rolisz's blog (Page 2)

rolisz's blog

HackTM Oradea

Last weekend was HackTM Oradea, a hackathon that started in Timisoara. Last year they went to Sibiu and this year they came to Oradea. In Timisoara it's quite big (over 700 participants last year). Here in Oradea it's smaller, around 100 people, most of them being from

Old Man's Cave

The next target for our hikes was Peștera Bătrânului (Old Man’s Cave)1, which is close to where my parents-in-law live. We knew the cave was closed to tourists, but the views on the way there were supposed to be pretty. We left on foot on a Saturday morning

Backing up 3: Syncthing

Backing up 3: Syncthing

A while ago, I mentioned how I back up my valuable data to my NAS. In the mean time, I added one more thing to it: a UPS[1] so even if the power goes out, it still says up and more importantly, it can shut down safely. This is

Boardgames Party: Splendor

Boardgames Party: Splendor

One of the games that we recently played a lot is Splendor, a game with some really neat tokens, representing precious stones, and where the rich get richer (almost like in real life xD). The objective of the game is to get 15 prestige points. You get

NAS Outage #1

Incident scope: NAS user not able to access Web Interface for NAS Incident duration: At least 30 hours, up to 72 hours Incident resolution: Change router port Last weekend I was not at home. Some time on Saturday afternoon, I wanted to access some of the self hosted services I

Books of 2018

Inspired by many of the posts I saw on the blogosphere about how people did in their reading challenge in 2018, I decided to do a short recap as well. I started 12 books in 2018 and I finished 10 of them. This is unusual for me,

Man (and car) versus nature 2

Man (and car) versus nature 2

Almost a year later, I went again on a winter hike, with the same group of friends, to the "Biserica Moțului" Peak, close to Padiș. This time I was one of the drivers, so I went with our little Skoda, with 3 other guys. Because this hike was shorter, we

2018 in Review

In 2018 I finally managed to buck the trend of writing fewer and fewer posts: I wrote 22 posts, just like in the previous year! That's a bit less than what I would have liked (at least two a month), but personal life keeps getting busier and busier. The number

Boardgames Party: Sushi Go

Boardgames Party: Sushi Go

This year I caught the bug of boardgames. I bought a lot of them, I tried a lot of them and I played some a loooot of times. My lovely wife also enjoys this hobby very much, so we often have friends over to play various boardgames. Almost all of

Synology Moments

Synology Moments

I have almost 60000 pictures (about 195 GB), going back to about 2007 and I like to keep things organized. Of course, I also don't want to manually tag 60000 pictures. Until last year, the only option to avoid that was Google Photos, which would automatical

Blogs I follow - part 2

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,

Monitoring GPU usage with StackDriver

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,

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

Sweating in Hong Kong

Sweating 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

Repairing Linux and Windows boot partitions

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

Evaluating 2018 goals

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

Setting up SSH keys

Setting up SSH keys

Updated December 2022 to add instructions for Windows 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

The Expanse

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

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,

Regular Expressions for Objects

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

Real estate cohort analysis

Real estate cohort analysis

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

Scraping for houses

Scraping for houses

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

Synology and Docker

Synology and Docker

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,

Man versus nature

Man versus nature

Some friends in Oradea are big hikers. They had plans to go to Curcubăta Mare, the highest peak on a 500 km radius, being at 1849m, but they were always foiled by weather. Finally they decided to go last Saturday, because the temperature had risen slightly and

N.T. Wright in Cluj

N.T. Wright in Cluj

N.T. Wright, one of the world’s leading New Testament scholars and an expert on Pauline theology, was invited by Edictum Dei to hold a conference in Cluj last week. I found out about it the day before, when there were already no more tickets available. But, I persisted,

Dell XPS 13 review

Dell XPS 13 review

While I worked for Google, I had a work Macbook and that was enough for my personal usage as well when I was travelling. But now, I needed a new laptop, so a month ago I splurged on a shiny new toy. Facebook proved itself useful for once: I asked

Goals for 2018

Because of my move to Romania, I decided to postpone any big goal setting until I’m finally here. Packing, driving 3000 kilometers, unpacking, deregistering from Switzerland and registering in Romania all take unpredictable amounts of time, so I just thought

An update on rolisz

An update on rolisz

After 3 years and 5 months at Google, time has come for me to move on to my next adventure. Yesterday was my last day at Google. I will be moving back to Romania, where my wife still has one year of university left. On one hand, I'm super excited

Mass Effect Andromeda

Mass Effect Andromeda

I have been a huge Mass Effect fan. I loved the first game as soon as I played. I found the story fascinating, the science there amazing. I played the games and read the books and got to know the universe pretty well. But then Mass Effect

2017 in Review

Blogging got put on the backburner this year, for a good reason though: I got married, so other stuff become more important. While I did still have a blogging goal, it was more reduced, to 1.5 posts a month, which I did actually managed to beat. I wrote 22

Let's go to Africa

Let's go to Africa

Because of work, I couldn't take a long, proper vacation right after our wedding, so we decided that after some deadlines at the beginning of September, we would do a nice, two week honeymoon. Given that I love flying and I need the frequent flier miles, while my wife was

The Last Jedi

A new Star Wars movie just came out and another Christmas is around so this year's Christmas party at Google was the screening of The Last Jedi, one day before the public launch. While I really enjoyed The Force Awakens, I was pretty disappointed in The Last

Show-ing off

Last weekend was a very “cultured” one for me. On Friday evening I went to a 2Cellos concert. And boy, did that concert rock. For those who don’t know them, 2Cellos is made by two cello players who take modern songs and adapt them for the cello. They play

Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049

The original Blade Runner, which came out in 1982, is an iconic movie. It poses difficult questions, has great monologues about the human condition, and had just enough open questions left to have fans debating pretty much until now. Somehow, Hollywood decided to make a sequel to it 35 years

Blogs I follow - part 1

Blogs I follow - part 1

I'm still one of those rare weirdos who use RSS feeds (with Feedly) and over the years I have started following many people and reading many blogs. Unfortunately, many of them have stopped posting, but there are still some people who regularly post really inter

Around Europe with my wifey

Around Europe with my wifey

This reminds me of the singing lion. My wife has never been outside of Romania before this year, so I thought I would use this summer to fix that by traveling around as much as possible. Right after our wedding, we went for a short, one week, roadtrip honeymoon around

Drei Jahre in der Schweiz

Drei Jahre in der Schweiz

Three years ago today I started my job at Google. I had moved to Switzerland two days before, with two suitcases and a backpack. Then followed a lot of adventure. The third year was different. I started learning Swiss German, so that I can better integrate and it payed

How to organize a wedding - in 20 easy steps

How to organize a wedding - in 20 easy steps

So you decided to get married. You need a wedding for that. It's a lot of work. Given that I just got married two weeks ago, I'll try to jot down some step-by-step instructions (with particulars about Romanian bureaucracy). 1. Find a

Evaluating goals - 2017 edition

Evaluating goals - 2017 edition

Another half a year has passed, so it's time to review my goals from January. Around March something came up, so I dropped some goals or reduced their intensity. That something is called setting a wedding date for July, so I'll excuse myself for being busy with that. Scoring will

I believe I can fly!

I believe I can fly!

About a month ago I started believing I can fly, so I proved it by going for a gliding session. A glider is a lightweight plane, which doesn't have an engine, so it's pulled by another plane until it takes off. After that, you glide through the air, like

The Piano Guys

Last Friday The Piano Guys were in Zürich. I found out about it from an ad on Facebook. It's probably the second time in my life where an advertisement there is actually useful and relevant for me. They started by playing Batman Evolution, which goes through most

Istanbul, land of turbans, spice and carpets

Istanbul, land of turbans, spice and carpets

This is the land of cheap layovers on the way to Romania. Thanks to the invisible hand of the market, tickets to the airports that are close to where my fiancee lives were 50% cheaper when flying through Istanbul, with an overnight layover, than more direct flights. It was still

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to my dear mom! I love you! Kisses from New York!

Look what I found on Uetliberg

Look what I found on Uetliberg

Scarcely had I hiked up Uetliberg when I found the one my heart loves. I held her tightly and I put a ring on her finger! (to paraphrase Song of Solomon 3:4)

Indexing IM logs with Elasticsearch

Indexing IM logs with Elasticsearch

Remember my old project for processing instant messaging logs? Probably, because I wrote about it five years ago. Well, the project is only mostly dead, every once in a while I still occasionally work on it. I mostly use it as an excuse to learn tech

Silence

Silence is a movie by Martin Scorsese about two Catholic priests, Rodriguez and Garupe, who go to Japan in the 17th century to find their mentor, Father Ferreira, who is rumoured to have lost the faith. It's a really good movie, even though it's extremely brutal. It makes you think

Backing up 2: The NAS

Backing up 2: The NAS

As I mentioned in my previous post, it's good to have various kinds of backups. Today I'm going to talk about on-site backups, in a Network Attached Storage. Network Attached Storages (NAS) are small form computers which usually have at least two hard drives. The hard drives are often hot

Backing up

In today's world, our data and our information is one of our most valuable assets. I have photos going back to 2008. My sporadic journal has digital entries from 2010. I have IM logs from 2009. I have a list of my monthly expenses since 2012. My

Winter sports

I've been in Switzerland for almost two and half years now, but I haven't done the typical Swiss things (except eating Fondue). Last winter I was either not here or busy at work, so I avoided all winter sports. But this year two opportunities came

Sous vide with Anova Precision Cooker

Sous vide with Anova Precision Cooker

Last year I bought an Anova Sous Vide Cooker. The name is slightly misleading, because it's not generally used to cook in a vacuum, but for cooking at very precisely controlled temperatures. The advantage of using Anova is that you can cook various foods at temper

New year, old goals

New year, old goals

My attempt a year ago to set public goals was quite successful. I achieved most of them and the average completion score was 0.7. I took a break in the second half of the year, but now I'm well rested and I want to start again. I learned some

2016 in review

Wow, this post is finally done on time! Yaaaay! This year was the first time I had a goal for writing on my blog, at least for the first half of the year. In January I set up a goal to write 3.5 blog posts per month, for the

Noh hai la vot!

Noh hai la vot!

On Sunday there are parliamentary elections in Romania, so I'm doing my civic duty of encouraging people to go and vote. După cum probabil ați auzit, mâine, 11 decembrie, sunt alegeri pentru deputați și senatori. Eu o să merg mâine la vot în Berna, cum am fost și acum doi

Going places...

Going places...

...but not too far. Last month I exchanged the view that can be seen in the above image, for this one: I moved from Langnau am Albis, where I have lived for two years, to Wiedikon, a district in Zürich. The old place has been officially the place where I've

Maltalavista

Last week I was in Malta, on an offsite with the new (extended) team. It was possibly even better than in Nice. Because I switched to this team "late", I couldn't find flights together with the rest of the team, so I went a day early, but I stayed at

Data and Goliath

Data and Goliath

Bruce Schneier is a well known American security researcher, who has written several books about this topic. Data and Goliath is his latest book about it. I bought it last year, but I only got around to reading it last month (one more win for the reading goal for the

Good bye, Alida

Good bye, Alida

I’ll miss your funny quips. I’ll miss the long discussions we used to have about about the craziest topics (like the differences in mentality between people who are interested in the humanities versus the sciences). I’ll miss going to eat greasy, yummy food

Searching for something?

Searching for something?

This post is "cu dedicatie pentru Ciprian de la Bistrita", who has asked for a search feature for some time now I didn't have a search on my blog for quite some time, because it's a static website, without any dynamic backend (except for comments, but those are well isolated,

Two years at Google

Two years at Google

A bit more than two years ago I was anxiously heading towards the reception of the Google Zurich office. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was very excited. One year ago, I was oncall, dying of heat in my home. Today, I am on my last oncall

My desktop setup

My desktop setup

It's been 5 years since I posted anything related to the kinds of tools and apps I'm using. It's also been a year and a half since I bashed Linux last time. While the more I use computers, the more I hate them (and not just in the way most

How to make a selfie time-lapse video

How to make a selfie time-lapse video

Mostly for future self reference, but also in case somebody else wants to do something similar, I'll write down the steps I took to do my selfie time lapse video. First step: take daily pictures. I recommend about 0.3-0.5 seconds per picture in the slideshow and you want

50 Days of Roland

50 Days of Roland

For a long time I wanted to do the kind of video where you take one photo every day and then you show make a slideshow of them, like this one. Today is the day where it finally happened, even if it contains only 50 days worth of data! The

Evaluating goals

Evaluating goals

The first half of the year has passed, so it's time to see how I did on my goals that I had set out for it. Sorry the post is late, I was travelling for the last two weeks. I described using two techniques for helping achieve goals. One of

The Rise and Fall of the Yahoo Messenger Empire

The Rise and Fall of the Yahoo Messenger Empire

Back in my days, in Romania, Yahoo Messenger was "the thing" to be on. Everyone had it. It was the most popular Instant Messaging platform by far, for almost ten years, while MSN, AOL or ICQ were pretty much unheard of. Sometimes, people would send messages saying something among the

Nice time in Nice

Nice time in Nice

Because I had such a good time in Paris last month, I just had to go again to France, this time to the French Riviera, to hear the beautiful French language again :X:X. Or maybe it was just an SRE offsite. Who knows? It was really exciting to go

Glücklicher 6. Geburtstag, mein blog!

Glücklicher 6. Geburtstag, mein blog!

Du bist sechs Jahre alt, mein lieber blog. Ich habe viele schöne Erinnerung in deine Blog-Posts.... Ah, who am I kidding, my German is not good enough to write a whole post in it. You've travelled a lot in the last one year. You've been twice to America. You've visited

Nutribullet

For Christmas, a colleague of mine bought himself a juicer and a blender and he was super happy about them. So, for my birthday, my right hand surprised me by ordering me the blender my colleague had: the Nutribullet 600. And boy, was it a nice surprise. It's

Paris Revisited

Paris Revisited

After feeling a bit down under at home, I decided to go places again. Because I haven't seen my good friend Alida in a long time, I decided to go to Paris again. And this time not just for an afternoon. It made me feel uncomfortably excited

Hanz Zimmer Live on Tour

Hanz Zimmer Live on Tour

Hanz Zimmer, a composer for many movie soundtracks, has gone for the first time on a tour. He started off on the 6th of April in London and he will finish on the 16th of May in Sofia. And, more importantly for me, he was in

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider

I am a huge fan of the Tomb Raider series. I still remember playing Tomb Raider II for hours when I was little. So of course I bought the new one as soon as it came out. I bought it on Steam, because I don't even have a DVD reader

Musings about free will

Musings about free will

Sometimes when I don't have anything in particular on my mind, like when I'm on the train and I've already checked the Facebook newsfeed, or when I'm washing the dishes, I like thinking about various philosophical issues. I haven't studied too much philosophy, I mostly limited myself to Wikipedia, so

Fixing the bike

Exactly one year ago, I went for the first time to the office with my bike. Today, for my birthday again, I went with the same bike, for the first time this year, now to church. But, there is a biiig difference: I "fixed" my bike myself this year :>:> And

Midway goal checkup

Midway goal checkup

Three months ago I set up some goals for myself. Because accountability is key to accomplishing goals and sticking to them, it's time I review them, see how I did, and possibly adjust them. Losing weight: I'm at 82 kg right now, so

Revisiting Romania

Revisiting Romania

It's that time of the year again when the Easter Bunny I visit Romania. History likes to repeat itself, but there are changes. First change, which I welcome with open arms (and mouth), is that they have good orange juice in Romania. The packaging claims it's all natural, fresh, only

The Museum

Almost two years after I went to The Dungeon, I went with Eliza and Ruxi to The Museum, another room escape game in Cluj. The Museum has two different puzzles and for some reason we chose to go to the second one, which is more difficult. Because one person bailed

The Master Algorithm

The Master Algorithm

Having a goal to read books really helps with reading them. I finally started reading through the mountain of machine learning books that have been sitting on my shelves for half a year. The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos, a professor at the University of Washington, is an user friendly

Mayumana

The Israeli dance troupe Mayumana was in Zürich this weekend and I went to see one of their shows. Colour me impressed. That was amazing. It was a really good show. The theme of the show was time. They started off by showing a video about flies and how their

New York Again

After Mountain View, I went to Memphis to visit some dear friends from a fellowship there. Because of this, I spent most of my time meeting with lots of people, so I didn't really get to see too many places, so no post about Memphis. One remark though: Memphis pork

Why Nations Fail

Why Nations Fail

I finally finished this book. I bought it from one of the authors a year and a half ago. The book has seen some serious mileage in my hands, having been to the Belgium and to the US. But I finally managed to read all of it. Having a goal

Alcatraz

This year started off well, with another trip to the USA, on a business trip to Mountain View. One of the things that I missed last time I was in San Francisco was Alcatraz. When I arrived there I realized that you need to buy tickets several weeks in advance,

Bose Bluetooth Headphones

Bose Bluetooth Headphones

Last year I bought myself a pair of Bose SoundLink Around-Ear Bluetooth Headphones. After 6 months of usage, I feel like it's time that I finally review them, having used them enough :)) Let me first say my track record with all of my previous wired earphones: none of them lasted

2015 in review

Woohoo. I wrote this post four days sooner that I did last year. Maybe in a couple of years I will actually write it on the first day of the year!!!!! This year has not been such a great year. While the number of readers did go up slightly, from

Setting goals

While this may seem like a New Years Resolution kind of post, I assure you, it's just a coincidence. In December I read two books about productivity. The first one is by Tim Challies, a Christian pastor and very prolific blogger, Do More

The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens

The Christmas party organized by Google in Zurich this year was... drumroll a private Star Wars: The Force Awakens screening. They rented out half of Arena Cinemas for half a day and they invited all Zooglers to watch the movie. Normally I don't go to see movies in the first

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100 Review

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100 Review

Back in April, after my trip to Geneva, I realized I needed a camera. Just using my phone to take pictures wasn't going to cut it. No matter how good cameras in phones get, they still have a small sensor and a fixed lens, so in many conditions they will

Adding SSL with Let's Encrypt

Adding SSL with Let's Encrypt

Let's encrypt is a new Certificate Authority, started by Mozilla, EFF and University of Michigan, that will offer free SSL certificates, with an easy setup. I had an attempt previously to set up SSL for my website, from StartSSL, but I... accidentally

Line charts in Javascript

Line charts in Javascript

Recently I wanted to take a look at some personal data that I had been collecting for several years (Quantified Self and Lifelogging ftw :D). Until now it was sitting there write-only, with me occasionally peeking at it manually, but because it was in

BAP

In September I went to Belgium to work in a Google datacenter, near Mons, for two weeks. I took the opportunity and used the three weekends to wander around and visit a lot of places, including three capitals: Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris (hence the title of

Google Tech Talk @ Babes Bolyai University

Good news everyone! I will give two presentations at the Babes Bolyai University in Cluj on the 21st of October. The first talk is aimed mostly at students and I will be talking about what I do as a Site Reliability Engineer

San Francisco and the so called Mountain View

San Francisco and the so called Mountain View

Alcatraz, where my childhood favorite movie was set, The Rock After a week in New York and another one in hot, humid Richmond, where I had a very blessed time due to who was there, I finally arrived to the official destination of my trip: Mountain View,

After a year in Zürich

After a year in Zürich

One year ago today I was discovering, to my shock and horror, that my laptop's charger doesn't fit in the Swiss socket. My phone charger did, but the laptop plugs pins were 0.25 mm thicker, so they did not. Several hours earlier I boarded the plane

The Big Apple

The Big Apple. New York. The greatest city in the world, as every tour guide in the city will tell you every 5 minutes. I went for a business trip to the USA, to Mountain View, California, but before that I took two weeks of vacation: one in New York

The Little Daco-Hungarian Expat Makes Gulyas

The Little Daco-Hungarian Expat Makes Gulyas

After spending a long time in the fatty, sugary, GMO, antibiotic-ladden land of the USA, the little daco-hungarian decided to make himself some gulyas, for the first time ever. Here is his step-by-step recipe, with way too many pictures and details about all the mistakes he made. Ingredi

Trip to Dublin

A month ago there was the first ever SRECon in Europe. It got together lots of SRE-like engineers (basically the people who are responsible for the software that is live, running in production) from Google (the host of the event), Facebook, Etsy, Splunk, SoundCloud and others. Because

Happy 5th Birthday!

Happy 5th Birthday!

5 years ago, on this day, I started this blog on Wordpress.com. And here I am, half a decade later, 2^8 posts later. Let me tell you how it all started. I had been planning for a long time to start a blog. I actually even started one

Gardening

About two months ago, we had a TetraPak gardening class at work. During this class we learned how to seed and care for spinach (left in the above picture) and salad (right) plants in a 1L milk box. But these were just short term "gardening" experi

Weekend in London

Weekend in London

I was oncall the week that ended in the long weekend of the 1st of May. It was a rainy weekend and I had to stay inside the house, during my shift, but because it was rainy, it wasn't very tempting to go outside even after it. So I decided

Google Cardboard

Google Cardboard

Google Cardboard is a low cost virtual reality headset made out of cardboard, obviously, two lenses, a small magnet and some velcro. Instructions on how to make one yourself are available online. I was quite skeptical when it came out last year. I'm not a big fan of