All posts by Steven

howto, music

Splitting CUE/Log Flac Files

Leave a comment

I ran across some old FLAC files I ripped and for some unknown reason I decided at the time that a the FLAC LOG/CUE format was the way to go. I dunno perhaps I was intoxicated at the time.

At any rate is what I used to split the single FLAC out into files.

Install the necessary tools (this is Pacman which I use on my Manjaro box):

# pacman -S cuetools shntool flac mutagen

Split out the giant FLAC file into smaller track FLAC files:

$ shnsplit -f cue_file.cue -t "%n %t" -o "flac flac -s -8 -o %f -" flac_file.flac

Then this populates the id3 tags in the newly split out FLAC files from the CUE file:

$ cuetag.sh cue_file.cue *.flac

Enjoy!

Uncategorized

Error With Pip and flask-bcrypt

Leave a comment

I am playing around with Flask and I wanted to use the Bcrypt tool to encrypt my users passwords. So like all the other packages I attempted:

pip install flask-bcrypt

That however resulted in this rather unpleasant error:

  error: Microsoft Visual C++ 10.0 is required (Unable to find vcvarsall.bat).

  ----------------------------------------
  Failed building wheel for python-bcrypt

That of course sent me on a dizzying hunt for resolution. I got it working by editing the “msvc9_support.py” file to not use the registry and use just the path where I found vcvarsall.bat on my computer:

   productdir = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC" # Reg.get_value(key, "installdir")

Elegant? Eh probably not, Utility? perhaps. But it does work and after that I was able to install flask-bcrypt.

conferences

VSLive San Francisco 2015

Leave a comment

I was able to attend VSLive in San Francisco this year including the Pre-Conference (yes nifty indeed) hosted at the historical Fairmont.

Here are some of my notes/observations/snotty comments:

  • Open source licenses are complicated and if you have deliverables in the enterprise you should NOT use copyleft licenses as you are legally bound to re-release under that same license your additions on top or using the original copyleft material. Focus on more Permissive licenses (like Apache, BSD, MIT) to avoid potential hassles.
  • Microsoft really, REALLY loves Azure and wants you to 100% do everything in it. It was communicated that their reasoning for Open sourcing .NET was to promote “Any Developer, Any App on Any Device” – of course all using Azure offerings.
  • PowerShell was a reoccurring theme across sessions from deployments to testing.
  • San Francisco is a wickedly expensive place to visit. When the locals say “oh its only four blocks” be warned those four blocks are likely at 45° inclines and are meant to weed out the weak.
  • It appears to me that most of the attendees don’t keep up during the year and use these conferences to catch up. My personal reason was to re-enforce that what I have learned and practiced on the technologies covered are correct and optimal. I can honestly say that about 80% of the material covered was review.
  • I think its interesting how most developer types are very anti-social and these conferences continually try to “socialize” these sorts together. What winds up happening more often than not is groups of geeks sitting at a lunch table not a single person saying anything; absolute awkward silence. I attempt start up conversations and they usually end with a single “yep” or “nope” type response.

Notable Quotes from Sessions:

  • “Trading velocity for quality will lead to technical debt” – Hundhausen
  • “Routinely have a HARD Conversation with shareholders – Honest, Appropriate, Respectful and Direct” – Hundhausen
  • “Always follow the Boy Scout Rule; leave your code better than you found it” – Hundhausen

List of the sessions I attended:

  • Pre-Conference: ALM and DevOps with the Microsoft Stack – Brain Randell
  • Keynote: The Future of Application Development – Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 – Jay Schmelzer
  • UX Design Principle Fundamentals for Non-Designers – Billy Hollis
  • Cloud or Not, 10 Reasons Why You Must Know “Web Apps” – Vishwas Lele
  • Mobile Apps for the Javascript Developer with Apache Cordova – Subhag Oak
  • Build Data-Centric HTML5 Single Page Applications with Breeze – Brian Noyes
  • To Git or Not To Git for Enterprise Development – Benjamin Day
  • What’s new in C# 6.0 – Jason Bock
  • Microsoft’s .NET is Now Open Source and Cross-Platform. Why it matters – Mark Rosenberg

 

pictures

San Francisco Google Awesome-ness

Leave a comment

I was in San Francisco and I took these from the Crown room on the 24th floor of the Fairmont hotel. I have all my phone pictures backed up via Google and Google Awesome, was well pretty awesome and made these panoramic views from several pictures I took next to each other. Sure they are a bit grainy (they are from my Samsung G4 be nice) but you can see Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Wharf and Golden Gate bridge.

20150616_163112-PANO

This is the other side I dunno what is noteworthy over here but I thought the shipping container ships were interesting to see out in the water.

20150616_163303-PANO

Enjoy!

howto

Setting up WordPress FavIcon

Leave a comment

I wanted something a bit more custom looking than the stock WordPress Icon so I decided to take my avatar and make a favIcon from that.

I went to Favicon-Generator it does a nice job of resizing and making the “ico” file, which is pain to create, and gives you several varying sizes of your uploaded image:

favicon_generated_set

It also does a nice job of creating the html to include in your header. I only used a subset from the generated html:

<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="192x192"  href="/android-icon-192x192.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="/favicon-32x32.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="96x96" href="/favicon-96x96.png">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="16x16" href="/favicon-16x16.png">

I created a child theme in Word Press then edited the header to include the above in the <head> block.

Enjoy!

howto

ASP.NET MVC 5 Preview

Leave a comment

Managed to get ASP.NET 5 preview up and working via Visual Studio 2015 RC in a Docker container hosted on my local Ubuntu server (read; not an Azure hosted server). All in Oracle VirtualBox Virtual Machines.

ASP.NET 5 Preview Running on a Local Docker Ubuntu VM
ASP.NET 5 Preview

My VirtualBox host is a Windows 8.1 box and I used two VMs: a Windows 7 Development Box (I tried Windows 8.1 in a VM and the performance was terrible) and a Ubuntu Server 14.04.2.

For the most part it was pretty much documented here. My only hiccup was that I had to do a “Restore Packages” to get Grunt to install its packages, this didn’t happen with a “Rebuild” as I would expect. I set my “Custom Docker Host” settings like this:

Custom Docker Settings For Publishing To Docker Server
Custom Docker Settings

After publishing from Visual Studio I was able to get a list of the images on the Docker server and it now included the new published app:

{
    Created: 1432561734,
    Id: "0ad5302ad774376604042790713f79ffa98fceca9826159bcd93b1e20dfce552",
    Labels: {},
    ParentId: "becb4b73fe255ab7284cfdcf3f5768520736317cd5f0456bf169bb9f441763d3",
    RepoDigests: [],
    RepoTags: [
        "helloworldweb1:latest"
    ],
    Size: 0,
    VirtualSize: 756665995
},

So the next challange is to get MongoDB setup running in a Dockerized instance on my Ubuntu server then create a ASP.NET MVC application consuming that server and publish that via Docker and see how performance and maintenance plays out.

 

howto

ASP.NET 5 on Ubuntu on VirtualBox

Leave a comment

I figured out the magic sauce for getting ASP.NET 5 running on Ubuntu 14.04 in a VirtualBox VM.

asp_6_on_ubuntu_vm

I followed this mostly for the setup but your Dockerfile should look like this:

FROM microsoft/aspnet

COPY project.json /app/

WORKDIR /app

RUN ["dnu", "restore"]

COPY . /app

EXPOSE 5004

ENTRYPOINT ["dnx", "project.json", "kestrel"]

Be sure and set your VirtualBox setting to “Bridged” so you can hit the IP from your workstation.

Enjoy!

Uncategorized

Blog Setup

Leave a comment

Hopefully this will be a start of something new and exciting – or another thing for me to procrastinate about. I have tried several times before to blog consistently I just get, well, sidetracked.

My intention is to blog stuff that I don’t want to forget or stuff that I want to share. Most things I would expect to be of a technical nature but I suspect that sometimes I will want to post something for the ages to remember my wit and wisdom (read; me ranting about something inconsequential).

Enjoy!

Uncategorized

Wheezy.web + Sublime Text

Leave a comment

Part of being a developer is pushing yourself to learn and use something new. So I decided I would take a language I am familiar with and do MVC in it (as I do ASP.NET MVC in C# daily at work). I looked at several MVC frameworks for Python but decided upon Wheezy.web

After playing around with Sublime Text 3 for about two hours I decided to get a license; and frankly its rare I actually pay for something that there are many FOSS alternatives. Sublime Text 3 is just that good. Yes really, that good. Highly recommend you setup “Package Control” for Sublime Text it makes installing packages a breeze. I used this blog post and installed Anaconda for syntax completion.

Sublime Text 3
See I do support projects I use.

This is using the built-in “Sunburst” theme along with the “Dark” Sublime Text layout. It’s a thing of beauty. Here is my “User” config setup :

[js]
{
"color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme – Default/Sunburst.tmTheme",
"ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true,
"folder_exclude_patterns":
[
".svn",
".git",
".hg",
"CVS",
"__pycache__"
],
"font_face": "Consolas",
"font_size": 12,
"ignored_packages":
[
"Vintage"
],
"indent_to_bracket": true,
"rulers":
[
79
],
"shift_tab_unindent": true,
"theme": "Soda Dark 3.sublime-theme",
"translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
"trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true,
"wrap_width": 80
}
[/js]

Wheezy.web has some really impressive features for such a lean framework. This coupled with Mako templates makes for a great foundation for highly concurrent, high performance web projects.

Uncategorized

So much hate.

Leave a comment

I guess getting older sitting around watching and listening to people (especially on Facebook) is taking a toll on me. It’s difficult to sit and watch and listen to friends and relatives promote toxic behavior all in the vein of “Righteousness”. This rambling is my opinion (mixed with some King James bible quotes).

I was reminded of this today and thought it was awesome. “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven” – Luke 6:37.

How great would it be if everyone realized we are all fallible, (“Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” Philip 2:3), and our love and respect for others is a reflection of who we really are.

The adherence to the “Golden Rule” shouldn’t be an elective – “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them” (Matthew 7:12). It should be mandatory, if you treat others not how you want others to treat you that makes you a hypocrite – and generally not a very endearing person to be with.

No matter your beliefs; some of us are Christians, some are Deists, some are Hindi, some are Jewish, some are Atheists. Everyone initially deserves being treated with respect; its that followup of how they respond to you which you can react (remember are you looking out of the bowl or is someone watching you from outside the bowl – your actions speak louder than your words). Initially don’t presume because they appear different than you that you are better than them – or nicer, or have more money, or whatever.

Try to remember this much. Your right to say whatever it is you think is right, and do whatever you think is right (obviously within legal limits) is equal to those rights of others. If you don’t think that equality exists – your effectively breaking the “Golden Rule”.

TL;DR; Be nice to others even when you don’t agree. No-one wants to deal with someone who intentionally wants to cause emotional damage. Everyone is fallible.