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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

How do you spell "guerrilla"?

2018-08-20

Categories: random  
Tags: random  

How do you spell “guerrilla”? Oh, just like that after looking it up in a spelling dictionary. Of course, it wouldn’t be interesting if I didn’t also make sure to look it up on Wikipedia too.

Oh, now this is an interesting concept from guerrilla marketing: “reverse graffiti”: find a dirty surface, and wash away the dirt and grime to make your perfect marketing image. It’s completely harmless, and if anyone doesn’t like the marketing image, they can simply wash away the remainder of the dirt and grime from the surface.

20180820/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_marketing
20180820/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_graffiti

Short answer: They can’t exist, the USB protocol makes them physically impossible relative to their performance requirements.

Long answer: At one point in the historic past, in the year 2010, there was a bit of a heyday of Windows driver development to approximate the kind of direct hardware control of a USB-connected parallel port that you’d otherwise be able to get from a directly connected port. The critical problem remaining was that IN instructions to the parallel port were significantly slow due to USB protocol limitations. Given that issue, the primary recommendation remained with buying a PCI connected parallel port interface card if you really needed parallel port access.

That being said, if you are interested in parallel port control over the Raspberry Pi, that would mean that you do something over the GPIO, I2C, or SPI buses, not the USB bus.

20180820/DuckDuckGo linux full usb emulation parallel port adapter
20180820/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4217352/can-i-access-the-parallel-port-normally-when-using-usb-to-parallel-port-adapter#4218431
20180820/http://web.archive.org/web/20151004081304/https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~ygu/bastelecke/PC/USB2LPT/index.en.htm

Finally, last note. If all you care about is accessing printers over the parallel port, there are many adapters that can do that just fine. But, if you want to do more advanced things like control a JTAG programmer, then you better look elsewhere, my primary recommendation being to look toward using the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins in today’s world.

So, now I’ve gotten further into the lowdown of RAW photo processing. I’ve tried out Darktable, and now I’ve become enlightened as to why I wasn’t quite getting the RAW photos that I wanted out of RAWTherapee, namely that they didn’t look as similar to the built-in RAW development in my Pentax K-1 camera.

Digital cameras tend to have a non-linear luminosity curve profile that they apply to the base linear luminosity data before converting to sRGB gamma-coded image samples. Darktable has corresponding profiles for each such camera. When I removed that luminosity curve profile from Darktable, I ended up with developed RAW images that looked very similar to those that I got from RAWTherapee.

So, once I got that out of the way, I had no more questions whether Darktable supported my Pentax K-1 camera. Of course it did, with excellent quality development, giving me better results than I got with my Pentax K-1 camera’s built-in development. Note when highlight correction comes into effect, this means you’ll be adjusting exposure compensation manually when doing your own RAW development to get equivalent results.

Read on →

Built-in lazy loading has come to Google Chrome Canary, which is only the development version thus far. The main motivation here is to optimize mobile Android browser experience.

What does this mean for you as a web developer? Eventually, on pages not marked otherwise, all images and inline frames will be lazy loaded by default. If you do not want the image or frame to be lazy loaded, then you should put a lazyload="auto/on/off" attribute on the corresponding element:

< iframe src="http://www.example.com/" lazyload="auto/on/off" >< /iframe >

20180818/https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/built-in-lazy-loading-lands-in-google-chrome-canary/

So, I’ve come to an interesting point in time. My sister wanted to take some pictures, and she asked about me coming to use my DSLR camera. I suggested that she just started with a smartphone camera, and we would take retakes later with the DSLR camera. Why? Suffice it to say, I know she doesn’t really know what she wants out of the photos. Of course DSLR cameras can give you a lot of options, but at this point, the main reason why I must be skeptic about is because even though I can bring multiple lenses with me, I don’t have a setup or any practice for changing lenses “on the go,” outside of a clean indoor environment. Also, as it turns out, my sister specifically wants to take the photos outdoors.

Read on →

Wondering about changing DSLR camera lenses in the field? Are people who are doing that using something like a changing bag, like what was used for good old film developing? Well, no actually. They have a different trick up their sleeve: do the DSLR lens changes blindly under a jacket, putting their arms through the sleeve holes. Ah, tricky. Now it would be an even more tricky idea if you used that same trick for successfully developing film in the field.

Read on →

So you’re wondering about how to setup persistent volumes in Kubernetes? Look here. How about scaling persistent volumes per pod when scaling deployments? Well, that looks tougher, I’m still not sure how exactly to do it.

20180817/https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/persistent-volumes/
20180817/https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/storage-classes/
20180817/https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/deployment/#creating-a-deployment

So, you’re wondering about making Kubernetes deployments using Ansible? Look here, in the new version of Ansible there is a new and improved Kubernetes deployment module that is based off of the Python OpenShift client.

20180817/https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/k8s_module.html#k8s-module

Unfortunately, when I tried it out, I ran into permission problems on my cluster with RBAC enabled. So that means its time to dig deeper.

Try using the OpenShift Python client directly.

20180817/https://github.com/openshift/openshift-restclient-python

Now try going deeper and using the Python Kubernetes client. Take a look at the doucmentation.

20180817/https://github.com/kubernetes-client/python
20180817/https://github.com/kubernetes-client/python/blob/master/kubernetes/docs/ExtensionsV1beta1Api.md

Also take note of how to use it from a pod within a Kubernetes cluster with a service account.

20180817/https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/administer-cluster/access-cluster-api/
20180817/https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/configure-pod-container/configure-service-account/
20180817/https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/access-cluster/#accessing-the-api-from-a-pod

Redis versus Memcached

2018-08-17

Categories: web-dev  
Tags: web-dev  

So, now you’re wondering. This Redis, is sounds very similar to Memcached, how do they compare? Well, let’s see. Memcached is indeed older than Redis, just as I suspected. However, Redis has accumulated many more features in a shorter amount of time, has a larger community, more documentation, and is otherwise simply better for newer projects than Memcached. Memcached is still useful if you have a project already using it, but otherwise it’s not recommended for much else.

20180817/DuckDuckGo redis versus memcached
20180817/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10558465/memcached-vs-redis#11257333
20180817/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redis
20180817/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memcached