Quick notes

Quickie posts when I’m lazy

Grumble: Virgin Media is hijacking DNS and has no customer service

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Just recently we moved home and of course we had to look for an another Internet Service Provider. Due to coronavirus outbreak we could not install Vodafone. We had it previously and generally it was quite reliable and service was decent. Instead we stick to the only option - Virgin Media

TR;DR: If you can - avoid. It's a scum. Terrible service, low-end hardware, DNS spoofing, HTTP/s transparent proxy, website doesn't work, support agents are humiliating and threatening you.
Not convinced? Read further.

I'm going to repost my post from reddit and provide additional comments

If you're from IT you probably would be especially interested in what Virgin Media is doing with you internet traffic

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Installing docker-machine on Raspberry PI

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One of the nicest things about docker is reproducibility and containerisation. It is possible to run multiple applications which requires different environment on the same computer and make them live happily altogether. Although Raspberry Pi has ARMv7 instructions set, we still can run docker on it - we just need different images. One would be surprised there are some official images available on docker hub.

The configuration can be very simple - literally two commands in terminal, thanks to widely available devops tools such as docker-machine and ansible. Having this setup there won't be need to login to the RPi and perform any manual configuration per service anymore. Instead, services can be configured and deployed right from your computer.

If you don't have your Rasbperry configured yet refer to previous article for the initial setup.

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Setting up Raspberry Pi without Monitor

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In this post we will setup and configure Rasbian for your RPi to be instantly available via local network and without screen on the linux or mac system. Those steps should be appliable to any Raspberry PI version

To start with we need a few things:

  • Raspberry PI itself
  • 8Gb+ SD Card, class 10 at least
  • Ethernet cable to connect RPi to the router
  • Downloaded Raspbian Lite zipped image

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Year 2o19 wrapped

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Everything I put together all updates of different aspects of life. The year 2019 is unique as it closes the decade.

This time I feel I finished the decade's race absolutely empty. There were too many emotional blips, and several personal projects didn't even see the light, but it's all about reflection on results!

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Functional kotlin part 2: elvis operator

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Continuing series of posts #kotlin-showoff about functional constructions in kotlin I want to demostrate use of elvis operator

Essentially, elvis operator lvalue ?: rexpression is returning left value if it's not null or executes rexpression otherwise. The crazy thing about kotlin is most of the constructions are expressions and that gives another way to express business logic.

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Functional kotlin part 1: safe calls

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For the seasoned Java developer it's very easy to switch to kotlin. Even more, thanks to the great effort of JetBrains team for java interop, there is no need to wait for the greenfield project to start to write kotlin code. You can start koding straight away by either implementing new functionality in kotlin or converting existing classes into the new language by employing Intellj Idea automagic converter

This is a first of this series of posts unioned by tag #kotlin-showoff

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5 Years In UK

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Five years ago I started one more journey when I landed for the first time at the Heathrow Airport from Saint-Petersburg. As expected, many things have changed. Since it's quite a date I want to reflect on the life.

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Presentation – GCP APIs with kotlin

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I was invited for the talk as part of kotlin/everywhere at GDG Cloud London meetup on June 8th 2019. Unlike previous talks in this one I focused on the live coding part after brief intro into the language.

The demo project I prepared is a web site allowing user to upload pictures into GCP Storage, automatically annotate content using Vision API, synthesise voice which describes content of the image.

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Backup time: bitbucket backup script

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Git is decentralised version control system but let's face it - most likely we use single remote repository. Most likely it's github or bitbucket.

Some people already have learnt the hard way that backups are necessary even for the thing we believe will never break, because, you know, nothing more permanent than temporary.

Recently I was reviewing my backups of important services and noticed that I don't really have a repeatable automated way to archive repositories on Bitbucket. Scaring myself of it I immediately rushed to write a script which does so.

So, requirements for the bitbucket backup script:

  • Must work on Linux(or may be even macos) without any extra dependencies. It must work using only bash + git + tar
  • Created archives should be bz2ipped
  • Backup script must not have write access to the repositories
  • It must include all repositories/teams I was contributing to

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Checklist for the new contract/job

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Interviews for the new contract or job aren't easy thing to do. Many conversations about technology, business requirements, team work, responsibilities are going on in very short period of time. Often it's easy to forget about secondary questions which are still important but don't affect much final decisions

Since I'm very passion about what I'll be doing I personally often forget to ask end customer about that.

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