A small team of us have been working very hard on a project that I internally call “liwords”. The inspiration is obviously lichess.org. Why not do for crossword board games what lichess did for chess? This has been a dream of mine for a few years since I first saw that wonderful site. Although we are very far from being done, I hit a minor milestone recently on Twitch (I sometimes stream coding on Twitch).

I’m going to log more of my progress on the apps that I wrote about in an earlier post, in an attempt to: make myself more likely to work on these apps write a log for me and others and drum up some excitement! ;) Monte Carlo simulation is basically working on Macondo. I expect that since I just got it working, that I’ll discover some bugs and special cases, and there’s so much more I want to do with it, but for now I’m excited that I got it working.

I have a lot of ideas for improving the state of tournament and recreational Scrabble, mostly revolving around the technological aspect of things. I am aware that there are many other ways in which it is lacking, but my expertise is in technology, and that’s probably the best way I can make an impact

Around April of 2017 I wrote this article about moving my side project to a single-node Kubernetes cluster: https://hackernoon.com/lessons-learned-from-moving-my-side-project-to-kubernetes-c28161a16c69 As of today, the infrastructure is still running strong, although I’ve run into a few issues I will talk about later in this article. I initially set up my node as a $10/month node but it was barely not powerful enough. Since then, Digital Ocean seems to have roughly doubled the CPU/memory for each of its instances, so $10 might work out.

I have been coding in one form or another since I was around 8 years old, on my brother’s calculator that had around 450 bytes of program memory, and I’ve been videogaming since I was 6 (my dad bringing an NES from the US back to my native Caracas was one of my happiest memories). But why not combine both those loves? I’ve been wanting to make an emulator for ages but for some reason or another I’ve kept putting it off.

This title may already be ringing some faint alarm bells; why move a small side project to use Kubernetes? And was it worth it? I run a small study site for tournament Scrabble players, available at https://www.aerolith.org. (Please excuse the lack of a nice landing page). It consists of a Django app, with PostgreSQL, and a small Go-based microservice that generates some complex word challenges on demand. The reason that service uses Go instead of Python had mainly to do with performance, but partially I was also experimenting with Go at the time.

docker run -it -p 8181:8000 -v /home/ubuntu/word_db:/db:ro --env-file webolith/config/config.env domino14/webolith:latest (and 8180 instead of 8181) on home machine ab -kc 100 -n 1000 For haproxy stuff apt-get install ruby gem install haproxyctl Need a haproxy.cfg file that exposes the socket. Need latest HAProxy: https://haproxy.debian.net/#?distribution=Ubuntu&release=trusty&version=1.6 Take down a server cleanly sudo haproxyctl set server servers/server2 state drain Need to set up health checks, and figure out when a server is done draining

The article here sums up pretty well the debacle that North American tournament Scrabble players have been faced with since the introduction of the new Tournament Word List in April of 2015: Major Scrabble Brouhaha: Can You Copyright a List of Words? _In the 1980s, when Brian Sheppard created a computer program that played Scrabble, he typed in a lot of words-more than…_www.slate.com Basically, Hasbro or Merriam-Webster or both decided to take the volunteer work various Scrabble players did in putting together a new word list, slapped a copyright on it, and made it impossible for players to obtain a digital version of the word list.

This is hilarious: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/lib/libssl/ssl/Makefile?rev=1.29;content-type=text%2Fx-cvsweb-markup The CFLAGS in the commit contain: -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEAT The actual setting to disable the SSL heartbeat is -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS (note the S at the end). This commit was apparently OKed by two other people. This right here tells you why code is hard. Hubris anyone? Is there a coding equivalent to Muphry’s law?

https://graph.facebook.com/me/insights/page_impressions_unique/day?access_token={{TOKEN}}&since=1388649600&until=1391241600 1388649600 = 1/2/2014 12:00:00 AM GMT-8 1391241600 = 2/1/2014 12:00:00 AM GMT-8 returns something that looks like this: { /* previous, next page, etc keys */ "data": [ { "values": [ { "end_time": "2014-01-03T08:00:00+0000", "value": 4 }, { "end_time": "2014-01-04T08:00:00+0000", "value": 1 }, { "end_time": "2014-01-05T08:00:00+0000", "value": 0 } .... /* More 0 values here until Feb 2 */ ], "period": "day", "description": "Daily: The number of people who have seen any content associated with your Page.