rolisz's site

Blogs I follow - part 2

After a year, prompted by a question Catalin asked me, I finally made time to write about a couple more great writers I follow.

Seth Godin
Seth does many things, but he is mainly a marketing person. However, he doesn't do marketing in the annoying, in your face spammy way, but in a thoughtful, creative way. Instead of trying to go for the masses, to appeal to everyone, to bring the product to the lowest common de­nom­i­na­tor, he tries to broaden the market, to find new people, to win people over by quality, not by the lowest price and by having an eye on the long term. I have …continue.

Monitoring GPU usage with StackDriver

At work we use Google Cloud Platform to run our machine learning jobs on multiple machines. GCP has a monitoring platform called Stack­driv­er which can be used to view all kinds of metrics about your VMs. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it doesn't collect any metrics about GPUs, neither usage or memory. The good news is that it is extensible and you can "easily" set up a new kind of metric and monitor it.

To get GPU metrics, we can use the nvidia-smi program, which is installed when you get all the necessary drivers for your graphics card. If you call it simply, it will give you the following output:

> nvidia-smi
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|
…continue.

Epistaxis

hemorrhage from the nose, usually due to rupture of small vessels overlying the anterior part of the car­ti­lagi­nous nasal septum. Minor bleeding may be caused by a blow on the nose, irritation from foreign bodies, or vigorous nose-blowing during a cold

The Free Dictionary

Since I was a little kid I would sometime have nose bleeds, especially when I had a cold and would blow my nose a lot. I recently actually started tracking this, and it seems to happen every 2-3 months, but until now, the bleeding stopped in half an hour or one hour at most.

But on Saturday, it didn't. It started around 7 AM. It stopped …continue.

Sweating in Hong Kong

Landing in Hong Kong

Landing in Hong Kong

At the beginning of the year, a dear brother and good friend, whom I met in New York, invited me to his wedding which was going to be in Hong Kong. What better excuse to go to visit "China" than going for a wedding? This also made the decision of where to go on vacation this year quite easy to figure out. So we booked a hotel and the 12 hour flights, with a layover in Zurich, because we missed it/because it was the cheapest flight.

First impression after we got there: it's hot. Like really, really, really hot. And humid. Buckets of water …continue.

Repairing Linux and Windows boot partitions

My Windows in­stal­la­tion was on a 120 GB SSD and I decided it was time to upgrade that to 256 GB. Because I didn't want to reinstall my Windows, I copied it with CloneZilla. Everything seemed to work fine, until I formatted the old partition. Then the Windows partition stopped booting. I could access the files from ArchLinux. I tried to run some commands from the Windows Recovery Console, but I held it wrong and the result was that my Archlinux stopped booting too! Yaaay.

After lots of digging on various tutorials, I managed to put together the following to fix it. First, download a Live …continue.

Evaluating 2018 goals

Another half a year has passed from my latest goals and this is what seems like one of my worst per­for­mances so far. Turns out tran­si­tion­ing to a full time remote job is quite hard and time consuming. Also, not having a gym right at work makes it much harder to go to one :/

Weight watching
Ahahaha. :( I am "glad" to report that I am the same weight as I was when I posted this. Score: 0. At least I didn't gain weight (though I definitely got fatter :( )
Exercise three times a week
I averaged about 1.5 times a week. Score 0.5.
Juggle for 5 minutes …continue.

Setting up SSH keys

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.

The Expanse

The Expanse poster

I'm a huge sci-fi fan. I love sci-fi TV shows, but in the last couple of years, most of them have been... lacking, to put it gently. But finally, Sy-Fy made a new great show: The Expanse, based on a novel by James S. A. Corey.

The Expanse is a space opera, set two hundred years into the future. Humanity has colonized most of the solar system, but they haven't managed to get any further. Most asteroids have colonies on them, either for mining(Ceres) or for growing food (Ganymede). Mars has broken free of Earth control and the two are in constant political struggle with each other, …continue.

Fiddler on the Roof

Fiddler on the Roof

The last time I went to the theater was sometime in elementary school. I think it might have been The Lion King, but I'm not sure. I definitely don't remember anything that happened on stage. I vaguely remember the chairs and some of my classmates.

But about a month ago, my wife told me that the theater from Oradea will be doing The Fiddler on the Roof and that they still have tickets. She was going to have an exam that day, so what better way to relax than to go to the theater?

I have seen the movie twice and I really liked it. …continue.

Regular Expressions for Objects

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.