People who just want results 🔗There are some people who just want to see results. They won’t take excuses why the results cannot be achieved. They are prepared to go the distance and do the hard work. They are hell bent on getting to the results. People who just want results 🔗There are some people who just want to see results. They would stoop any low just to see the reults. They would take all the shortcuts, cut all the corners and just blindly check all the boxes on a checklist just as long as they get to some form of.. results.

I have written a IP calculator for personal use. Yes, there is a command line version of the great, web based ipcalc. I only recently discovered that and been using it since. That probably only delayed writing my own. Why would you want to reinvent ipcalc, you may ask. Because there are few, little features I need. First, when I get a CIDR block and have to split it up into subnets, perhaps of uneven size, I want to to know the start of the next possible subnet.

Have you ever wanted to just make a static website and throw it behind an authwall? Maybe to make your personal notes, playbooks that are too specific and not very helpful to share publicly available to you over the interwebs. Or else to use the static site system that you know works well to manage your company knowledge base. I have had both these problems and didn’t really find a nice, straightforward enough system. After looking around for YEARS, I ended up with this system that works for me. Now I won’t claim this is easy. But I made it work for my use case. However, there might be others that can benefit from this. Hence this blog post, not an authwalled write up ;).

So, I finally gave in and bought a Mechanical Keyboard. Just to be upfront, I never really liked the idea. I felt like the keys with a lot of travel just trip me up a lot. This is probably because I was using a lot of bad/cheap keyboards until got my hands on laptops. And then I just started liking the low travel keyboards. The first time I worked next to someone using a proper mechanical keyboard was quite late into my career and I found the noise to be super annoying. That, in the backdrop of this Buddhist idea of ‘putting oneself in another’s place" (Dhammapada) [1]. I have come to believe that it’s simply not right to use a loud keybopard around other living beings.

TLDR: Something I built had issues due to browser/platform quirks. keypress (deprecated), keydown, keyup are not supported on browsers on Android. The next option input event behaves differently on mobile platforms. Firefox on Android emits input event for soft edits too. Sayura is a project I built to scratch my own itch which is not being able to type Sinhala anywhere. It was done in a time we had worse support for Sinhala input than it is now. It was quite simple, lightweight and was nothing fancy. But it was good enough to write short Sinhala phrases. Ideal for tweets, which is the only thing that really matters anyway.

I. Love. Material for MkDocs! I’ve been using the MkDocs - Material for MkDocs combination in every. single. place. I worked in, to document things. And everyone loves it. Recently I had to share some of my notes with my colleagues and realized we are oceans apart. So I put it on a VM and shared. Nothing fancy. I had a shell script involving a bit of rsync to deploy the site. It never felt archaic until my work suddenly involved public cloud.

Once upon a time I wanted to keep track of foreign exchange rates and probably do something useful with it. I looked for any APIs which would ideally present data in JSON. Unsurprisingly I didn’t find any. So I had to build it myself. Now, the only way to do this was scraping exchange rates pages of the banks I am interested in. Even though I knew this scraping thing is an ugly, dirty thing, I was too excited about the idea to just give up on it.

The adventures of Lee Kuan Yew was not a strange topic for me. We Sri Lankans get to hear about him a lot. Mostly in the context how useless our politicians are. Oh, and how Singapore was built taking Sri Lanka as an example. We’d probably get to that later. He was more or less the man who built an almost heaven, out of mostly thin air. Or so the story goes. What I didn’t get to hear was the details of it. He was this elusive figure, almost god like. I somehow didn’t try to zoom in to the details until recently.

When I started at my current workplace my world was shattered (Obvious exaggeration). I realized I had to work on windows day in day out. Of course I would be logging in to Linux servers for most of the actual work but I really missed the comfy and friendly unixy tools. Yes there were options but they did not even come close to the user experience I were used to.

I have been working with Ansible for some time at work now. This new project uses quite a bit of Ansible so I have been learning a lot. I had touched Ansible before but that was just to put together something to help me with copying stuff over and over to a bunch of servers. The requirement of current project is to programmatically run an Ansible playbook on a server newly provisioned. Going in without knowing much about Ansible, one could easily believe that it’s as easy as passing the new host. Well that’s not how things turned out for me.