Rui Carmo
June 23^rd 2018, in the morning · 1 min read

Apple Starts Fixing MacBook Keyboards ※

Took them long enough, and covers a bunch of models. On the other hand, this is an encouraging sign for future hardware revisions–maybe they will actually care about keyboard quality over thinness.

(Personally, I’m a bit miffed that typing on my MacBook Pro makes enough noise to be heard across an office, and find the feel much worse than on the MacBook One, but am glad to have had only marginal, transient issues so far that I was able to fix with a blower.)

Rui Carmo
June 17^th 2018, at lunchtime

The Future

a wide plaza between curved buildings with oval openings — The inner plaza at the Champalimaud Foundation.

Rui Carmo
June 16^th 2018, late night · 2 min read

Trivial Static Websites On Azure Blob Storage

At the risk of never getting around to picking up Kotlin, I’ve been revisiting other topics this weekend, namely updating last week’s Terraform example and figuring out the new features for static hosting on Azure, which I need to set up a little app I’m doing.

As it turns out, a preview of static websites on Azure storage was actually announced in this Build 2018 video. It was a fairly low-key affair, which I only noticed earlier in the week.

But since it’s public, you can get started using it right away–all you need to do is log in to the Azure Portal through aka.ms/staticwebsites, and you should have access to it.

Provisioning

The service is still only available in US West Central, so you should create a storage account in that region. Once you do that, you get a new Static website (preview) option in the portal settings blade:

Publishing

To publish your site, all you need to do is upload your files to the newly created $web container. The canonical way to do so with a GUI is usually through Azure Storage Explorer, but I’m using Mountain Duck because it provides a virtual volume on the Mac, which is much nicer (if a trifle less efficient):

Finder window with storage account mounted locally and JavaScript files — It just works

I also tried to use the blobfuse FUSE adapter for Azure Storage (which would be a great way to automate site builds on Linux), but there is a niggling issue that I hope will be sorted out soon.

Pro Tips

To add a Cloudflare-managed CNAME to the storage account, you should first set the record to DNS only in the Cloudflare dashboard until it’s validated. Otherwise it obviously won’t resolve properly back to Azure.

Once you’ve bound the new domain name to the storage account, it then works exactly like you’d expect. I’ve had zero issues with CORS, content types and related stuff up until now, but I’ve barely gotten started with the app (it’s a simple single-page app that renders selected Azure metrics, something that I’ll write about at a later date).

This opens up a lot of possibilities for this site (I’ve been meaning to get it off a VM for a while), but in between fiddling with REST APIs and the need to fix a maven build, I’ll get back to exploring that some other weekend…

Rui Carmo
June 13^th 2018, in the morning · 1 min read

Oat the Goat ※

This is delightfully well done, and worth sharing around.

Rui Carmo
June 10^th 2018, at night · 9 min read

Terraforming Azure

As promised, this week I’m going to dive into Azure provisioning using Terraform, which is something I’ve been spending some time on, but which many folk in the Azure universe seem to be unaware of. Well, now there’s a copiously detailed example of how to bring them together, and I’m going to walk you through it.

Rui Carmo
June 4^th 2018, at night · 1 min read

macOS Mojave ※

Well, dark mode and the preliminary UIKit ports seem nice, and I wasn’t really expecting any new hardware, but bringing Stacks back a decade later and neutering CoverFlow seems, well… Not very imaginative, really.

Best takeaways from the keynote for me? The committment to iOS 12 support across the entire current range (which is impressive) and with performance increases (which I hope will actually happen), plus the rebirth of Workflow as Shortcuts.

Hopefully there’ll be a migration path that lets me re-build all the workflows I have with third-party apps–otherwise, it’ll be more than a little awkward.

Also, kind of sad to see Podcasts show up on the Watch and semi-Sherlock Overcast. I’ve avoided the built-in app so far because Overcast has very neat audio processing (and will likely keep using it), but…

Rui Carmo
June 3^rd 2018, at dinnertime · 1 min read

Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub ※

Around two years ago, a high-ranking exec turned to me at a dinner party and asked me what the heck I was doing at Microsoft with my OpenSource background and (I quote) “actual tech experience”.

I’m prone to wondering that myself sometimes, but stuff like this gives me heart.

On the other hand, it feels totally unreal. It’s as if a million repositories suddenly cried out…

Ah well. Let’s see how things pan out.

Update: Official blog post, presentation. $7.5B–not bad at all…

HackerNews, of course, has gone ballistic at least twice.

Rui Carmo
June 2^nd 2018, at late afternoon · 5 min read

Keeping Tabs On Azure Usage Using Jupyter

I haven’t written much of anything about Azure over the past year or so, other than assorted notes on infrastructure provisioning (to which I will get back, now that Terraform has an updated provider), nor about machine learning and data science—the former because it’s not a very sexy topic, and the latter because most machine learning in real-life boils down to a lot of data cleaning work that is hardly reflected in all the pretty one-off examples you’ll see in most blog posts.

Rui Carmo
June 1^st 2018, in the afternoon

The Maze

Rui Carmo
May 31^st 2018, in the evening · 3 min read

Static Considerations

Every now and then I ponder whether or not to move this site to purely static hosting (i.e., off an S3 bucket or an Azure storage account), both because it annoys me somewhat to maintain the VM and because the less code I have running to keep it up the better (and this even after having automated most away all chores and pared the code down to the absolute minimum).

Rui Carmo
May 28^th 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

It’s official: Amazon has saved The Expanse ※

This was by far the best news all week. I’m a fan of both the books and the series and rate them quite highly, because even if some of the plot devices could be tuned down a little the hard physics, sheer attention to detail and character dynamics make it a treat for both sides of the brain.

The biggest takeaway, though, is that SyFy is fundamentally incompetent at managing their assets – this is the latest in a series of fumbles and cancellations that shows they are completely missing the point of the genre they’re named after, and I’m very glad Amazon picked this up.

After all, this is the best Sci-Fi show in recent years, and it would be a near criminal waste to deny us this kind of glimpse into what could be the future of the human condition (regardless of the plot devices).

Rui Carmo
May 24^th 2018, at dinnertime · 5 min read

The Obligatory GPDR Notice

I have had to deal with GDPR in a professional capacity in a number of customers over the past few months, and, as usual, won’t write anything about that here.

Rui Carmo
May 22^nd 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

Your Professional Growth Questionnaire ※

Michael Lopp, in his usual concise and unassuming fashion, knocks it out of the park, at least where I’m concerned.

(This is serendipitous for a number of reasons I can’t get into right now, but, as usual, terrific reading if you’re seriously into any sort of career, your own or other people’s)

Rui Carmo
May 20^th 2018, at dinnertime · 1 min read

Maintaining Sanity

I’ve been traipsing round the countryside (near and far) on entirely too many customer visits, which, coupled with the return of my sinus troubles and a massive allergy, has done little towards either mood or creativity–hence the radio silence over the past couple of weeks.

Rui Carmo
May 10^th 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

Hi, I’m a machine! ※

We’ve spent the past couple of years drumming up passive/reactive assistants that do little more than pattern matching, so no wonder placing them into roles that mimic initiative makes people uneasy.

But they’re still glorified state machines. I found the Google I/O demo to be a bit whimsical, but the capability is undeniably there, and it’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out, especially since it is the ultimate API—in short, all the talk about digital transformation, exposing APIs for customer service, etc., does not scale out (or down) this far, and Duplex has the potential for doing that.

Rui Carmo
May 3^rd 2018, in the morning

A Leisurely Lunch

a granite plaza in front of an old church — Near the Braga Cathedral, shown here in its gothic majesty.

Rui Carmo
May 3^rd 2018, in the wee hours · 1 min read

Lobe ※

I spend a lot of time using machine learning tools of all kinds, and this is very, very slick indeed, at least judging by the demo video.

Although I’ve found that I work best with Jupyter notebooks and CLI tools, I’m really curious to try it out with some of my training sets.

Rui Carmo
May 1^st 2018, in the morning · 1 min read

How To Run Quake III Arena in 2018 ※

Even though I only play a couple of times a year, I’ve maintained a Quake III Arena installation on my personal desktop for many, many years (thanks to ioquake3), and this seems like the perfect way to while away a lazy holiday afternoon.

Update: make sure you download the 64-bit build of ioquake3. Also, if you want to run servers, I keep some notes on it for other architectures.

Rui Carmo
May 1^st 2018, at breakfast · 1 min read

NeXT Raspberry Pi Case ※

This is so cool I just had to link to it.

I might even print one myself some day, since I have a Pi on my desk set up as an Arduino development environment and Docker build box.

Rui Carmo
April 27^th 2018, at dawn · 1 min read

RIP AirPort Base Stations ※

The writing was on the wall, but this is still sad. What annoys me the most is that a lot of modern Wi-Fi gear relies on crummy management applications (or worse, volatile cloud services that expose your home to all kinds of added risks), and the only real guarantee you have of having a setup that will work smoothly and securely is to be your own radio planning expert.

When my three AirPort base stations die, I’ll likely replace them with OpenWRT-capable gear rather than rely on a manufacturer to “support” them.