Latest posts for tag eng

Growing up framed as a somewhat nerdy male, I was exposed to a horrible mainstream narrative for relationships. I really like how these two links take some of it apart and make its serious problems visible:

• This Video Shows How The Big Bang Theory Tries to Make Misogyny Look “Adorkable”
• Born Sexy Yesterday

The narrative for mainstream-desirable males also needs questioning:

• Game of Thrones's Natalie Dormer: men are as objectified as women on TV
• Why is There No Gay Men’s Body Liberation Movement?
• Toxic masculinity - Wikipedia

And since I posted a link about unreasonable expectations towards male bodies:

• Fotoshop by Adobé
• What You See Isn't What You Get
• Se bella vuoi apparire...

This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi.

Building Qt5 takes a long time. The build server I was using had CPUs and RAM, but was very slow on I/O. I was very frustrated by that, and I started evaluating alternatives. I ended up setting up scripts to automatically provision a throwaway cloud server at Hetzner.

Initial setup

I got an API key from my customer's Hetzner account.

I installed hcloud-cli, currently only in testing and unstable:

apt install hcloud-cli

Then I configured hcloud with the API key:

hcloud context create

Spin up

I wrote a quick and dirty script to spin up a new machine, which grew a bit with little tweaks:

#!/bin/sh

# Create the server
hcloud server create --name buildqt --ssh-key … --start-after-create \
                     --type cpx51 --image debian-10 --datacenter …

# Query server IP
IP="$(hcloud server describe buildqt -o json | jq -r .public_net.ipv4.ip)"

# Update ansible host file
echo "buildqt ansible_user=root ansible_host=$IP" > hosts

# Remove old host key
ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/known_hosts -R "$IP"

# Update login script
echo "#!/bin/sh" > login
echo "ssh root@$IP" >> login
chmod 0755 login

I picked a datacenter in the same location as where we have other servers, to get quicker data transfers.

I like that CLI tools have JSON output that I can cleanly pick at with jq. Sadly, my ISP doesn't do IPv6 yet.

Since the server just got regenerated, I remove a possibly cached host key.

Provisioning the machine

One git server I need is behind HTTP authentication. Here's a quick hack to pass the relevant .netrc credentials to ansible before provisioning:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import subprocess
import netrc
import tempfile
import json

login, account, password = netrc.netrc().authenticators("…")

with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode="wt", suffix=".json") as fd:
    json.dump({
        "repo_user": login,
        "repo_password": password,
    }, fd)
    fd.flush()

    subprocess.run([
        "ansible-playbook",
        "-i", "hosts",
        "-l", "buildqt",
        "--extra-vars", f"@{fd.name}",
        "provision.yml",
        ], check=True)

And here's the ansible playbook:

#!/usr/bin/env ansible-playbook

- name: Install and configure buildqt
  hosts: all
  tasks:
   - name: Update apt cache
     apt:
        update_cache: yes
        cache_valid_time: 86400

   - name: Create build user
     user:
        name: build
        comment: QT5 Build User
        shell: /bin/bash

   - name: Create sources directory
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     file:
        path: ~/sources
        state: directory
        mode: 0755

   - name: Download sources
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     get_url:
        url: "https://…/{{item}}"
        dest: "~/sources/{{item}}"
        mode: 0644
     with_items:
      - "qt-everywhere-src-5.15.1.tar.xz"
      - "qt-creator-enterprise-src-4.13.2.tar.gz"

   - name: Populate home directory
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     copy:
        src: build
        dest: ~/
        mode: preserve

   - name: Write .netrc
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     copy:
        dest: ~/.netrc
        mode: 0600
        content: |
           machine …
           login {{repo_user}}
           password {{repo_password}}

   - name: Write .screenrc
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     copy:
        dest: ~/.screenrc
        mode: 0644
        content: |
           hardstatus alwayslastline
           hardstatus string '%{= cw}%-Lw%{= KW}%50>%n%f* %t%{= cw}%+Lw%< %{= kK}%-=%D %Y-%m-%d %c%{-}'
           startup_message off
           defutf8 on
           defscrollback 10240

   - name: Install base packages
     apt:
        name: git,mc,ncdu,neovim,eatmydata,devscripts,equivs,screen
        state: present

   - name: Clone git repo
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     git:
        repo: https://…@…/….git
        dest: ~/…

   - name: Copy Qt license
     become: yes
     become_user: build
     copy:
        src: qt-license.txt
        dest: ~/.qt-license
        mode: 0600

Now everything is ready for a 16 core, 32Gb ram build on SSD storage.

Tear down

When done:

#!/bin/sh
hcloud server delete buildqt

The whole spin up plus provisioning takes around a minute, so I can do it when I start a work day, and take it down at the end. The build machine wasn't that expensive to begin with, and this way it will even be billed by the hour.

A first try on a CPX51 machine has just built the full Qt5 Everywhere Enterprise including QtWebEngine and all its frills, for amd64, in under 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Weather: We can only forecast the weather a few days into the future.

Nuclear: I had no idea Thorium-based nuclear power was a thing.

Fluid dynamics applied to traffic: Traffic Flow and Phantom Jams.

Psychology, economics, and a history of culturally biased experiment results: We aren’t the world.

Italy during the cold war has always been in too strategic a position, and with too strong a left wing movement, not to get the CIA involved.

Here are a few stories of coup d'état and other kinds of efforts to manipulate Italian politics:

• 1964: Piano Solo
• 1970: Golpe Borghese
• 196x-1980: Strategia della tensione
• 1956-1990: Operation Gladio
• 1976-?: Propaganda Due

The Bouletcorp » Love & Dragons is a strip I like about fairytale relationships.

There are a lot of mainstream expectations about relationships. These links challenge a few of them:

• Riding the relationship escalator (or not)
• Rescripting sex
• xkcd: Marriage

More about emotional work, some more links to follow a previous links post:

• You Don’t Have to Own Your Feelings
• Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever

A few interesting places to visit. Traveling could be complicated, and internet searches could be interesting enough.

For example, churches:

• Ghost Church of Czechia
• Cadaver Tomb of René of Chalon
• Gereja Ayam - Wikipedia

Or fascinating urbanistic projects, for which it's worth to look up photos:

• Burj Al Babas
• Pardis

Or nature, like Get Lost in Mega-Tunnels Dug by South American Megafauna

Cognitive bias cheat sheet has another elegant infographic summarising cognitive biases. On this subject, you might want to also check out 15 Insane Things That Correlate With Each Other.

Get started | Learning Music (Beta) has a nice interactive introduction to music making.

If you leave in a block of flats and decide to learn music making, please use headphones when experimenting. Our neighbour, sadly, didn't.

You can also learn photography with Photography for Beginners (The Ultimate Guide in 2020) and somewhat related, Understanding Aspect Ratios: A Comprehensive Guide

A fascinating apparent paradox that kind of makes sense: Czech nudists reprimanded by police for not wearing face-masks.

Besides being careful about masks when naked at the lake, be careful about your laptop being confused for a pizza: German nudist chases wild boar that stole laptop.

Talking about pigs: Pig starts farm fire by excreting pedometer.

Now that traveling is complicated, you might enjoy A Brief History of Children Sent Through the Mail, or learning about Narco-submarines.

Meanwhile, in a time of intense biotechnological research, Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates.

Finally, for a good, cheaper, and more readily available alternative to a trip to the pharmacy, learn about Hypoalgesic effect of swearing.

Here are the slides of mine and Ulrike's talk Doing things /together/.

Our thoughts about cooperation aspects of doing things together.

Sometimes in Debian we do work together with others, and sometimes we are a number of people who work alone, and happen to all upload their work in the same place.

In times when we have needed to take important decisions together, this distinction has become crucial, and some of us might have found that we were not as good at cooperation as we would have thought.

This talk is intended for everyone who is part of a larger community. We will show concepts and tools that we think could help understand and shape cooperation.

Video of the talk:

• full quality
• low quality

The slides have extensive notes: you can use View → Notes in LibreOffice Impress to see them.

Here are the Inkscape sources for the graphs:

• Carlo Maria Cipolla's graph
• Thomas Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument
• Kahler's Drivers

Here are links to resources quoted in the talk:

• Carlo M. Cipolla - Wikipedia
• Thomas–Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument - Wikipedia
• The Evolution of Trust
• Moral behavior in animals
• Taibi Kahler - Wikipedia
• Kahler's Drivers questionnaire / Antreiber Test - English and German
• Alison Green Coaching - Behavioural Drivers Questionnaire
• Founder's syndrome - Wikipedia
• Peter principle - Wikipedia
• Benevolent dictator for life - Wikipedia
• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
• Getting to Yes - Wikipedia
• Webcomics - Pepper&Carrot

In the Q&A, pollo asked:

How can we still have a good code review process without making it a "you need to be perfect" scenario? I often find picky code reviews help me write better code.

Ulrike wrote a more detailed answer: Code reviews: from nitpicking to cooperation

Saint Guinefort was a dog who lived in France in the 13th century, worshipped through history as a saint until less than a century ago. The recurrence is soon, on the 22th of August.

Many think middle ages were about superstition, and generally a bad period. Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages tells a different, fascinating story.

Another fascinating middle age story is that of Christine de Pizan, author of The Book of the City of Ladies. This is a very good lecture about her (in Italian): Come pensava una donna nel Medioevo? 2 - Christine de Pizan. You can read some of her books at the Memory of the World library.

If you understand Italian, Alessandro Barbero gives fascinating lectures. You can find them index in a timeline, or in a map.

Still from around the middle ages, we get playing cards: see Playing Cards Around the World and Through the Ages.

If you want to go have a look in person, and you overshoot with your time machine, here's a convenient route planner for antique Roman roads.

View all historical links that I have shared.