Tag: english

CodeWars

February 11, 2018
valeblog
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I really like Medium’s weekly digest. It keeps providing me with great articles. A few weeks back there was one with advice from a young girl developer, and (among other pretty solid advice) there was a mention of a certain CodeWars. First time I heard of it. This was Thursday evening.

On Sunday I had 50 or so kata behind me and I was challenging an 1kyu one. It’s really addictive, because I just keep pushing the “next kata” button and can’t rest until I’ve dealt with it. However, this approach doesn’t work if I wanted to solve 5 kata a day as advised, because the algo keeps giving me harder and harder challenges, and even “easier” ones end up taking a few hours.

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Passing the correct remote address

January 28, 2018
valeblog
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Today I was playing with my database in PHPMyAdmin, when I suddenly realized that it’s up there open to anyone who can guess the path (which isn’t a very hard task). I decided to only allow connections to it from my home IP, which shouldn’t be such a difficult thing to do. Except Apache is behind an nginx reverse proxy, so it kinda is.

I’ve noticed before that all Apache access logs show the remote IP as 127.0.0.1, localhost where nginx is running (and proxying requests). I didn’t really care about it, since it’s just a personal site, but now that I wanted to use the actual visitor’s IP address to limit access, it was a whole different story.

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About certs, for version control

January 7, 2018
valeblog
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Version control in the sense that I haven’t made any Ansible (or similar) scripts to deal with this, so I have to keep writing blog posts not to forget what I did and managed.

For ages now I’ve had Apache crashing (at least so it seemed) at regular intervals. I had no idea what was causing it, so I just added a crontab entry to (try to) start the Apache service every 5 minutes. That solved the issue of 502 Bad Gateway errors, but not the cause for them.

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Subcomponents in Vue.js lists

January 5, 2018
valeblog
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In my winter break I’ve been working on a Vue.js client for Mastodon. I’ve got two big reasons for doing it: I want link/video previews on my timeline and I have to get familiar with Vue for work.

I’m not very familiar with Mastodon’s API, nor with Vue, so I think I’ve been running into lots of problems that I shouldn’t have. For example, I added card (that’s the Mastodon name for link or video previews) autoloading to the timeline and I noticed something weird.

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Wizard of Earthsea

December 10, 2017
valeblog
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Yesterday I set a bit of a stretch goal for myself: read a whole book. There are still plenty on my shelf that I could read in (half) a day, but in the end I went with Wizard of Earthsea, that just arrived yesterday too.

I didn’t know much about the series, only that it was adapted into a Ghibli movie (that I haven’t seen) criticized by the author. But it’s youth fiction, so I supposed it was  easy (and quick) to read, and I wasn’t wrong.

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Todos

December 10, 2017
valeblog
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I was afraid I would forget something I wanted to do today, so I used a TodoMVC demo to keep track of what I wanted to do today. I have a bad habit of “wasting” weekends just playing games or idly staring at Twitter and Mastodon – not necessarily wasted, actually, since that’s plenty of recovery and mental idle after the tightly paced weekdays.

The point is rather that I often do that and not do things that I’d want or need to do, and that’s where the list comes handy. Actually on Mastodon I was pointed to Habitica for the same purpose, and I did register too, but at first glance it felt a bit too much for what I needed (an absolutely minimal todo list) and also counter-intuitive with its game-like system.

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Dual screen workspaces in Ubuntu 17.10

November 11, 2017
valeblog
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I expected the aardvark to break a couple of things. They switched back from Unity to Gnome, so even more than usual, I feared the system might not even start.

Compared to that, things went quite smoothly. One problem I ran into is how Gnome devs apparently never used a dual screen setup, and thought it would be a good idea to only switch workspaces on the main screen, and keep the other screen static. Needless to say, that’s not how workspaces are supposed to work.

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Decaf

October 22, 2017
valeblog
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It was almost a running joke among my coworkers that I’d sooner than later die of a heart attack due to a caffeine overdose. Apparently my body needs at least 8 hours of sleep to function properly, if not more – at least so I thought. Since getting 8 hours of sleep would require me to either cut down on working out or go to bed right after eating, and neither of those sound like very good options.

As it always is with substances, resistance builds up, so on bad days I’d need 3 cans of energy drinks just to remain functional (and still far from optimal). I got fed up with that eventually (and judging from the signals, my body too), and I decided to go no-caffeine on my birthday. I didn’t decide how long I’d keep it up, but the bare minimum is a month.

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28

October 22, 2017
valeblog
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Hi, I just turned 28 two weeks ago. Not much has changed since, so I thought I’d do the unusual and sum up what’s been up the past year. Interestingly enough, it was right last October that I decided to leave the anime business and accept a friend’s invitation to working as a programmer.

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Just a little torture

October 16, 2017
valeblog
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I stumbled upon an article on Guardian about Yanagiya, a restaurant in Gifu that apparently might just be the best restaurant on the planet. Of course I’d love to go, but I fear that even calling on the combined web of all my social networks, I might still not get an invitation. But it’s definitely worth giving a try, seeing all these accolades. I’ll still have to find someone to go with, but I doubt that’d be an issue.

And why is that torture? Because I’ve had the worst lunch today in… a very long time. My coworkers were singing tales about the cafeteria of the nearby Senshu university, so we went to give it a try. It was simply horrible. I had no idea miso soup could taste bad, but now I know. It feels like my stomach is giving extra care to that trash because 10 hours later I still don’t feel like eating anything.

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