Category: valeblog

Fixed my TLS

shallow focus photography of padlocks in steel cable
June 17, 2025
valeblog
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Usually there was no problem. Stuff worked just fine. Certificates were generated and renewed automatically. https:// links opened without ugly browser warnings about how you’re about to get hacked and it’s the end of the known universe.

But when it wasn’t “usually”, when Traefik just happened to restart for whatever reason, then all of that was obliterated. Since Traefik was running on ephemeral storage, eg nothing was really persisted, innocently tweaking some configuration (that resulted in a restart) could be catastrophic. You know, self-signed certificates and ugly browser warnings.

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Upgrading the argo-cd Helm chart from 5.x to 8.x

three sail boats on water during daytime
May 19, 2025
valeblog
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I’ve been using Argo CD for GitOps automation for a very long time. I have it manage itself too! The other day I noticed that there was a new major version of Argo CD, so I decided to upgrade my stuff too. It did not go smoothly, though it wasn’t an issue with Argo CD itself.

It was the usual problem of Helm charts renaming and moving around stuff in their values.yaml, which results in significant breakage for (from an user perspective) no good reason. I summed up what I learned so others don’t have to play around with it so much.

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How I set up my smart lights with Home Assistant

May 18, 2025
valeblog
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I’ve been playing around with smart lights for a while now. I have four Edison Smart filament bulbs, two Philips Hue white bulbs and some Switchbot bulb. I had a terrible experience with Switchbot bulbs (which is why I got the Hues in the first place), disconnecting and needing to be re-paired all the time, suddenly factory resetting themselves to max brightness in the middle of the night and such. So the one I kept is just a reading light now with a manual switch on my bedside table.

For the others though, I’ve wanted to have some manual switches for them too in addition to being able to control them through my smartphone. When I get home it’s still quicker to tap a physical switch than to whip up my phone, wait until the respective proprietary app connects to the bulbs and then I get some light.

What I ended up with: a Home Assistant Green with the external USB Zigbee dongle, three IKEA RODRET switches and this blog post. I got those Home Assistant devices because that’s what I could get shipping to Japan, but I believe the Yellow version has Zigbee built in, which should make it a little less clumsy.

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VIVA LA ROCK 25

May 7, 2025
valeblog
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今年初めてスーパーアリーナのVIVA LA ROCKの3-4日め行ってきた。目当てのバンドも楽しかったバンドもいっぱいあったが、最終的にもっとも印象に残ったのは花冷え。だった。

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ARABAKI 25

April 28, 2025
valeblog
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今年もアラバキ行きました！前回と違ってシュラフやテントのポールを忘れていくというアホはしてないのでまんべんなく楽しめた。

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The mythical modular monolith

Trees and snow are seen from above.
March 23, 2025
valeblog
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So often I see people giving talks about how the microservice architecture is a failure. You end up losing transactional protections, you’ll have to “join” data across a network boundary, and that network boundary is “always” flaky. Wouldn’t it be much better if everything was in one process, where you could enjoy the benefits of transactions, neighboring data is just a method call away and the only network you have to worry about is the database connection?

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Podman containers can’t talk to each other

February 8, 2025
valeblog
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The other day I decided to update my server-side rendering example, and I ran into a strange problem. While my compose.yaml hasn’t changed, my containers could not talk to each other. This was most apparent with the nginx container, which immediately crashed out with [emerg] 1#1: host not found in upstream. What gives?

After a quick debugging including on a different computer, it became clear that my compose.yaml should be fine: it worked without issues on the computer that used Docker, but didn’t work with Podman. The issue with Podman was soon clear too: looking at podman network inspect the "dns_enabled": false was an obvious culprit. That’s where things got interesting.

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2024を振り返ろう

January 26, 2025
valeblog
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2024はあまりいい味が残る年にはならなかった。始まりはいいものの、そのあとは負の連鎖が続くという感じでなかなか評価が厳しい。

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Tricking the JVM JIT into speed

December 12, 2024
valeblog
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On the Clojurians Slack, PEZ brought some delicious Fibonacci performance tuning from the “languages” repo. While I don’t think that benchmark is as useful as mesmerizing the moving circles are in the animated graphs, I had a few very confusing and interesting discoveries.

Step 1: watch Alex Miller’s talk about Clojure’s interop performance. Step 2: learn how to actually do all that stuff. Step 3: notice that recursion does things. Step 4: magic.

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Untyped JS objects in ClojureScript

December 10, 2024
valeblog
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Working on a Chrome plugin I got to use ClojureScript in yet another new environment. After the usual browser setup, Node, Deno and Github Actions, this time it was the Chrome plugin system. While it was mostly a very smooth ride, I had a little trouble figuring out how to deal with a “Cannot infer target type in expression” warning.

It showed up while dealing with a HAR entry object passed in to my callback from devtools.network.onRequestFinished. The HAR object, while its shape is well defined, is not typed in a strict sense (though I guess there may be some type definition for it somewhere out there if I looked hard enough). That’s why when I tried to access its fields like (-> entry .-request .-url) the ClojureScript compiler (through Shadow CLJS) would complain about inferring the “target type” as above.

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