Week Notes – Updates, Updates, Updates

In which I don’t talk about Kuberneetus like the last three posts to avoid writing up things about kubernetes — I just avoid writing up things about kubernetes, well mostly.

Simon Willison is one of the developers that I’ve admired for years, and have followed his work off and mostly on every since I came across his work on pingback and xml-rpc back when I did PHP (way, way back in the early aught’s). I’ve got a stack of stars about a mile long in my feed reader starring all his work with sqlite tools and especially Datasette — which is something that I haven’t been able to integrate into my day job(s) — and I keep wanting to clear the decks to make time for in the hobby space.

A few weeks ago, Simon did another thing that I am going to try to emulate — he’s started writing weeknotes (he links to [more information here][4] )

It’s just a great idea, if only for myself, to be able to look back and see some progression (or regression) in the work that I do.

I didn’t start a post of notes last week, so this first one of mine is going to be a bit stilted most likely, but we’ll see how it goes.


I hold a lot of stress/tension in my neck, which comes up and haunts me sometimes, I ended up getting a fairly severe muscle cramp (what I would have called/do call “pulling a muscle” before I learned better) — enough that it knocked me out of the commute into work. I was able to work from home that day though, and worked on a Bash script. That might not be the best idea for a cure for a muscle cramp 😉

One of our WordPress multisite platforms is available for students and organizations and has been self-serve for years, and has built up somewhere north of 15,000 idle blogs/sites. My colleagues that do the actual WordPress work (I am responsible for the web platforms themselves) are cleaning those out, and worked on a process to identify and flag those blogs as deleted (WordPress has a deleted flag that will 404 the site, but leave all the tables and content). We have a Jenkins platform already in place that’s running some scripts (typically all Bash) that deploy the site and do things like run the wp-cli tool to rewrite urls when needed. Since that’s the model, I went with it, and ended up writing a Jenkins-executed Bash script to use wp-cli to query the database for all the blogs flagged as deleted, dump them to a file and loop over them at 2,000 an hour to remove.

In between Google Searches and Bash Heredoc games, I upgraded my personal iMac to Catalina. I think it would have been straightforward if I had better than 6.0Mbps DSL and a slow 2TB spinning disk in the iMac, it was pretty rough around the edges for sure. But it eventually settled out.

I upgraded my work Macbook to Catalina the next day without much event other than all the Windows Vista-esque permission prompts for Documents, Downloads and notification access.

Sometime last month, we had some accounts get created in our GitLab platform(s) with the wrong UID — so I spent some time trying to debug where that might have gone off the rails. We implemented signed/encrypted SAML — so I can’t get the attributes that were returned from Shibboleth in the logs easily. While [OneLogin has a SAML decryptor][5] tool — it’s online only, and well, no private keys are getting pasted there, so I looked into what it would take to write a (non-Java, preferably python) tool to do it locally — with some leads, but no end-success other than to realize the labor effort probably isn’t worth it, and I just need to spend some time with a non-encrypted dev box to work out where things went wrong with the uid value.

In kubernetes news, [Rancher 2.3 was released][6] — so both my homelab cluster and my Kuberneetus/Kuberneetleüs cluster were updated. And it just worked (which is definitely more than I can say for every OpenShift upgrade I’ve watched, or the ones I attempted last fall in the homelab)

Friday I ended up needing to take a leave day and go out of town for a bit — so there wasn’t anything work or hobby wise that came up then, but on the way back, I did on a spur of the moment suddenly decide that it was time to upgrade my iPhone — so I swung by the Apple store, and worked through that, where again the curse of 6.0Mbps DSL in trying to download a 3.2GB iOS update, and some untold gigabytes of app re-downloads stretched that whole process over 5 hours. But the low-light photo options are pretty amazing.

So, yeah a bit stilted — but maybe that’s appropriate for update week.

I’ve got better notes to start this week on — and it’s likely going to be all about “JupyterHub” this week, which honestly I’m fairly excited about.

[4]: https://weeknot.es/what-on-earth-are-weeknotes-a81874c5cef9) ) [5]: https://www.samltool.com/decrypt.php [6]: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases/tag/v2.3.0