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. I’m still always busy but I figure it’s time to start a cool new project. My target will be emulating the SNES, probably my favorite console of all time, to the extent that it can play FFVI, Yoshi’s Island, and Mario RPG as well as I can make them - the latter of those two use different coprocessor chips so those would be fun to emulate as well. As an electrical engineer by trade I do understand roughly what it would take to write a console emulator.

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. The site also uses SQLite to store the word databases, Gunicorn, Nginx, i.e. a standard Django setup. The site gets a couple hundred players a day, so it’s not that tiny. I have also used this platform to learn; the very first version of Aerolith for the web was completed in 2011 and written in ghastly Javascript. It is now a fairly modern app with React.js and ES6. So it’s a nice project because I get to tinker with technologies that I sometimes end up using at my day job (for example, I did some Redis/Sock.js stuff briefly in the past, as well as Django upgrades, etc).

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 rendered various study tools such as Quackle, the best Scrabble AI, close to useless. I’ve heard a few players argue: who cares if Quackle doesn’t find every last word? It will still give you pretty good plays. I’m sorry, but playing Scrabble without all the acceptable words is like playing chess without knowing how the rook moves. Not quite, but it almost feels like that. Other players argued that we kids had it easy and that back in the day people studied by poring through the physical copy of the book. This is a ridiculous argument; computer study methods such as Leitner spaced repetition or even my own site Aerolith make it much easier to search for and remember words than looking through a giant book.

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. (Unique Users)",
      "title": "Daily Total Reach"
    }
  ]
}

Whereas

Recently moved a project to Django 1.3 and I kept seeing duplicate messages for all of my logger.x messages, even though my LOGGING dictionary looked like:

LOGGING = {
    'version': 1,
    'disable_existing_loggers': True,
    'loggers': {
        'base': {
            'level': 'DEBUG',
        },
    }
}

I simplified it to this to see if there were any issues, and although I define no handlers for the ‘base’ logger, it still was printing out logging messages. I did a grep on the entire virtualenv libraries for basicConfig or BASIC_FORMAT to see if any of my external libraries were misbehaving and didn’t find anything. I went through my codebase again and got rid of some extraneous logging.debug in some files and that fixed it. So always use

YOM is better than the bingo CO(E)MpLOY