Home on Matjaž Drolc

Books Giveaway

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Let me know if you want any of these books and it’s yours. https://drola-my.sharepoint.com/:x:/g/personal/matjaz_matjazdrolc_eu/Ea2Qtuam2xhNlMdW7UtS1ZkBss5f3rOY5LoNoEIWt9sy4Q?e=SIAPxH

This week in climbing: 01/2022

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Summary of my week in climbing: January 3rd - January 9th. Climbing lessons The exercise is simple. Put a short piece of rope (20-40cm) on top of each shoe and climb a route without any piece of rope falling off. There are more variations to this exercise. Pieces of rope can be replaced with coins or hacky sacks. Maintaining those pieces of rope on top of shoes requires extremely controlled feet movement.

Climbing lessons debrief: Flags

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a debrief from last week’s climbing technique lessons. Lesson 7 Goals: Extend the warm-up with muscle activation circuit: 5 push-ups, 3-5 pull-ups, and a 10-second hang (straight arms, activated shoulders!). Repeat the circuit 3 times. Negate a barn door by utilizing a back flag Observations: The warm-up: When warming up, the hang board is not the appropriate place to do the hangs. Find something more substantial to hold on to, for example, a couple of nice jugs or a pull-up bar.

Climbing lessons debrief: Adrenaline Rush

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a debrief from this week’s climbing lessons. I’m taking a course on belaying when lead climbing and a course in climbing technique. This week I took the fourth (and final) lesson in belaying (lead) and the third one in climbing technique. Course: Belaying - Lead Climbing Lesson 4 Goal: Learn to fall and catch falls as a belayer safely and comfortably. Observations: This lesson is well suited for all the adrenaline junkies out there.

Climbing lessons debrief: Ballet on the Wall

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a debrief from this week’s climbing lessons. I’m taking a course on belaying when lead climbing and a course in climbing technique. This week I took the third lesson in belaying (lead) and the second one in climbing technique. Course: Belaying - Lead Climbing Lesson 3 Goal: Learn to give out slack quickly with a Grigri by squeezing the brake. Rehearse everything we learned so far. Observations: Giving out slack quickly is especially important when clipping the lowest quickdraws.

Climbing lessons debrief

Wed, 06 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a debrief from this week’s climbing lessons. I’m taking a course on belaying when lead climbing and a course in climbing technique. This week I took the second lesson in belaying (lead) and the first one in climbing technique. Course: Belaying - Lead Climbing Lesson 2 Goal: Start belaying with a Grigri. This time without second belayer with top-rope technique. For now without squeezing the Grigri brake. Observations: When the climber is low on the wall, it is possible to fall on the ground before the rope starts providing significant braking action.

On Schedule Frontend Development

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My dream project makes me happy because we’re solving an important problem for our customers. To stay best in class we heavily rely on tooling. Automation lets us focus our brainpower on hard challenges. We reliably ship improvements and features, as multiple automatic safety nets catch problems in the product before a human touches the new version. The stakeholders are happy, as our progress is steady and predictable. Am I wearing pink glasses? Maybe. Let’s take a look at some tools to help us close the gap between the dream and reality.

Pareto meets Vim

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It was at the JSDayES conference at Madrid where substack (James Halliday) coded on the stage of the big auditorium. The lines and words were changing quicker than I was used to. He wasn’t editing code character-by-character. Whole statements, lines, and blocks were moving around. Editing code like that looked magical to me. We weren’t watching a recording. It was Vim that was the secret sauce. How does one become a Vim wizard without being intimidated by the superpowers?

These Lightroom Tools Will Ruin Your Timelapse

Thu, 12 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Lightroom is a Swiss knife for RAW files from a camera. When I come home from a shoot, I start Lightroom, import SD card contents, and edit the photos. For most photos, Lightroom will be the only piece of software sitting between a camera and the finished product. Timelapses are different. The end goal is to stitch individual shots into a video. For that part, I settled on using Adobe After Effects. Its features span all the way from simple cutting to advanced color enhancement. In lieu of feature overlap between After Effects and Lightroom, we must decide which corrections to postpone to the video part of the workflow.

Learning the Hard Way: A Story of 3 Shutterstock Rejections

Thu, 05 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I find photography a very relaxing hobby. It leads me to seek beautiful landscapes, wake up before sunrise, climb hills, and visit locations I wouldn’t bother with otherwise. This hobby ain’t cheap though. To offset the cost of the camera and the lens I signed up as a creator for Shutterstock. So far this made me richer by $0 dollars and some wisdom. Here are 3 rejected photos, and the reasons.

NAS vs. Cloud in 2021

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Here we are throwing some numbers on the table to decide where to put 10 TB of data I don’t want to lose.

My Favorite Podcasts in 2021

Sat, 10 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My choice of podcast mostly follows my interests otherwise: technology, business, software engineering. The podcasts listed below are the top picks among my subscriptions.

2021: The Year of Progressive Web Apps

Sat, 02 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In 2021, progressive web apps will be the choice of more app developers than ever before. New APIs, absence of gatekeepers, lower development cost, their cross-platform nature, instant updates and the push by Google and Amazon will make them the optimal choice for most situations.

Knowledge base

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

STM32 Blue Pill HID Bootloader sudo apt-get install stlink-tools stlink-gui (upstream: https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink https://github.com/stlink-org/stlink/blob/develop/doc/tutorial.md) Install STM32 HID bootloader https://github.com/Serasidis/STM32_HID_Bootloader . Doing it via STLink v2 dongle is the easiest way. All jumpers stay in 0 position all the time For initial blinky, install Arduino IDE from https://www.arduino.cc/en/software . Ubuntu packages are really outdated. https://github.com/stm32duino/wiki/wiki/Getting-Started After HID bootloader installed: https://youtu.be/Myon8H111PQ?t=376

Three tips for faster bulk inserts into a PostgreSQL database

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Tens of gigabytes of data. An amount that doesn’t quite fit into an Excel spreadsheet but doesn’t warrant the use of big data tools like Hadoop either. PostgreSQL can easily handle this volume. This post is about speeding up the initial import of a large number of rows.

Seriously bad advice about SSL errors in Python and a better fix

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a post about fixing certificate verify failed error in Python without compromising security of your code. Don’t blindly follow suggestions on the internet because some suggested solutions can have serious unintended consequences.

Books

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Bodanis, David. E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation Brown, Dan Angels & Demons The Da Vinci Code Origin Digital Fortress Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time Hesse, Hermann. Siddharta Gladwell, Malcom. Outliers: The Story of Success McDougall, Christopher. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen Armstrong, Lance.

Why the shattered dream of the free internet is good?

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When I was in my teens, the internet was a symbol of opportunity for me. In the physical world, we always lacked money. Parents sacrificed a lot to build a house. The jobs available to them were not great because of their education. We lived in a village, where everything seemed so backward to me. I was battling this internal fight with the environment around me. My father appreciated physical work and couldn’t see the point of computers.

Tools I use

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Electronics Ersa i-CON Pico - soldering station Raspberry PI USBasp - USB programmer for AVR microcontrollers Software Autodesk Fusion 360 Ubuntu Linux Services Toggl - time tracking Gitlab - git repositories and CI/CD pipelines Office 365 - office, e-mail Google Firebase - hosting for this and other sites Command-line software Insect - scientific calculator Hugo - static site generator oh my zsh - goodies for Zsh shell Libraries, software development tools Docker - containers Visual Studio Code - excellent text editor that transforms into an IDE with plugins PhpStorm, PyCharm, DataGrip - very good IDEs Jupyter - awesome for prototyping OpenLayers - maps Symfony - PHP framework Angular - frontend framework Hello CSS - Highly readable CSS for quick HTML documents

Standardizing HTTP API testing

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post is actually a draft for a standard operating procedure for my software development and consulting business. I’ve come across the task of writing tests for HTTP APIs for three or four times in the last couple of months. I’ve tried multiple ways of writing automated tests and this is the method I’ve converged on. TypeScript, Jest, and supertest appear to work well together and are sufficient to implement concise tests.

Surely I can repair this. I've seen it on YouTube!

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I love good sound. I’ve been suffering with my poor bookshelf speakers for a while now. They simply don’t produce enough output at the bottom end of the spectrum. I don’t want to annoy neighbors. But I do want to feel the rhythm. I went to a Hi-Fi store to listen to a couple of speakers. I flirted with a pair of Polk Signature Series S55 floor standing speakers. But I didn’t want to open my wallet just yet. I remembered there is an old Genious SW HF 5.1 5000 system somewhere in the basement. But they were broken. The subwoofer is humming loudly even with no input. Armed with all the electronics knowledge from YouTube I gave myself a shot at repairing this.

Uncomfortable, but great decision

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

You are reading a success story of avoiding premature optimization. I had to design an API for a service that receives some geographical data and returns the same data with additional information for each point of interest.

Creating JavaScript objects in 2018

Thu, 05 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to learn how some popular design patterns look in JavaScript I recommend you to read The Comprehensive Guide to JavaScript Design Patterns by Marko Mišura. It argues why learning design patterns is important and shows some examples. However, the post was written in 2015. Since then JavaScript has evolved and obsoleted some common patterns that we were used to in the past. Making a “class” in JavaScript was a Wild West before ES6.

How to easily speed up your prime number generator with factorization wheels

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Prime numbers. Somehow boring and yet fascinating topic in mathematics. A number is a prime number if it’s divisible by one and by itself. In contrast composite numbers are divisible by one, itself and one or more other numbers. Primes: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13... Composites: 4 = 2 * 2, 6 = 2 * 3, 8 = 2 * 2 * 2, 10 = 2 * 5... It’s all so simple and obvious when numbers are small.

Academic Projects

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some reports/assignments I’ve done during my education at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, University of LJubljana. They’re mostly in Slovene. Seminar: Real-time cloth simulation [pdf, Slovene] Project for Industrial physics: Garage version of computer tomography using a gramophone: Slides [pdf, Slovene], Video Assignment for Mathematical physics 1 on the subject of current in super-conductive elliptical tube: elipsasti_superprevodnik.pdf

WebAssembly

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

WebAssembly or wasm is a new portable, size- and load-time-efficient format suitable for compilation to the web. Official site: http://webassembly.org/ Presentation slides and transcript: https://wasm.drola.si Browser support Internet Explorer: no Firefox: 52+ Chrome: 57 Safari (WebKit): In development (source) MS Edge: 15, by enabling “Experimental JavaScript Features” flag (source) Opera: 44 (source) Demos Epic Zen Garden WebDSP video editor Game engines with WebAssembly support Unity Unreal Engine 4 Emscripten: compile C++ to WASM http://kripken.

Dear FinTech companies, be careful with external scripts

Sun, 21 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Just last week I installed a Chrome extension called Privacy Badger. It is supposed to protect you from third party scripts included on websites that might track you. It does that by checking content loaded from other third-party domains. The side effect of this extension was that you suddenly begin to notice which sites include external scripts. I’d say I am not surprised by them on social media sites and other sites where I mostly consume the content.

Slovenian hosting providers with PHP 7

Mon, 09 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Slovenian hosting providers with PHP 7 PHP 7 has been released months ago. Increased performance makes upgrading a really attractive option. Some of us still remember the long transition that took place when PHP 5 has been released. That’s why it was interesting to see state of PHP 7 support today. I posted an email to the most popular shared hosting providers in Slovenia. I asked them about state of PHP support and their decision making process.