Category Archives: python

Power off.

Today I replaced a couple of quick hacks with InfluxDB and Chronograf.

I like things that run without breaking:

# supervisorctl
carbon      RUNNING   pid 1415, uptime 207 days,  19:49:57
graphite    RUNNING   pid 1419, uptime 207 days, 19:49:57
icecast     RUNNING   pid 24419, uptime 32 days, 1:11:18

Boot / No Boot

Today while cleaning I found an old stm32 board carrying an STM32F030F4P6.

Turns out that PlatformIO supports it so just for fun I tried to blink some lights.

I couldn’t find my stlink at home but openocd can use a buspirate as a programmer.

It took a while to upload but after that I was able to launch gdb.

And the light was dead.

Strangely enough poking at the memory showed that the code indeed was there. After a long pause to think I noticed that the boot 0 jumper was misplaced.

The lights flashed and there was much rejoicing.

A very apt metaphor

“we don’t have electricity on the south side of the building, but I know water conducts electricity, so just connect the water main to the power grid, then install an outlet in every faucet”

Brad Montgomery on what we do as software engineers. Original at https://bradmontgomery.net/blog/blue-collar-programmer/

I don’t know why or how I ended up at that post but that situation evokes many fond memories of failed attempts at explaining what I was doing sometimes.

For all of its sins (or our inability to understand it back then) XML coupled with XSLT & friends is a nice basis to do ETL transformations.

Hey, I wrote an assembler.

(It was about time I interrupted a never ending pile of drafts with something)

So, for a bit more than a month I’ve been attending a seminar on VHDL microcontroller design.

One of the workshops involved doing some simple exercises on eval boards. While the overall instruction set is small (fits on less than a page) the idea of programming and then assembling the sources using pencil and paper wasn’t very appealing at the moment.

It sure is a fun way to keep the mind fresh but given time constraints I couldn’t cope with such a long debugging cycle.

And… The obvious path was to build a tool.

I reused parts of python-lx200 because smart data structures and dumb code are nice. Most of this could be implemented with M4 too, perhaps for another code golf session.

A couple of years ago I’d probably tried to use Bison and Flex but doubt that I could manage something like this in just a handful of hours during the weekend.

There are some rough edges but as it is it supports labels, variable definitions and emits a valid IHEX file. I made a couple of dumb mistakes but they were really evident when looking at what Quartus made of the output file.

I’m quite proud of the result, I don’t know when was the last time I had so much fun doing a one off project, even if it wouldn’t be used anymore after the seminar.

The source code lives here: https://github.com/pardo-bsso/islyd-asm

Traitlets

Lately I’ve been hacking on IPython and Jupyter.

That journey led me into Traitlets and I wish I knew about them before.

For most of my stuff I use argparse, blinker (when not using GLib) and plain properties.

I knew about traits from long ago but what really liked from a first look is their solution to configuration management. It’s clean, self documenting, type checked, composable and can be python code.

I’m still a bit torn about having a complete programming language as a user configuration tool instead of a DSL or stuff like ini-files, json or the good dialect of yaml.

Wisdom

Quite a while ago (in the last century nonetheless) my idea of a productive day entailed writing a lot of code, measured by size in any suitable metric.

Lately I’ve been writing less in volume but I realize that I spend a greater time thinking about the problem at hand as a whole and that it happens mostly in the background while I’m doing something else. By the time I’m again at the workstation everything falls into place.

Also, when stepping aside and contemplating whatever I engineered I can’t help to feel anything but pride. Perhaps except for the documentation I build things from the get go thinking of what I would like to have were I a library user, on terms of building blocks.

During the last two weeks I built a library to parse a protocol called LX200 used to control telescopes and I can’t be happier with the result (for now it’s at https://github.com/telescopio-montemayor/python-lx200 ). The first one was a roller coaster, due to some other issues I went back to a night owl schedule and I can’t remember when was the last time I had such prolonged and intense periods of flow. I also taught myself asyncio.

It’s terse, concise, and (mostly) well structured. My former self would’ve made a mess of a state machine tied together with pages of if statements that worked, for sure, but was a pain to extend or correct. Of course looking down the path and leveraging years of experience this things seem obvious now.

Coincidentally, the other day Eric wrote about the advantage of declarative/table driven approaches.

It’s Over.

Yesterday, after almost exactly a year it was over.

We met for the first time on November 2016 while at PyCon. It was just like a dream.

The farewell party was at a very large house with pool and a park.

After a while of all the noise, shallow chit chat and drunken jokes I went for a walk at the park. It was dimly lit and among the shadows I catched a glimpse of a cat. I followed it until it decided to stop and allowed me to pet him.

And then, She joined me. We talked a lot about how we like cats, the clear sky full of stars, funny moments of the event. We got bored of sitting near the pool and I offered to grab a big puff so we can lay and watch the stars.

But by the time I reached the house some of my friends wanted to come back to the hostel, so I had to leave as I was the designated driver.

Later on December we matched on Tinder and started to chat, moved over to whatsapp and later telegram. She was about 1000km away back then.

On our first date I was a tad nervous, almost innocent. But then the fire lit again.

We had our ups and downs, wonderful moments and some not so much. We did a couple of trips, one of the most beautiful to Bariloche.

Without doubt she was one of the few Womans that I truly cared and Loved in the last years (Love with capital L).
She was one of the two that really cared about me and gave me support in one of my darkest eras (among other things She convinced me to start seeing a psychiatrist). Also, we explored our imagination and our kinky sides. She was one of the few woman that made me open up and reveal myself with all my insecurities and weaknesses. She let my human side flourish. Perhaps a bit too much, sometimes just the right word made me cry.

But not everything was roses. I became distant and tormented with troubles, some of them real, others just a byproduct of my mind. I focused on my studies and regaining my place on the society as an active member and so I put her on a second place for most of the week.

We had previous instances where we were about to call it quits. On one of them I applied some techniques of the Dual Control model and against all odds we ended in a whirlwind of lust.

But the writing was on the wall and we saw this coming.

She put it very concisely into words:

“We Love each other a Lot.
But we are not in love.”

Burning down the house

(Watch out)

So many drafts, some stories and pictures from the last PyCon at Bahía Blanca.

I was happily hacking on the kitchen the other Saturday when I hear a strange noise coming from the garden.

To my dismal surprise I see that the shed is on fire and part of the roof collapsed. I went in to take out a propane can to avoid an impending catastrophe and called the firemen (lucky us, they are a few blocks away).

We lost the roof, tools, vinyls and books on an adjacent room but nothing that can’t be replaced. Still fuck.

Some pictures of PyCon at flickr (not mine) https://www.flickr.com/photos/70871182@N04/sets/72157677377824525

PyConAR 2016 Days 1, 2 and 3

The first day we were quite busy handling the admission and all that stuff at Club Emprendedores Bahía Blanca, so no pictures (at least from me, there are others from the official photographer)

The following days were at Complejo Palihue. It’s a lovely campus at the outside of the city within very wealthy neighborhoods.

The lecture rooms and amphitheaters are ample and well stocked and the view is lovely:

I also spent a while at our booth

And attended to a couple of talks. This one is about MicroPython running on the EDU-CIAA

A small detour on my way to PyConAR 2016

It’s that time of the year (again) when I rent a car and hit the route.

This time I’m heading to Bahía Blanca in order to help a bit and attend to PyConAR.

At the side of Ruta 51 on Coronel Pringles, a bit after the crossing with Ruta 72 there’s a wonderful lake.
Even if there were about 60 kms left I had to stop to enjoy the day and stretch a bit my legs.