Rui Carmo
June 21^st 2021, at dawn · 1 min read

Metroid Dread ※

I didn’t play all the Metroid games (I only came into the series when I fooled around with mobile emulators), but I quite like the way Nintendo keeps reinventing itself in various ways, and the game looks really nice and straightforward from an actual entertainment perspective (games often feel overwrought and gimmicky these days, so a slick, well thought out platformer feels really fresh).

Rui Carmo
June 19^th 2021, in the evening · 4 min read

Site Engine Update

It’s been a few months since I moved this site to Azure static storage, and I think a few notes are in order.

The site is still powered by my Wiki engine and I still keep it updated by tossing Markdown files into a git repository, but it now has even more unique twists.

Current Setup

TL;DR: Instead of rebuilding the entire site whenever a single page changes (or even syncing generated content), my current engine does delta updates directly onto an Azure storage container upon git push.

Or, to put it another way, it:

Takes the deltas off that push.
Matches them against what is currently published in $web.
Figures out what (if any) images, related pages and back-links need updating via a small SQLite database that holds all those references.
POSTs the generated HTML for any updated pages directly to a $web public container (which it does wickedly fast thanks to my own asyncio library for talking to Azure Storage).

This contrasts with the approach of many static site generators of rebuilding the entire site, saving the HTML to a folder and then syncing all of that to a public bucket/container, which can be pretty I/O intensive.

Or (like many people do these days with GitHub Actions et al) spawning and provisioning an entire VM to do so.

I don’t like either, and find the “pseudo-CI” approach a tad lazy (and wasteful).

Bang For The Buck

While it’s true that the site generator is on an “always on” (and admittedly pokey) Azure B1ls instance (1 VCPU, 512MB RAM), that machine is shared with a bunch of other small services, and the builder service is actually removed from RAM when idle (thanks to Piku/uwsgi magic), so overall costs are negligible.

The process has minimal storage and I/O impact (it only needs to work with a copy of the raw content and a SQLite database with page relationships), and takes less than 10 seconds to generate and publish a new page (or even a few hundred of them) from the moment I type git push, which compares well with my age-old, Dropbox-driven “live” syncing approach.

I could run the whole thing on a Pi Zero (and yes, I’ve tested it on a 3A+, just because the Zero is quite slow for full rebuilds), so that’s fine.

Pluses

There are a few distinct advantages with this setup:

No more worrying about HTTP handling and the constant flurry of botnets trying to hack their way into something that was never a Wordpress site in a rather heavy-handed way.
Much better availability as there would occasionally be some OS weirdness, VM update or configuration tweak that would take the site offline until I noticed.
Maybe a smidgeon more performance (even considering I had optimized HTTP request handling and have been using Cloudflare for years, the site does feel a tad snappier).

Minuses

There are a few things I’m not happy about, though:

My “magical” Wiki URL redirection feature was replaced by a gnarly bit of JavaScript that I’m not exactly enamoured with either. I might push that back to a Cloudflare worker, but am wary of relying too much on any single service.
I’m not particularly impressed with DuckDuckGo site search. Even after fiddling with various things like Bing Webmaster tools (since DuckDuckGo gets part of its catalog from it), search is just not good enough. I publish a complete sitemap and have OpenGraph everywhere, but their crawler simply doesn’t do a good a service as my old SQLite-powered full text indexer, and it’s getting very annoying.
The engine is a bit slow when rendering the full working set of 8000+ pages (when I do layout changes, for instance). Python can only do so much, and even though I pre-bake a lot of stuff, I’d like it to be a bit faster when parsing and rendering the actual pages.

I’ve been putting off using Azure Search because I don’t want to have to maintain a search endpoint, but I might end up doing it regardless.

Nice To Haves

There are a few minor things I’d like to have done, though:

I still haven’t pushed out the code to render archives, which has an annoying bug I haven’t had the time (or willpower) to fix because it will eventually force me to break a couple of longstanding abstractions. Update: I decided to not overthink it and just use my old Wiki code to generate archive pages.
OpenGraph can be improved little further, especially where images are concerned. Adding better image descriptions and the like feels like something I might have some fun doing, so will probably be adding Azure Cognitive Services to my rendering pipeline
I would love to have the builder run as an Azure Function, but there is simply no way I can get git to run inside one, and Piku has rendered this kind of service so simple and easy to maintain that I don’t feel the urge to tackle the amount of extra complexity required to work around that.

Engine Maintenance

Finally, the current codebase could do with a little cleaning up, since it has suffered a bit of feature creep over the years.

It’s relatively small at ~4000 LOC (discounting templating and HTML), but the actual static generator is a ~1000 LOC bolt-on that could be streamlined and blended in a little better, so I’d like to trim the whole thing back into the ~3000 LOC range.

And, in general, I just wish the entire codebase was simpler, for Python is a wonderful language but still lacks the conciseness of LISP–and I would very much like to go back to something like the Hy implementation I had a few years back¹.

And yet, replacing Python would be a tall order indeed. There are a few interesting candidates (Janet, Fennel, Clojure, Kotlin and even F#), but none of them have the full range of wonderful libraries I currently rely on.

I do, however, hear the siren call of building something leaner and meaner, so I might do some experiments over summer break.

Not Going To Happen

There are a few things I most definitely won’t be doing, though:

Building a Docker container (again, Piku has made things so easy to deploy and update that setting up a private registry, a full-blown CI/CD pipeline and whatever else would feel like a chore).
Getting this to run on Kubernetes (ha!).
Porting the engine to Rust (I gave it a go and realized that implementing the XML transformation pipelines I have would be a bit of a chore).

So, in essence, things are stable, reliable and with enough headroom and small things to tweak to keep being interesting, but definitely low impact.

I might do a redesign, though. It’s about time to see if there is something else I can do layout-wise (although I do like Georgia‘s readability and universal reach, and the lack of any unnecessary frills).

Besides wanting to move to Python 3, another reason I changed was that Hy kept repeatedly breaking over time and I’d need it to settle into some sort of long-term stable form first. They’re about to go 1.0 (which took its time), but I am definitely going to wait and see in that regard. ↩︎

Rui Carmo
June 17^th 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

Facebook will start putting ads in VR ※

I am actually quite surprised they hadn’t started doing this yet. But it’s funny to realize that some 20 years ago I was selectively overriding some Quake III Arena map textures to do branded maps, and that we even wrote some scripts to rotate them as you would banner ads…

Rui Carmo
June 12^th 2021, at dinnertime · 3 min read

Rabbit Holes I Dive Into Every Now And Then (Alternative Operating Systems Edition)

Over the past few years, and as part of my perennial personal quest for a nicer computing experience, I keep finding myself going down a small set of technological rabbit holes, which I’m listing here in an attempt to remind future me that I might already done so too many times.

Rui Carmo
June 11^th 2021, in the afternoon · 1 min read

Microsoft announces Xbox TV app, xCloud streaming stick ※

Skating to where the puck is going to be.

Also, I haven’t had any time to play games, but since I’m posting this I might as well point out that Control is free on the Epic Store this weekend.

It’s one of the Game Pass titles I’ve been tinkering with, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Rui Carmo
June 8^th 2021, at late afternoon · 1 min read

Three Thoughts on WWDC 2021

So I finally watched the keynote and the State Of The Union¹, and came away with three main thoughts:

Rui Carmo
June 5^th 2021, in the morning · 15 min read

The Big Sur kernel_task Troubleshooting Saga

Following last week’s post regarding my kernel_task woes (which began nearly two weeks ago now), I decided to strip out the updates from that post and consolidate them here with a little more detail.

Rui Carmo
June 2^nd 2021, at late afternoon · 6 min read

The Arturia KeyLab Essential 61

Although I have nothing to show for it yet, my music hobby is getting serious enough that I wanted a “proper” keyboard in my office. This because even though we already have a very nice Clavinova, there is no way I can use it with Logic from several rooms away¹.

Rui Carmo
May 29^th 2021, in the afternoon · 3 min read

Sucking Up to kernel_task

Just after upgrading to Big Sur 11.4, my aging iMac has taken to stall every now and then with kernel_task taking up most of the CPU, which is tremendously annoying as it becomes unresponsive even when I’m using it as a souped-up thin client to access my corporate virtual desktop environment.

Rui Carmo
May 26^th 2021, in the evening · 1 min read

Oxide Computer ※

This is very, very cool. I know I’m in the public cloud business, but from an engineering standpoint (and given my long time interest in the hardware space) there is a lot here to take in, and I look forward to learning more (by the way, they have a podcast which has been just wonderful to listen to).

Congratulations for pushing the envelope in so many ways.

Rui Carmo
May 24^th 2021, at night · 1 min read

Remaining Issues in Big Sur ※

This is a massive list. I’ve only experienced some of these issues, but the interesting bit is that I have heard about most of them through complaints from my friends, so it seems pretty comprehensive.

I do have to wonder why this is still the case this far into the 11.x cycle, since Big Sur really ought to be a lot less buggy than Catalina.

I mean, it’s not as if Apple was actively ignoring macOS.

Right?

Rui Carmo
May 23^rd 2021, in the evening · 3 min read

Notes on Wireless MIDI

It’s getting warm enough that a laptop (or a fan-happy desktop) is a nuisance do deal with, which together with an increased propensity to fall asleep on a couch means I’m back mostly using my iPad mini during weekends.

Rui Carmo
May 18^th 2021, at dawn · 1 min read

How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models ※

This is extremely cool, and something that Intel has completely dropped the ball on. The most interesting aspect, though, is how moving those background tasks to the efficiency cores impacts power budgets.

Rui Carmo
May 17^th 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

Cloudflare on the Edge ※

Some food for thought, although I think the industry is massively overloading the term “edge”. It doesn’t really mean what everyone thinks it means in real life.

Rui Carmo
May 16^th 2021, in the afternoon · 4 min read

Home Automation Catch-Up

As the weather has now improved beyond the need to turn the heaters on, I temporarily decommissioned most of my Sonoff S20 sockets until next winter and thought it was a good opportunity to catch up on my home automation endeavors.

Rui Carmo
May 11^th 2021, at night · 1 min read

Cubasis 3.3 and the KORG nanoKONTROL Studio

The other day I was futzing around pondering getting a better MIDI controller that I could use both with my desk setup and my iPad and, since I am not keen on buying stuff with proprietary protocols (regardless of how nice they look, I prefer stuff that won’t rely on the manufacturer’s own software) learned about Mackie Control and HUI and how they are supported by Arturia products.

And as it turns out Cubasis 3.3 came out recently, and besides extremely comprehensive MIDI learn support, it also supports Mackie and HUI.

Since I have a KORG nanoKONTROL Studio, I decided to investigate if it could work that way.

After a few tries, I figured out that if I booted the controller in Pro Tools mode (by turning it on while holding down Scene and Track Left-Arrow), you can enable it in MIDI settings like so:

Cubasis 3.3 on my iPad mini — Pretty trivial to set up, really.

After you’ve done that, everything (jog dial, transport controls, and all the track controls/pan/faders) just works, which probably makes Cubasis the best iOS DAW right now¹.

It also gives me firmer notions as to what kind of keyboard/controller I might get (Arturia’s are currently at the top of my list, but the interesting models are several years old and lack both Bluetooth and aftertouch…).

GarageBand has zero MIDI learn features, and NanoStudio 2 doesn’t seem to have either Mackie or HUI support, but I might be wrong as it at least has usable MIDI learn. ↩︎

Rui Carmo
May 11^th 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

iPad Camera Multitasking ※

I stopped using Teams on my iPad months ago because it was impossible to use the camera while looking up e-mails, so I’m quite amazed this was possible with Zoom (apparently my kids have been using it in school and thought it was a standard feature, so it never came up).

I completely get the need for entitlements (and curtailing their use when they’re privacy sensitive), but I have to wonder why this isn’t available to every major conferencing app (including WebEx, which Apple itself uses internally and that I had to resort to a couple of times recently).

Rui Carmo
May 10^th 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

Short Note on Epic v. Apple ※

The Verge’s headline is clearly clickbait, but it bears noting that the Epic v. Apple court sessions are turning into a quite entertaining show that casts new light on (or, rather, surfaces, if you’ll pardon the pun) the way revenue sharing deals are struck–or not.

I’ve been going through the court notes, testimonies and some of the evidence shown (or at least as much as has been publicly available) and it’s been quite educating. I had some insight into game distribution and margins back when Steam came into play, but some of the new models are interesting.

And, of course, Apple’s flat out blocking xCloud (especially given the court notes show there was no end of trying to reach an agreement) still stings a bit.

I don’t think Epic will win (honestly, they don’t deserve to in my view) but I hope Apple evolves its business into a saner model that can keep up with the times.

Rui Carmo
May 9^th 2021, in the evening · 2 min read

Spring Cleaning

I keep telling myself that “boring is good”, and yet things have been so far from boring that a moderately calm week like the past one is an outlier. I’m still mostly unwinding from work, but some geekery has taken place, albeit not particularly exciting stuff.

Rui Carmo
May 2^nd 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

Stop

After plodding through last week I decided to take this last Friday off, with the not-quite-amazing outcome of spending most of it sleeping and reading The Economist in an exquisitely sunny living room that I had a vague recollection of having in our house.

Rui Carmo
April 29^th 2021, at breakfast · 1 min read

Mighty ※

As someone who uses Windows Virtual Desktop every day to run Edge, Office and Teams (yes, you can do conferencing over RDP quite nicely, even from a Mac or iOS), I found this to be both amusing and intriguing as it normalizes what I’ve been doing for ages.

Remote display protocols and bandwidth have progressed to the point where a remote session is virtually indistinguishable from a local one, so the only relevant issue here is scalability and data residence.

But yeah, Sun was right. The ~~network~~ cloud is the computer.

Rui Carmo
April 25^th 2021, at late afternoon · 2 min read

Pause

Over the past few months, the 10h-a-day pace that became a constant during the pandemic started creeping up as I took up a new role¹ and needed more and more time to get work done after a day’s worth of meetings. I ended up working the last couple of weekeends as well, so this one was almost exclusively devoted to downtime.

Rui Carmo
April 24^th 2021, in the morning · 1 min read

The Lisperati 1000 Computer ※

I want one of these. I’ve been looking at the option of building myself one, but would prefer to at least have a kit with the printed parts done in something sturdier (as I only have PLA and my printer is getting finicky).

As a direct side effect of having tracked this since it was announced on Twitter, I’ve also gone down the glorious rabbit hole at r/MechanicalKeyboards, but sadly there doesn’t seem to be anyone selling a 40% Planck layout with both Bluetooth and low-profile, silent switches.

The Apple Magic Keyboard is so great in that regard that it has spoiled me somewhat, and the two Logitech K380s I have are nearly as good…

Rui Carmo
April 22^nd 2021, at dinnertime · 1 min read

New Spain & Portugal (Apple) Maps ※

Well, this was unexpected. I (obviously) don’t have nearly as much use for maps as I used to, but it’s nice to know it’s happening.

Regular readers will remember I used manage location-based services at Vodafone Portugal and regularly ~~complained~~ compared Apple Maps to the competition.

Rui Carmo
April 22^nd 2021, at dawn · 1 min read

Signal takes on Cellebrite UFED ※

The whole thing is amazing to read through, but I just love the tongue-in-cheek finale.