Why do I lifelog?

One of the reasons to publish these lifelogs is to make available a peek into the minutiae of another life (mine) that could help someone else get out of a rut, or just supply some alternative input that’s not form their own mind.

Put differently, I think that when I see what other people are doing and thinking day to day, it feels like a small, external disturbance (i.e. new information) that will help to nudge me in interesting and new directions.

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In this recent Mojo community blog post, I came across the term “two-world problem”, describing the disconnect in bio-informatics between the high-performance, low-level (often C++) and the more expressive, high-level (often Python) software layers.

As someone who has experienced this first-hand in scientific visualization and image processing, also between C++ and Python (quite acutely with VTK and ITK, less so but still relevant with SciPy), I really like this term.

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Monday 2024-01-29

• Took a bit of a deep dive today figuring out if and how we could implement our homegrown SciPy-heavy data ecosystem on Azure and Power BI. Ignoring the daunting (but predictable) costs, was quite impressed by MS Fabric. Read the following two blog posts for a good introduction, cast as a comparison between Fabric and the “old” Azure Synapse.
  • https://medium.com/version-1/does-fabric-offer-anything-more-than-synapse-workspace-d5240e4a30fe
  • https://endjin.com/blog/2023/05/azure-synapse-analytics-versus-microsoft-fabric-a-side-by-side-comparison
• Because I wanted to store and sometimes highlight bunches of web pages on above-mentioned topic, decided to use the OneNote webclipper to push to work’s cloud
  • article extraction works quite well, and you can highlight, but there’s no nice way to attach a note / comment to that highlight
  • omnivore sometimes struggles with extracting the article from a busy webpage, but attaching comments to highlights is a first class feature

Tuesday 2024-01-30

• Started with trying to write up Fabric notes in word doc, but did not get far. I do miss Dropbox Paper for things like this. Still, I should be able to get somewhere with just a DOCX and all of the screenshots I’ve been making.
• Defining high-level sprint goals worked much more nicely than I expected!
• Managed to get some sqlite3 data imported via Fabric Notebook into OneLake. Great feeling that it just works!

Wednesday 2024-01-31

• Started run at about 7:30 in Land en Zeezicht after dropping off GOU#3
• Coffee with ex-colleague J at Deluxe Coffeeworks in Dorp Street Stellenboch. Grateful for the catch-up, and also the exceptional coffee.
• llava 1.6 (VLM) release post: https://llava-vl.github.io/blog/2024-01-30-llava-1-6/
• Through reactflow, discovered ELK and elkjs for the layout of graphs! Play around with it here: https://rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de/elklive/
• Renewed vehicle license via https://online.natis.gov.za/ and not via City of Cape Town eServices as we usually do, because heard from colleague Z that natis delivers via courier and not via the South African Postal Service, which does not really function anymore thanks to the current government, and either takes months to deliver the licence or sometimes just loses track of it.

Thursday 2024-02-01

• Breakfast with almost lifetime friend CFS
• Did some work before he arrived, but got SUPER frustrated with DSTV because I was checking in on all my TODOs as I transferred them to the new month file and thus discovered that they had still not changed my subscription (this is after months of them confirming the change and not following through), and so after 10 years of their most expensive subscription I have now terminated our relationship.
  • Did you know: DSTV can be found in the dictionary under “galaxy-level grudge purchase”?

I have been trying to downgrade @DStv premium to compact plus since April 2023. Numerous times website confirmed my downgrade, but then returns to premium and bills me. In January, consultant confirmed my downgrade in January. Guess what? website says Premium! Cancelling @DStv

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Monday 2024-01-22

• As GOU#1 and GOU#2 were busy leaving for school, #3 came in to #2 for a hug but #2 was a bit too focused on getting all of her things ready to go in the car. Good Charl, in his only appearance of the day, spontaneously interjected with: “When you’re in a hug, for that moment, you put your full attention into that hug. For that moment, nothing else exists but the hug.”. I could really see the message hitting home with #2, and she vocalised as much. Monday: BIG SUCCESS!
• At work, managed to spill black coffee all over meself as I was just doing step 1 of living the one cable dream (read: attaching usb-c cable to my macbook). Clumsy Charl clearly at the wheel…
• Short but really nice streamlit demo during a work meeting. I knew about streamlit, but I’ve never actually played with it.
• Spent the rest of the day fighting trying, without success, to update the webcola d3 adapter to the latest version of d3.
  • In bed that night, had light-bulb that React was probably a better solution for this visualization in any case…
  • … and then realised that few years back I built something similar for work, and had a similar evolution of ideas which ended up with react + webcola.

Tuesday 2024-01-23

• At the office nice and early (7:30).
• Chatted with colleague about the abovementioned React + webcola thing we worked on together, at which point he pointed me at react-flow and comfyui
  • react-flow looks like it could work pretty well for this new project. Also: SO SHINY!
• streamlit app life cycle: script re-runs every time user interacts, see https://docs.streamlit.io/get-started/fundamentals/summary
  • it does have caching mechanisms to make this go faster
  • marimo, although much newer, approaches this issue with its reactive cell pattern
• Idea: We should write focused technical memos at work. This is now howto, but rather “things I learned” formulated to teach not just to document.
• Upgaded phone to iOS 17.3 and MacBook to macOS 14.3. Apparently there’s a zero day vulnerability in previous versions that can be exploited via malicious websites.

Wednesday 2024-01-24

• 8km run at just after 7 AM before it really got hot
• dip in the pool (friend LM says we must but pool is probably not cold enough due to +30℃ temps), then started to work
• right after dip in pool, partially pulled back muscle. Partial, because two warning spasms, but not complete lock like many previous times. PHEW!
  • Remember kids: Our spine’s vertical operation is a major evolutionary hack job and a mechanical disaster just waiting to happen. My advice: Spend more time horizontally.
  • This is also the reason why I’m still searching for a long enough reclining chair.
• Lovely working lunch with friend S at No Way José
• Some random ideas that popped into my head as I was trying to work:
  • idea: make github so that people can pipx install marimo-turbo to get install with pandas, altair, matplotlib, and so on.
  • idea: figure out way to publish marimo dashboard to HTTPS url somewhere, for really really cheap
    • sounds like AWS API gateway + lambdas can do something complicated to host streamlit, which also uses websockets
    • in the end, probably better to do this on my own VPS
      • … or even better, on my own machine behind tailscale funnel! This was straight-forward and seems to work well. See https://emacs.ch/@cpbotha/111811547009420844 (post is also embedded below)
  • idea: (which has been active for a bit longer) A reliable pattern to lazy start upstream processes only when the first request comes in, and to stop them when no-one is connected. Client -> nginx -> supervisord -> tornado
    • systemd can partially do something like this using socket activation: https://serverfault.com/questions/1121584/start-apache-on-demand-using-systemd-socket-activation
    • I would prefer to use supervisord for this
    • This will remain on the todo list for now, unless one of you knows a trick?
• ran into dude who built kubernetes thing for Hetzner using Crystal, a programming language of which I remembered that it just had a release, so quickly lost some more time on “crystal vs nim-lang” googling
  • blog post: https://vitobotta.com/2023/01/07/kubernetes-on-hetzner-cloud-the-easiest-way/
  • the kubernetes thing: https://github.com/vitobotta/hetzner-k3s

TIL: mastodon embeds are not as durable as twitter embeds

As I pasted the above embed, I saw to my disappointment that it’s just pulling in the mastodon post URL via iframe.

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Monday 2024-01-15

• Discovered that we (at work) now have access to GPT-4 Turbo via Azure OpenAI: 128K context and much cheaper than the old GPT-4. Will have to upgrade our private internal assistant, code name StoneGPT.
• Inspired by stefanv, carefully trying out weekly planning, but in a slight deviation I’m doing this in addition to my daily planning, which I only get around to a fraction of the time in any case. I think that this sort of multi-scalar examination and planning will help.
• Went to Bloemhof for the welcoming of the new grade 8 learners. Was really great to see GOU#1 and GOU#2 there, on two very opposite ends of the spectrum.

Tuesday 2024-01-16

• MS Copilot Pro ($20) has been announced, and also Copilot 365 is now available for businesses of all sizes (not just enterprises who can commit to 300 seats): https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/01/15/bringing-the-full-power-of-copilot-to-more-people-and-businesses/
  • Copilot Pro not yet available in South Africa 😥
    • $20 per month for integration with some Office apps (which could be useful, will have to see), priority access to latest models such as GPT-4 Turbo, and custom Copilots. I’m not convinced, will stick to my perplexity.ai for now.
  • Copilot for 365 can be purchased per seat, but minimum 1 year commitment which is $360 per person per year. Ouch.
• In addition to many meetings (Tuesday = meetings day), did manage to spend some quality time with a new visualization project. Slowly starting to use webcola again, but this time with d3@latest – sorta works, but no dragging. Have found work-around, still need to test.
• Went to bed really early, because must be up at 5:30 to help GOU#2 get ready for school and get to the bus stop on time. (Slept super badly thanks.)

Wednesday 2024-01-17

• Up at 5:30 after a pretty restless night. GOU#2 on the bus at 6 after some serious morning prep multi-tasking, GOU#3 (age 7) so organized and independent, ready to leave for school at 7!
• Nice and early(ish) slightly longer weekday run before work. My hip sent me a Teams message “Hi…” at about 80% of the route somewhere, but fortunately no follow-up. Colleagues on chat, haha.
• Got caught up in GEKKO Optimization Suite due to meetings with colleagues about various simulations. My initial enthusiasm was somewhat dampened upon learning that behind the Python API lies an admittedly useful but quite black-box compiled binary called apm.exe.
• TIL: John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon! See https://www.jacobelder.com/2024/01/17/director-of-toy-story-also-drew-bsd-daemon.html – I remember that daemon from the time when I had FreeBSD on my machine at home instead of Linux (somewhere in the 90s). You might remember that name from the Creativity Inc. book (the one about Pixar!) notes post on this blog

Thursday 2024-01-18

• AlphaGeometry from Google DeepMind is great work combining a symbolic math engine with a language model to solve Olympiad geometry math problems at just under gold-medalist level. See below for my breathless tweet. (twitter is still the uncontested ML firehose)
• News on our in-house GPT-wrapper front:
  • Discovered that I now have to upgrade to the new tool_call api as the old functions one has been deprecated. Made use of the opportunity to improve our implementation of the supplied OpenAI type annotations
  • Note to self, and to you: The *Params types are TypedDict declarations which you can use to work directly with JSON requests and responses, while the non-*Params types are pydantic models which you can use to (de)serialize JSON.
• Went to see a really good Mohs surgery dermatologist who will soon be removing my basal cell carcinomas. As always, AMA in the comments or via email.

This is such fantastic work! Symbolic engine + language model working together to solve Olympiad geometry math problems at just under gold-medalist level. Also, beautiful illustrations in the paper and posts. https://t.co/DtREuQK5k7

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Inspired by the impressive power (and philosophy) of One Punch Man’s Consecutive Normal Punches, I present: A Series of Consecutive Normal Daily Head Voices!

Monday 2024-01-08

• First day back at work 😱
• … but the most lovely lunch run (not literally) and chat with colleague E.
• Single cable life at work is there, but it’s complicated: Thunderbolt3 cable from macbook to Thinkpad dock, dock thunderbolt3 to displayport-mini (adapter), displayport-mini to displayport to monitor.
• Had blood drawn for my quarterly PSA test. (prostate-specific antigen; regular test to check that prostate cancer stays gone)
• Double Commander (currently at 1.1.8) on macOS is even better than I remember it, and is only a brew install --cask double-commander away.

Tuesday 2024-01-09

• marimo looks really good! From the github: a reactive notebook for Python. It allows you to rapidly experiment with data and models, code with confidence in your notebook’s correctness, and productionize notebooks as pipelines or interactive web apps. I still have to play with it, but it sounds like an Observable for Python.

Wednesday 2024-01-10

• Shorter weekday run because hip and because sun. Hip only started complaining by the end, a little later than my last short run. 🎉
• Tried to find reclining high-back office chairs with footrest in South Africa, starting from: https://www.wellnessgrit.com/best-reclining-office-chair-with-footrest/
  • Spectacular failure! Google Bard, Bing Chat, Perplexity come up with plausible looking links that go to different sites, but nowhere any chairs to be found
  • perplexity is probably the least bad because it more often admits to just not finding any links in SA
  • See e.g. https://g.co/bard/share/39071699296c and https://www.perplexity.ai/search/Following-is-a-aMds8_E1SkSAwsHGKNF_tQ?s=c#68c76cf3-f135-4a44-80c2-c1c628d17fb5
• Because of work, started to spend some quality time with d3.js again. I hope to be doing some nice interactive visualization soon!

Thursday 2024-01-11

• PSA is 0.006! 🥳
• if you’ve ever worked with d3.js, you will have used bl.ocks.org quite often. To my surprise, none of these links work anymore, and instead redirect you to the source gist, where they used to show you the live visualization. I could not find much official news about this sunsetting, but was consoled by the discovery of the open source bl.ocks.org clone at https://blocks.roadtolarissa.com/ via https://stackoverflow.com/a/75351168/532513
• Tune of the evening: RÜFÜS DU SOL - On My Knees (Adriatique Remix)

Friday 2024-01-12

• Short week-day run, no hip issues!
• Very nice focused day at home: First half wrapping up a code review. Second half diving back into d3.js. So much old memories I have to unearth.
• In between hacked in an idle mode for org-roam-similarity, in the process discovered that on this M1 Pro, CPU is much faster (2x) and uses much less RAM than the hardware accelerated PyTorch MPS version
• Lovely weekend-starter braai with family.
• Ran into the final sections (and private comments the source org file) of WHV #208 – besides the nostalgic music bits, really enjoyed reading some of the older journals. Publish or not, strong motivation to keep on writing journals. (now-you is often a very different person than then-you. interesting to keep in touch!)

Saturday 2024-01-13

• one of the highlights of the day was phone-call by and substantial conversation with bestie PK
• rest of day quite laid-back with the whole family, which was great
• thinking a lot about stefanv’s week planner instead of day planner, and the implications of this seemingly reduced planning effort (my daily planning is mostly only theoretical)
• greater family braai (GFB)

Sunday 2024-01-14

• Overslept a bit, woke up at 9 AM. This has not happened in ages.
• Slightly longer weekend run at 10 with new running hat and SPF50 on me face and neck. Hip issue did not manifest, am touching wood!
• Because I’ve been thinking about more visual ways to plan my week, worked on org-roam-canvas, making it a whole lot faster.

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• Last day of my vacation. 🥹
• Accompanied GOU#1 to the gym so that I could test out their assault bikes
  • Did a 42 minute interval-ish workout on the thing. Can get heart-rate up and keep it there quite easily. Intervals do feel quite harsh, and so I spent more time just pedalling harder than rest in the “rest” periods instead.
    • The assault bike saddles are garbarge.
    • Will probably go back for another airbike session or two to see if / how much it grows on me.
  • Spent the last 30 minutes quite enjoyably running on a “normal” treadmill after failing to get the motorless (self-powered) treadmill under control. It was either going to fast or too slow for me.
    • … hip niggle started to make an appearance by the end, but only subtly so.
• After getting wlziipsrv built as part of an arm64 docker image, decided to cancel the project (for now…) of porting all of my websites (static, wordpress, more stuff) from the Hetzner CX21 (2 Intel vCores, 4GB RAM, 40GB + 50GB extra) to the CAX21 (4 ARM64 cores, 8GB RAM, 80GB disk) as a neatly dockerized configuration. I pushed my image to dockerhub in case someone else finds its useful: https://hub.docker.com/r/cpbotha/supervisor-wlziipsrv
• Discovered that karabiner, a tool I used in the past to work around JetBrains shortcuts getting confused with Dvorak, fixes both of my current § vs ` (and ~) button swapping (bug in macOS 17.2) and non-working-ctrl-in-rdp-to-windows issues on macOS!
• Sublime post-dinner sunset walk with GOU#1 and GOU#2 ❤️

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• Researching assault-style airbikes as an alternative cardio modality, for when I would like a workout that’s not running (for when my joints need some rest) and that’s not in the sun so much
  • An assault-style airbike uses a big fan as the front wheel, and engages your arms and upper body as well. Seems to be an important staple in the crossfit world. I’m not sure if I’m the right person for it, but it sure looks convincing!
  • Here’s a not-too-crazy beginner cardio workout example on youtube: https://youtu.be/6OMfabFyVFI?si=SId44AGsPX9U2YZJ
• Really special braai with a group of besties, hosted by SnR. According to the highly scientific DHV-scale, the evening has been classified as “life-affirming” and also “the absolute best possible way to spend those hours”. So much thank you!

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• Woke up to gorgeous day in Betty’s Bay, spent first half on the beach
• Spent second half of the day slowly packing up all of our stuff (not my favourite vacation phase), some drinks, and working in-between on stuffing the archaic wlziipsrv.fcgi into a debian bookworm aarch64 image. Mostly bunches of ugly new hacks to work around some of the ugly old hacks in wlziipsrv.
• Scenic Clarence Drive route home, stopped at Café Zest in Gordon’s Bay for dinner. Yellowtail there was absolutely amazing! (thanks to GOU#1 who picked this jewel of a restaurant and made a reservation for us, all from the car)
• At home, finally got wlziipsrv built. Am secretly hopeful it might even work. (need to hook it up to supervisord, then nginx, then all of the microscopy data)

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• Pushed through to completion finally, the 2024 edition of the traditional yearly year transition blog post!
• Added an about page for the Daily Head Voices / lifelog (an edition of which you are reading now)
  • How can I add this as a standard but discrete part of every DHV? Should I?
• Noticed that I can upgrade my super humble Hetzner VPS + its extra storage for visible-orbit.org to a newer Hetzner VPS with 4 x ARM64 cores instead of 2 x AMD64 (according to benchmarks in total a small step up), double the RAM and enough storage for current needs for only a few cents extra per month. Benefit: Microscopically faster websites. Cost: Some time to modernize the configuration from ubuntu 18.04 to 22.04, perhaps even dockerizing everything in the process.
  • In the process of sniffing around, noticed that someone was bruteforcing the xmlrpc.php on medvis.org (thanks htop and puny VPS CPUs!), and so added a fail2ban configuration to iptables them into oblivion.
  • After that, took a deeper dive into the porting and modernization work. Biggest blocker looks like the super obscure wlziipsrv code I would have to rebuild for arm64 for the visible-orbit high-res slice viewer.

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