We’ve had some wacky weather recently. In the space of a week, the temperature went from a high of about 75°F to a low around 15°F. This got me to thinking about what constitutes “normal” weather here in the Boston area, and in particular, how common it is to have a string of consecutive days in which the high temperature stays below freezing. While this was an interesting question in itself, it also seemed like a great opportunity to learn a little about Pandas, the Python data analysis framework.

I recently answered a question from Harsha Nalore on StackOverflow that involved using Ansible to extract the output of a command sent to a BigIP device of some sort. My solution – which I claim to be functional, but probably not optimal – involved writing an Ansible filter module to parse the output. That filter made use of a complex-looking regular expression. Harsha asked for some details on that regular expression works, and the existing StackOverflow answer didn’t really seem the write place for that: so, here we are.

I often see questions from people who are attemping to perform complex text transformations in their Ansible playbooks. While I am a huge fan of Ansible, data transformation is not one of its strong points. For example, this past week someone asked a question on Stack Overflow in which they were attempting to convert the output of the keytool command into a list of dictionaries. The output of the keytool -list -v command looks something like this:

CircuitPython is “an education friendly open source derivative of MicroPython”. MicroPython is a port of Python to microcontroller environments; it can run on boards with very few resources such as the ESP8266. I’ve recently started experimenting with CircuitPython on a Wemos D1 mini, which is a small form-factor ESP8266 board. I had previously been using Mike Causer’s micropython-tm1637 for MicroPython to drive a 4 digit LED display. I was hoping to get the same code working under CircuitPython, but when I tried to build an image that included the tm1637 module I ran into:

I just recently learned about the signalfd(2) system call, which was introduced to the Linux kernel back in 2007: signalfd() creates a file descriptor that can be used to accept signals targeted at the caller. This provides an alternative to the use of a signal handler or sigwaitinfo(2), and has the advantage that the file descriptor may be monitored by select(2), poll(2), and epoll(7). The traditional asynchronous delivery mechanism can be tricky to get right, whereas this provides a convenient fd interface that integrates nicely with your existing event-based code.