Lately my computer network setup has grown more and more com­pli­cat­ed. I have my server in the cloud, a NAS, a desktop work machine, a laptop and soon some Raspberry Pis too. In order to be able to easily connect from one to another I need to setup SSH between them. The default arguments to generate the keys are insecure and many sites on the Internet don't follow the best practices, so I am writing them down here so I can find them more easily.

We first need to generate a key on the source machine. There are several options available for algorithm choice: RSA is older, …continue.

For work I recently needed to do something that is very similar to regexes, but with a twist: it should operate on lists of objects, not only on strings. Luckily, Python came to the rescue with REfO, a library for doing just this.

My usecase was selecting phrases from Part-of-Speech (POS) annotated text. The text was lemmatized and tagged using SpaCy and it resulted in lists of the following form:

s = [['i', 'PRON'], ['look', 'VERB'], ['around', 'ADP'], ['me', 'PRON'],
 ['and', 'CCONJ'], ['see', 'VERB'], ['that', 'ADP'], ['everyone', 'NOUN'],
 ['be', 'VERB'], ['run', 'VERB'], ['around', 'ADV'], ['in', 'ADP'],
 ['a', 'DET'], ['hurry', 'NOUN']]

From these sentences we want to extract human …continue.

After in the last post we looked how to get the data, now we are going to start analyzing it. The first question we are interested in is how quickly do houses sell. We don't have access to actual contracts, so we will use a proxy to measure this: how long is an ad­ver­tis­ment for a house still displayed. We are going to estimate that this is roughly the time it takes to sell a house.

We will do a cohort analysis, where each cohort will be composed of ads that were shown for the first time on that day and we will track what …continue.

Having moved back to Romania, I decided I would need a place to live in, ideally to buy. So we started looking online for various places, we went to see a lot of them. Lots of work, especially footwork. But, being the data nerd that I am, I wanted to get smart about it and analyze the market.

For that, I needed data. For data, I turned to scraping. For scraping, I turned to Scrapy. While I did write a scraper 5 years ago, I didn't want to reinvent the wheel yet again, so I turned to Scrapy because it's a well-known, much used scraping framework in …continue.

After more than a year of using my NAS only to collect dust and the occasional backup, I decided this month to start self hosting various web apps on it. Synology has a visual Docker interface, so I installed that and I started trying to install my first app: Monica, which is a personal re­la­tion­ship manager (I love to track things).

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, modern technology has not yet solved this problem of deploying apps seamlessly. :(

Installing the Monica Docker container was fairly simple: you search for it, click download, set the en­vi­ron­ment variables in the GUI, carefully copy pasting their names from the doc­u­men­ta­tion, …continue.