Over the past couple months, I’ve been working on fine tuning my Python skills, part of this has been taking tutorials online along with building some applications. One of the things I’ve been wanting to document, mostly for myself, is setting up a new environment for developing with Python. I’m using macOS Sierra right now, it seems that most operating systems still comes with version 2.x of Python. It’s always a good idea to be able to control the version of Python you are using.

One of the things I find myself always looking into and being excited about is scaling out systems. Now this means different things to different people. The reason for me looking into RPC is how to deal with Microservices as part of a way to move Monolithic applications to into the Microservices architecture. RPC (or Remote procedure call) is an idea that has been in computer science for a bit now.

Made this posting sometime ago but I’ve been forgetting to actually post it. When I was looking up some information on Scala I found a great video tutorial on youtube made by MadocDoyu, which can be found here. In part of the video he introduces the Project Euler, this project seems really interesting. I plan on solving problems time to time using many of the languages I have looked at. I’m hoping this will keep my skills in these languages up to date.

Hopping around from languages to languages, its easy to forget how to do something, nothing that a quick Google search can’t help with but I wanted to make this posting for myself to save some time. MD5 is used all over the place, its a one way hash that can be used for checking the integrity of files, storing passwords in databases and checking text being passed around. I do want to add a note here about using MD5 hashes for storing passwords in a database, I would start by looking at SHA-1 along with using salt this will help ensure if anyone gets a hold of your database they can just use rainbow table to workout the plain text of the password.

From my last posting about ZFS “Fun with ZFS send and receive” we see that the ZFS commands are really easy to use but very powerful, because of this I find it easy to write scripts to do the things I need. Here is some code that I use for snapshots, it’s written in python but can be ported to anything as it’s taking command line output and parsing info for what it needs.