Code on Yuvi

Disabling JupyterLab extensions on your z2jh JupyterHub installations

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 12:16:47 +0530

Sometimes you want to temporarily disable a JupyterLab extension on a JupyterHub by default, without having to rebuild your docker image. This can be very easily done with z2jh’s singleuser.extraFiles, and JupyterLab’s page_config.json

JupyterLab’s page_config.json lets you set page configuration by dropping JSON files under a labconfig directory inside any of the directories listed when you run jupyter --paths. We just use singleuser.extraFiles to provide this file!

singleuser:
  extraFiles:
    lab-config:
      mountPath: /etc/jupyter/labconfig/page_config.json
      data:
        disabledExtensions:
          jupyterlab-link-share: true

This will disable the link-share labextension, both in JupyterLab and RetroLab. You can find the name of the extension, as well as its current status, with jupyter labextension list.

The fastest way to share your notebooks - announcing NotebookSharing.space

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 20:43:11 +0530

Sharing notebooks is harder than it should be.

You are working on a notebook (in Jupyter, RStudio, Visual Studio Code, whatever), and want to share it quickly with someone. Maybe you want some feedback, or you’re demonstrating a technique, or there is a cool result you want to quickly show someone. A million reasons to want to quickly share a notebook, but unfortunately there isn’t a quick enough and easy enough solution right now. That’s why I built notebooksharing.space, focused specifically on solving the problem of - “I have a notebook, I want to quickly share it with someone else”.

Announcing the nbgitpuller Link Generator browser extensions

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 18:58:28 +0530

(Leave comments or discuss this post on the jupyter discourse)

nbgitpuller is my most favorite way to distribute content (notebooks, data files, etc) to students on a JupyterHub. The student mental model is ‘I click a link, and can start working on my notebook’, which is as close to ideal as we have today. That is possible since all the information required for this workflow is embedded in the link itself - so it can be distributed easily via your pre-existing communication channel (like email, course website, etc), rather than requiring your students to use yet another tool.

Why repo2docker? Why not s2i?

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 01:23:54 -0800

The wonderful Graham Dumpleton asked on twitter why we built an entirely new tool (repo2docker) instead of using OpenShift’s cool source2image tool.

This is a very good question, and not a decision we made lightly. This post lays out some history, and explains the reasons we decided to stop using s2i. s2i is still a great tool for most production use cases, and you should use it if you’re building anything like a PaaS!

systemd simple containment for GUI applications & shells

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 23:23:52 -0700

I earlier had a vaguely working setup for making sure browsers, shells and other applications don’t eat all RAM / CPU on my machine with systemd + sudo + shell scripts.

It was a hacky solution, and also had complications when used to launch shells. It wasn’t passing in all the environment varialbes it should, causing interesting-to-debug issues. sudo rules were complex, and hard to do securely.

I had also been looking for an excuse to learn more Golang, so I ended up writing systemd-simple-containment or ssc.

systemd gui applications

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 20:47:10 -0700

Update: There’s a follow-up post with a simpler solution now.

Ever since I read Jessie Frazelle’s amazing setup (1, 2, 3) for running GUI applications in docker containers, I’ve wanted to do something similar. However, I want to install things on my computer - not in docker images. So what I wanted was just isolation (no more Chrome / Firefox freezing my laptop), not images. I’m also not as awesome (or knowledgeable!) as Jess, so will have to naturally settle for less…

My Vim setup

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:55:03 +0000

I moved from emacs to vim a while ago, and have been steadily accumulating a series of plugins in my .vim. They’re all up in my rather messy dotfiles repo. Here’s a slightly more neatly organized list of the plugins I currently use:

command-t – File opener and buffer switcher. In-fuckin-credibly useful.
vimpress – What I use to blog since moving to wordpress.
matchit – Lets % work with html tags
~~commentary – Generic commenting and uncommenting script~~ NERDCommenter has replaced commentary due to being more flexible and having more options.
fugitive – Incredibly awesome git wrapper for vim. I rarely go to the commandline for git these days
tagbar – Useful code-exploratory plugin when I’m looking around a codebase trying to familiarize myself.
supertab – Buffer completion in insert mode only when I need it.
gist – Put stuff up in gist to pass it around
BufClose – So I can close a buffer without messing up my splits
extradite – :Glog replacement that builds on top of fugitive. I don’t understand why this isn’t bundled with fugitive
TwitVim – Yes, so I don’t have to go to the browser (and be consumed by chat/reddit/hn) just to post a tweet.
ack.vim – Ack integration for vim. Do yourself a favor and use ack instead of grep.
Syntastic – Automatic syntax checking so that I don’t miss a semicolon and not know about it
php-doc – Insert boilerplate PHP doc compatible strings in my PHP files whenever I want to. Very PHP specific, need to find something that works across languages. (Note: This plugin has quite some identity crisis. It’s named PDV but it’s filename is php-doc. Since php-doc is more descriptive, I’m using that)
delimitMate – Automatically closes quotes, parens, braces, etc for you. I initially thought this would be super annoying, but in fact it is rather very pleasant.

~~I’m also on the default desert color theme – haven’t found anything better. Suggestions welcome – both for the color scheme and for new/replacement plugins.~~ After trying out wombat and jellybeans color schemes, I have settled on wombat for now.

Non-ASCII Characters in HTTP Headers

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 00:56:10 +0000

I was debugging an issue at work today where a (generated) file refused to download in Chrome, but the same URL worked just fine with wget. I remember reading in the HTTP Spec that HTTP headers can only be lower ASCII, so when wget mangled the output file’s name, the problem was obvious – the file name contained a character that wasn’t in lower ASCII (an accented A). Chrome had borked on encountering it, while wget soldiered on. Using iconv to strip non-ASCII characters in the file name on the server side fixed the issue.

You are a programmer if you can run code in your head

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 04:09:23 +0000

From HN:

From my experience, the largest hurdle first time programmers have is being able to execute programs in their head. It takes a cognitive leap to go from the source code in front of them, and what happens at runtime.

(emphasis mine)

I believe that if you have made that cognitive leap, you can call yourself a programmer. It means you’ve entered into the second hump – you are a programmer. One of us. Welcome :)

SleepSort from 4Chan

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 01:40:36 +0000

4Chan isn’t exactly what you’d associate with ‘shit, that’s a cool piece of code!’, but look what I found!

(via HN)

Nice hack. And it is O(N) in bitsize of largest number (Ignoring all the overhead of forking new processes, the problem with the race conditions(Sort 0 and 0.1? How about 0.01 and 0.011?), processor contention, etc,.) They basically delegated the sorting to the process scheduler, treating it as a sort of priority queue.

Moving back to WordPress

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:21:40 +0000

A while back, I moved my blog (from a wordpress install whose data I lost) to my own platform (HiSlain).

After several close calls, I’m officially moving from HiSlain back to WordPress. I just don’t have enough time to maintain all the things I wanted in a blog platform in HiSlain, hence the move back. However, it satisfied it’s purpose – I learnt to write code I could use, others could use, and others could contribute to. The old blog is still around (all permalinks would work) if you’re interested.

SICP and BrainFuck

Fri, 13 May 2011 05:10:31 +0000

No, I’m not going to blow your mind by telling you I’m going to do the SICP exercises in BrainFuck :)

I just wrote my first brainfuck program. Might as well be my last, but not sure. Tape-based turing-ish programing seems fun, so maybe I’ll try that again with something more expressive than brainfuck (or maybe that is pointless?)

And I’m doing the SICP Exercises. In MIT-Scheme. I’ve put them up on GitHub. I’m doing this with the FPUG-C SICP Study Group, so hope I’m able to complete it all this time :) Big props to Balaji for organizing it, and letting us get away with the free coke and coffee!

GStreamer 101 at GNOME Asia 2011

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:02:48 +0000

My GStreamer 101 presentation at GNOME.asia was very wel received. I was quite happy with the way it turned out. Thanks to Ford_Prefect and Bharath Acharya for pulling me in :)

My very minimal slides are here. You can reuse them if you want to.

Sadly, missed the week long hackfest :( Next time!