Contabo, Python, Ubuntu, PowerShell, ArangoDB

1. Nice start for a week and month. Contabo's Nuremberg servers getting shutdown due to slight thermal issues. Ie. air condition not working. It's interesting to see how long it takes before they'll resolve this problem and if any hardware damage has been occurring making the restart really slow process. It took around 12 hours to get most of the systems restored. Yet some unlucky ones had servers damaged by the temperature and now all systems got turned on so "quickly", if we can say so.

2. Tested Python 3.12 subinterpereters with my test code which was initially made to test ETL data export job designed for 32 core system. It utilizes async, threads and multiprocessing (processes) all in the implementation. Process involves reading data from MS SQL (SQL-Server, T-SQL) database, filtering, processing and grouping it as well as posting data out over HTTPS as XML batches. After initial testing the results were really promising and good. Much less memory is consumed that with the pure multiprocess version and performance was greatly better than the async (which really sucks with large XML data processing) as well as the threads, because GIL radically blocks in those cases. Some colleagues were slightly amused how happy I was about the achieved results during morning coffee. - Hey, if something can be done better, why not? - Yes, I'm aware about the fact that the subinterpereters are still experimental feature and might change and get improved a lot before official release. That's why I mentioned the 3.12 version at the very beginning of this statement. Ref: PEP 554 (@ python.org)

3. Finished updating all Ubuntu 22.04 LTS versions to 24.04 LTS. Good job! After a few bad attempts rest of the systems went surprisingly smoothly when you know where the problematic spots were. One system got broken Bluetooth, but I have to check that I did update the Bluetooth/main config. If not, that's likely to be the cause.

4. PowerShell, I love it. Spent three hours trying to accomplish a simple task using PowerShell. Random errors, doesn't work. Then I got mad and used 5 minutes to write the same script in Python and it works and even with many more features like automatic log file management, etc. - Awww, grah. - Yet it's nice that they've included the convertto-json so it's easy to get data from PowerShell in acceptable and easy to parse format. Another frustrating thing is that PowerShell is so complex and bad (if you're not used to it, just like Bash), that Copilot constantly messes it up, and doesn't even know how to fix issues when given specific error message and code snippet. Classic .cmd batch files just work so much better. kw: PowerShell (@ Wikipedia) - Another annoyance is versioning PowerShell 5 and PowerShell 7 are quite different, issues are guaranteed. As frun reference: Almost like python 2 vs 3. 

5. Glogg (@ glogg.bonnefon.org) is an excellent large log viewer, really fast and efficient with larger log files even when sizes are in several gigabytes. - I don't want to say anything about people whom spend hours opening large logs with Microsoft Windows standard Notepad and are asking for more RAM for their workstations because of... - Yeah.

6. After Ubuntu 24.04 LTS installation, system just freezes on boot. The boot process simply stops, yet kernel is working on some low level, because boot from keyboard does work. It seems that most likely reason for this annoying crash is the CUPS (@ Wikipedia) which causes segfault. Another probable secondary reason could be issues with network interface, but that sounds quite unlikely. After digging deeper, it wasn't really a crash because as stated, keyboard boot worked. After digging deeper, the reason was Nvidia (@ Wikipedia) drivers and the version of using older 470 driver. After updating to 550 is started to work. It was just interesting that it didn't always fail, it just failed at times more or less randomly. Especially, if I switched between tty mode and X mode during the boot clicking keyboard aggressively, it almost always worked. In the series of the funny fails. But now it works and life is good. Yet it might be that WebAuthn / FIDO2 / Passkeys is now broken, let's see. - Nope, it's working.

7. Tested ArangoDB (@ Wikipedia) for around four hours, just to know the basics. Creating different data models, assigning user / data permissions, inserting, selecting and deleting data. Basic CRUD test, it works.

8. I like preplexity.ai (@ Wikipedia) it's very nice and fast. Yet for some strange reason it annoyingly often fails to generate responses requiring multiple reloads / new thread clicks. I made an issue ticket about it, let's see if any followup is coming.

9. Fresh extra note: For several weeks Google Sites didn't add header to a new page (post), but today it did. I love their randomization logic, as I've mentioned several times.

2025-03-02