Guus Bosman

Last year I switched over to T-Mobile 5G after months of back-and-forth with Comcast. They simply couldn’t resolve the reliability issues on our street. I was hesitant at first, but the 5G connection has been excellent. And to state the obvious: reliable internet matters a lot to me given the number of video presentations I do. I’m mostly in the office these days, but for video production, my home studio is still hard to beat.

For the six months I kept the 5G gateway in the basement while testing the signal, and once I was confident in its stability, I decided to give it a permanent (and better) home. Two electricians ran Ethernet to several rooms upstairs — a surprising amount of work, two floors up and across the house — but the result is fantastic.

I moved the modem to the upstairs room that’s closest to the T-Mobile antenna a few streets over — and the visual speaks for itself. The signal strength improved by about 15 decibels, a substantial boost that translates to roughly 30X more received signal power.

Our house has been experiencing intermittent internet issues. Our cable provider, Comcast, has come out a few times to take a look but they have not found the root cause yet.

I spent some time creating a dashboard for myself, so I could track the problem better. I installed Docker on a Raspberry Pi, and installed Prometheus, InfluxDB and Grafana plus custom scrapers for my Motorola modem. All this came out quite nicely.

The first chart shows packet loss -- I run a ping test every few seconds against a couple of internet targets. It's very clear that this connection is not clean.

The other charts show details from the modem. For example, when the Comcast engineer worked on my cables yesterday, it resulted in much higher Upstream Power -- which we thought might have resolved it, but sadly didn't.

I'm mostly done with the Natural Language Processing specialization and tonight I was playing around with a fun proof of concept written by Andrej Karpathy.

The proof of concept is a tiny transformer architecture, "GPT mini". Unlike its big GPT-3 and GPT-4 brothers, this tiny model is character based, not word based. The text I used are three short stories by author Nescio -- which, in fact, constitute his complete works, around 200k characters. I trained it for 20,000 iterations.

I've completed the first three courses of the Natural Language Processing specialization at Coursera, and started the fourth one today. I really enjoyed the the courses so far but this fourth course is the best part: learning about Attention.

The basic concept of this was introduced in 2014, three years later the famous "Attention is all you need" paper came out.

With the rise of Large Language Models, I decided to dive into machine learning again and catch up on how these LLMs truly work. I'm following a course by Deeplearning.ai on Natural Language Processing.

I'm at the end of the second course and we're going through Continuous Bag of Words, which was part of the original word2vec algorithm that was so influential. It's really fun. The previous week was about n-grams, which was also nice to program with.

I successfully completed a certification for Azure, the cloud offering from Microsoft.

I took the exam in our basement; it was strange to be on video all the time. But the process was nice and smooth.

A script I wrote a few years ago to help me with pictures on the website stopped working... It assumed every year started with 201, haha.

FoundPos := RegExMatch(clipboard, "^201[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].*\.[jJ][pP][gG]", FoundFileName)

I moved my blog to EC2 last weekend and last night the instance stopped working for the first time.

"Design for failure", is the mantra, and I'll do some work on automated reboots when monitoring fails.

Seems like the httpd server went ran out of memory last night.

Dec 15 00:26:49 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: Out of memory: Kill process 8250 (httpd) score 37 or sacrifice child
Dec 15 00:26:49 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: Killed process 8250 (httpd) total-vm:526616kB,...
Dec 15 00:26:53 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: httpd invoked oom-killer...

I just completed the exam for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, a certificate that shows I have basic knowledge about the different Amazon Web Service offerings.

The exam was relatively easy. I've been preparing for this conference for a while, and done quite a bit of studying on the various AWS products. I did study a few trial exams from Udemy.com, and those were helpful for questions on more basic stuff like the Billing and Support models -- the less technical topics.

Still, it's been a while since I had done an official test and I was a little nervous, and now I'm very happy I passed the test. "Certified individuals" also get access to a special area here at the re:Invent 2018 conference.

Hmmm, I'm not very proud of this but it looks like my site has had an open redirect for a good while. Years, in fact.

It's a custom script that I wrote 15 years ago and somehow survived the migration from the various CMS that I've used.

The original script had a reference to Php-Nuke from 2002. I've now removed it, finally.