Blog

  1. Poetry at SFPC

    Last year I was part of an independent art school in NYC called SFPC. A lot of people have since asked me what it is, and what it means to be in such a school. The site has a blurb on what they do, but that description still leaves me and the people I explain it to slightly puzzled.

    So what is SFPC? It is a school that teaches computation in the service of art. It strives to give students the tools to express themselves in the medium of computation. I think the choice of the word computation is deliberate. It encompasses more than software, and to me, is wider than the word ‘algorithm’, but it also implies some sort of mechanization. It also teaches students to look at technology critically.

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  2. Jupyter in the Cloud

    I recently read Joe Feeeny’s amazing guide on how to get Jupyter set up in the cloud. Having suffered trying to optimize models on my laptop, I was really excited about the ability to do this, but automated, of course.

    I would recommend two small additions on top of that post:

    1. Use Amazon Linux Machine Learning AMIs, so that most deep learning frameworks(Keras + TensorFlow, Theano, numpy) and low level libraries(like CUDA) are installed already, so no need to waste precious time installing anaconda. I haven’t investigated this thoroughly, but it appears that the machine learning amis have 30gb of free storage that comes with the image, much higher than the 8gb limit that comes with Ubuntu AMIs.

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  3. Working With Elb

    For the web project I am currently working on, I started needing more disk space on my AWS instance than the free 8gbs that come with t2 instances. Eventually I should probably move to S3 to host static assets like these, but for now I took the opportunity to learn how to attach EBS volumes to my ec2 instances.

    I was surprised at how much patching that needed to be done on top of Terraform to properly mount EBS volumes. The providers that are relevant are:

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  4. Setting up logwatch

    One of the parts of managing linux instances is understanding the state of the machine so it can be troubleshooted. I really needed to output logs from my machine, so I set out to learn a very well known tool for log summarization called logwatch.

    There are three parts to any logwatch ‘service’. I use this term in quotes because I haven’t defined it yet, but also because it is different than the unix concept of a service. Generally it encompasses the type of logs you wish to summarize.

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  5. Deploying Selenium

    I had the misfortune of trying to use Selenium in one of my upcoming projects. Actually, Selenium is a pretty amazing tool for automating website testing, but the dependencies can be tricky to nail.

    Installing on OSX is pretty straightforward:

    1
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    pip install selenium
brew install chromedriver

    But this became a huge nightmare for me when installing remotely. Fortunately, there is a selenium releases a docker image one can run with this one liner:

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  6. Virtualenv Workflow

    Over the past couple of days, I had gained an appreciation for the tooling that has developed around the python ecosystem for package management, from having to develop and deploy several python applications.

    I’d like to share some guides and tips to maintaining python environments.

    pyenv

    I highly recommend using pyenv to manage your python environments.(and while we’re on that topict, rvm for Ruby, nenv for node). What these tools have in common is that it makes sure that you can maintain a separate set of dependencies for different projects.

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  7. That thing in Hugo

    Hugo continues to make occasional splashes on the front page of Hacker News, and like many others who were a little tired of why Jekyll took so long to render even small pages, I took a leap, and would like to share some of my experiences doing so.

    The first caveat I should mention before you read ANY further. The biggest downside of Hugo, in my opinion, is that it does not come batteries included with regards to SASS processing. All the blogs that mention how blazingly fast it is(and they are right) don’t mention this fact. IMHO, writing css in the modern day always involves a css preprocessor. Fortunately, SASS compilation handled by many build systems, and I will share my setup at the end of this post.

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