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November 27, 2020 1:52 PM

Using the DigitalOcean Spaces API

This is a very long post. So long that I cut off the post unless you look at the individual entry page for this post. I doubt anyone would care to read this, unless someone is interviewing me for a job, and they want to know how I approach problems. So, read it if you want.

So, I have a bunch of pictures on my wordpress site that I need to port over to my Spaces CDN. I've got a script that parses an XML wordpress export, and any time it runs into an image, I need to:

Simple enough. So what I did was take each image, and extract the path out of it. So for this url https://meyzdaisy.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/img_0308.jpg, I'd need the 2019/01/img_0308.jpg part. I have a bucket that I store all the files in, and each file is accessed using a key. I created a folder in my bucket just for these images that are coming from my WP site called from-wordpress. And with this, the key for this particular image would be from-wordpress/2019/01/img_0308.jpg

Now to use the Spaces API. If you read their documentation, you'll notice that they have examples in JavaScript, Go, Python, PHP, and Ruby. No Perl. Of course there's no Perl. A quick google search for "DigitalOcean Spaces Perl" doesn't seem to come up with anything. Sometimes I think, man it would be so much easier if I just learned Python and used that instead of Perl. But I am a Perl programmer and I will figure this out.


November 21, 2020 10:48 PM

Food blog revamp

My next big tech-y project is getting the food blog back. I've created version 2.0, but right now only a few people know about it, and it's still listed under this domain. I have two main goals that I'm working on:

My wordpress subscription expires in like 50 days so I've gotta get moving on this!

I'm working on the first part now. I was able to download an XML export of all my content on wordpress, and I'm writing a perl script to parse it and load it into the database and CDN for the new food blog. I've been using the XML::LibXML perl module, and I must say it has excellent documentation.

I've also got some other small food blog updates:


November 17, 2020 10:03 PM

My DDR quarantine goal

Back when the pandemic first started, I gave myself a quarantine goal of getting an A in every single song in Dance Dance Revolution Konamix. Now I love DDR, and I guess I'm decent at it, but not amazing. But this is a really old version of DDR for the PS1. Getting an A in Konamix means getting a FULL COMBO--nothing but Greats and Perfects. (Marvelous didn't exist in this version)

,=. .*. ,'. ,=. ,+ ,+ . | | . ,+ +. +. +. ,+ -----. + `.| |.' + ,+ +. .===== +. + =====' `+ ` ` +' + .'| |`. + '----- + `+ '+ `+ +' `' | | `' +' +' `=' `-' '-' `=' These arrows were a lot of work to type out.

All of the songs in Konamix have a level from 1-9, 1 being easy and 9 being the hardest. Nowadays, the highest level is 20. The hardest songs in Konamix miiight be a 13 in today's scale. So, getting a full combo on all of them? Totally doable.

EXCEPT, I'm in a second floor apartment and all I have are crappy foam dance pads. Each one seems to have a different arrow that's at least a little broken. Konamix also didn't have a lot of options. Pretty much everyone speeds up the arrows now, but you have to read everything at 1x in Konamix. And on top of all that the backgrounds are suuuuper trippy.

Anyway, this was a really silly quarantine goal, and to be honest, I didn't actually think I was going to finish this because of my pads misfiring ALL. THE. TIME. But! I was determined! And on Sunday I finally achieved my goal. It only took many months and many, many attempts at playing Drop Out.


October 7, 2020 2:16 PM

Getting the site back up

A few weeks ago, DigitalOcean underwent some maintenance that didn't go so well, and I wasn't able to reach my server. Once it came back up, I realized I was still having trouble getting my website to work. I looked into to for a few days until I finally realized that it was a firewall issue.

Anyway, it's back up! And I finally got a new SSL cert! I didn't even realize you could do this for free now! So this site is back up, the Teochew site is back up, and I'm making more progress on flailing 2.0.


September 21, 2020 10:05 PM

Bringing back the food blog

I have had the most exhausting few months at work. And it just kept getting worse and worse. I think I was working during all waking hours last week.

But today I did something I haven't done in a while. I worked an 8 hour workday. And then I stopped. Not because I had something to do, but because my 8 hours were up and it was time for me to End of Day.

Anyway, I've been meaning to get back to the food blog. But I'm kind of sick of Wordpress. I looked into alternatives. Ghost seemed promising, but I already got annoyed when I tried to install it, and my tolerance for dealing with annoying things in new pieces of technology are very low, so I gave up on that quickly. I decided that the best thing for me to do was to just build the site myself. When I first started flailing in my kitchen I didn't want to do that at all. I didn't want to be a Sysadmin. But, there is something rewarding about setting up a site yourself. So that's what I'm doing now. I made one blog post, and it's a total mess on the inside, but I'm happy with what I've got so far.

flailing in my kitchen v2

Update: When I first created v2, I made it part of this domain, under the path "/flailing", while the flailing site still had my old blog. I updated the link above to actually point to flailinginmykitchen.com.


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