research to
Mostly Unixish SCP taming: stop local silliness Every day now and then, I get an scp command wrong. Scp is designed after commands like rcp and works totally fine for local-to-local file copy. While this can (or could) be useful in some contexts, It's not what I like to do these
Ollivander Productivity, the office, and the open floor plan There's one pattern that, nowadays, I find amusing; the productivity mantra is repeated everywhere. Everybody wants to get more productive, every company is trying to make their employees more productive.
Ollivander Command line data crunching with Python Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one
Mostly Unixish Git: automatically set and use multiple commit identities Sure, git is great. Sure it is possible to use multiple commit identities in git - just set local per-repo variables. If it weren't for the fact that chances of
Ollivander Shell scripting: short or long format options? This is something I get asked quite a lot, so I wanted to write a piece about it. This is an extract from the manpage from GNU grep: NAME grep,
Ollivander Stopping The Internet Of Noise - A Useful Internet Back Again The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth
Ollivander Students that don't "get" computer science - bimodality as a teaching failure There seems to be a common belief about computer science: people either get it, or don't get it. A recent paper by the University of Toronto, Evidence That Computer Science
Ollivander Primitive types are not your friends Really. Stop (ab)using just strings and integers! Yes, they're the building blocks of whatever you do. But if you abuse them, you're not taking full advantage of your Object
Ollivander Enabling Process vs Bureaucratic Process The Process, today, is king. There're a lot of people focusing just on process, and a lot of them hold it as The True Solution to all the world's problems.
Mostly Unixish badblocks: test your mass storage! Are you unsure whether your mass storage works properly? Do you suspect it's faulty somewhere? Verify it with a nifty tool, included in most Linux distros and in macOS if you install the ext2fs tools: sudo badblocks -swv -t random -b 4096 -c 2048
Mostly Unixish Automated cleanup of Docker leavings As much as I like Docker, one thing it doesn't do well: cleanup whatever is left on my hard drive after running it for a while. There're generally two kinds
Ollivander Python: discover the type of an object This seems a simple enough question: How can I discover the type of any given Python object? Suppose Python 2.7 (Python 3 is a different beast on this topic), and try implementing such function: def discover_type_of_object(obj): """
Ollivander Git Flow is superflous and complex Some years ago, a git workflow model called git-flow took the software development world by storm. I'd always thought that the workflow was far too complex and I couldn't figure out what purpose it served. Now, after having used it for some months, I
Mostly Unixish Python requests SSL and InsecurePlatformWarning Every now and then, when using Python 2.7 < 2.7.9 and trying to access SSL resources, especially through the requests toolkit, which seems to trigger the issue frequently - but I've seen it on some combinations of pip inside virtualenv as
Ollivander Parkinson's law and estimates Each and every time I think about Parkinson's law, I think that Cyril Northcote Parkinson was a sort of genius, who could gain a great insight into people's heads. For the few that have never heard about it, it's as simple as: Work expands
Mostly Unixish chmod and the capital X This is one very, very, very interesting piece of ancient wisdom. Suppose you need to change permissions for some directories. Maybe the permissions are too strict, e.g. something like 700 for directories and 600 for files, and you need to give access to
Mostly Unixish Kill Me Softly: killing a process The Right Way I was tired of repeating the same old pattern. Send a kill signal. Check with pgrep. Did the process exit? Send a kill -9. Now all my knowledge has been permanently dumped here: Kill Me Softly on GitHub If you want to kill a
Mostly Unixish Unfreezing your desktop: when Compiz goes wrong A desktop freeze is something that's not so rare nowadays - that's not good, but we shouldn't get desperate about that. I like Compiz with Unity Desktop on my Ubuntu Trusty very much; I feel it's a step forward compared to traditional desktops. The
Mostly Unixish Don't give a shell to system users - use su I seem very ancientwisdom-oriented these days. Sometimes you've got a system user on your linux server that's used to run a specific service; it's a good practice to employ those users to achieve privilege separation, since it limits the impact of many security breaches.
Mostly Unixish SSH hostnames configuration and shortcuts This is another old trick, but I like to tell the world about such amenities. I often find people writing command lines such as: ssh arcane-system-user@someextremelylong.andimpossibiletotype.anderrorprone.hostname.com or, worse ssh idliketorememberwhichuser@10.20.30.40 or maybe it was ssh
