There’s a book titled “Measure What Matters”, and it’s fascinating and worth the read. This article from acmqueue with nearly the same title is quite interesting, because it turns some of my previous thinking on it’s head.
Summary: “Speed matters”; Instrument client code to measure user experience; Measure “long-tail” latency at the 95th and 99th percentiles; even minor changes to code or user behavior can effect things; build bench-marking into release testing procedures.
I’ve got an OpenWRT router, and here’s how I configured it to enable safesearch on my home network.
Update May, 2022: Not recommended. I upgraded my router to OpenWRT 21.02.3 and suddenly, all searches through google, bing, and duckduckgo stopped working. At first, I thought it was cloudflare’s 1.1.1.3 DNS that was broken, but I was wrong. Once I removed the cname entries from my router and restarted dnsmasq, searches started working again.
uci add dhcp cname
uci set dhcp.@cname[-1].cname="www.google.com"
uci set dhcp.@cname[-1].target="forcesafesearch.google.com"
uci commit dhcp
uci add dhcp cname
uci set dhcp.@cname[-1].cname="www.bing.com"
uci set dhcp.@cname[-1].target="strict.bing.com"
uci commit dhcp
uci add dhcp cname
uci set dhcp.@cname[-1].cname="duckduckgo.com"
uci set dhcp.@cname[-1].target="safe.duckduckgo.com"
uci commit dhcp
for name in www.youtube.com m.youtube.com youtubei.googleapis.com youtube.googleapis.com www.youtube-nocookie.com ; do
uci add dhcp cname
uci set dhcp.@cname[-1].cname="$name"
uci set dhcp.@cname[-1].target="restrict.youtube.com"
uci commit dhcp
done
service dnsmasq restart
See the configuration:
grep -A2 cname /etc/config/dhcp
Useful information for reducing memory usage of Python programs:
TLDR: Dictionaries use a lot of memory. Possible solutions include using a class and slots, namedtuple, recordclass, cython, or numpy.
I run Ubuntu on my Lenovo P50, and the backlight keys haven’t ever worked. Here’s how I got it working.
sudo apt install xbacklight
Then I mapped the keys using Settings > Devices > Keyboard and added mappings for the following:
Windows-F5: xbacklight -inc 5 -time 1 -steps 1
Windows-F6: xbacklight -dec 5 -time 0 -steps 1
If you write Linux shell scripts (bash), you should use https://www.shellcheck.net/ to improve the quality of the script.
Microsoft has a long article in ACM Queue on what people think they’re getting out of code reviews, what they’re actually getting, as well as a list of benefits a code review tool should provide.
My main takeaways:
My Ubuntu box decided to update this library today, so I learned about a very fast and cool key-value database. It replaces BerkleyDB on Linux systems and is also used to persist data for Redis, InfluxDB, and has even been adapted for use with SQLite — called SQLightning (20x faster).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Memory-Mapped_Database
Spell checking wasn’t working for me in LibreOffice Writer. I followed the instructions here and got it working:
https://askubuntu.com/a/954608
In writer, I used this menu, and it finally worked:
Tools > Language > For all Text > English (USA)
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has posted a video that shows their new Rome Italy Temple.
The workmanship and beauty is a testament to the importance members place on the sacred covenants they make there.
I downloaded some photos from Google Photos, only to find that they were in heic format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format). [When I originally wrote this blog post,] none of my linux programs know how to open that format — I needed them in jpg format. I found a utility to do the job: https://launchpad.net/~xiota/+archive/ubuntu/stuff-3
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xiota/stuff-3
sudo apt-get install libheif-tools
sudo apt-get install libheif-examples
for f in *heic ; do heif-convert -q 90 $f ${f%.heic}.jpg ; done