Author: flipaoXIX

Bakeries p1

I want to try to visit one bakery from time to time and see the new city. First some old visits for this year:

Fortitude: I went there last time I was in London…. I tried two things, they were nice. I dont remember the names though (like girls 🙂 The one below looked big but it was mainly the cream.

Arome: I went early this year I think. It was a bit late and I tried the best seller that is like a thick slice of bread caramelised. It was nice, super crispy outside and juicy. And looked simple.

From this video, you can see both places above. Although, I should try others mentioned in the video.

And this is the page I am following to plan my visits in Berlin:

Sofi: I wen there today. Really impressed with the “pain aux raisins”style pastry but it was really cardamon… super crispy.

I bought a piece of rye with seeds bread too:

It is nice, and I have similar recipe so I can do it.

Domberger Brot-Werk: I went there last week, very nice place. I didnt take any picture but I tried:

  • Vinschgerl: small bread roll, rye flour and spices.

Johann Backerei: It wasn’t in my plan this weekend but I went there and I tried a “pain au chocolate” that was good and 1/4 of big piece of bread. And that was amazing!

The bread was still warm! (and I bought it after 2pm!) I think it is wholemeal flour because it is darker than mine, very dark crust. I am not sure if it has some spieces? The webpage doesnt say much and then you just have IG……

KEIT: I tried the “Toast” bread that is not actually the standard toast bread. I got a bit late and they didnt have small pieces of the bread I wanted to try. I managed to have a conversation with the shop assistant as there was nobody waiting and she recommended that.

And too be honest, I was quite surprised. It was very tasty, spongy and moist. So definitely not the standard toast bread. Based on the webpage, the ingredients are: natural sourdough, oat porridge, spelt flour (Dinkel) 630, water, thermal salt. At some point I want to try new recipes of sourdough.

Albatross: I bought a piece of bread and a pastry (queen a). The pastry was good, but I wouldn’t go there again just for that. But the bread was amazing! It was the house bread.:

Ingredients:
80% Wheat
15% Wholegrain Wheat
5% Rye

So jealous… the crust, the crumb, the taste. Every perfect.

VimGPT – Maia AI – Mirai – Reptar – Mellanox Debian – RISC-V DC – Mojo – Moors Law

VimGTP: Very interesting project. I haven’t used it. But thinking aloud, you could use it to interact with sites that dont have API (couriers)? I think with Selenium you can do things like that?

Maia AI: CLoud providers like to be masters of their own destiny so try to build as many things by themselves as possible. So now MS has developed its GPU for AI. It is quite interesting the custom rack they had to built with the sidekick for cooling down the new chips. There are no many figures about the chip (5nm, 105b transistors) to compare with other things in the market.

Reptar: new Intel CPU vulnerability. It looks like is a feature from Ice Lake architecture. It looks like you can crash the cores but no yet take over. Still interesting.

I am not affected 🙂

$ grep fsrm /proc/cpuinfo
$

Mellanox with Debian: Interesting how you can install a nearly standard Debian into a Mellanox SN2700 switch.

RISC-V into datacenter: Happy to see RISC-V chips in the datacenter. But not clear who is going to use them?

Mirai history: I think most of wired articles read like a holywood movie 🙂 Although 2016 security issues are “old” school, still interesting how teenagers got that far.

Mojo: Interesting because of the people behind of it… really impressive.

Moor’s law analysis: I liked the part about networks, that is not very common mentioned in these type of analysis.

Koshari

This is dish I wanted to try for some time. I knew about it by chance after reading about the favourite dish from a football player and then by chance, having it by lunch one day at work. It was very tasty, looked healthy and not very complicated. So finally, this weekend I tried it.

I followed this video but not to the dot as I missed/forgot some ingredients. Still, the result was quite good. I only did the tomate sauce

Ingredients:

  • 1 can of chickpeas (I didnt use because I had too much food)
  • 3/4 glass of green/brown lentils
  • 1 can of good pasata
  • 6-7 minced garlic cloves
  • 3/5 glass of rice (I used basmati)
  • 1 glass of pasta
  • 7 small onions, sliced (not diced)
  • Pepper, salt, ground coriander, chilli flakes
  • Olive oil
  • 1 glass of sunflour oil for deepfrying.

Process:

  • In a bowl, put the sliced onions with a bit of salt, pepper, ground coriander and chilli flakes. Toss it to be sure everything is well mixed. The idea is to make the onions to sweat a bit.

  • Cook the lentils in a deep saucepan. Add two parts of boiling water for 1 part of lentils. 1 tsp of coriander and salt + pepper.
  • Dont over cook it, something “aldente”
  • Keep the water of the lentils to cook the pasta. Let aside the lentils.

  • Cook the pasta with the lentils water. Again, till “aldente”. Set aside.
  • Save the water for the last step.

  • Heat up a a frying pan. Once hot, add some oil and the minced garlic. BE CAREFUL dont burn them!
  • Add the tomate pasata to the garlic. Add some salt/pepper. Taste.
  • Let it cook at medium heath until thickened. Set aside

  • In the deep saucepan used for the lentils, heat up the sunflour oil
  • Once it is hot, add a handfull of onios.
  • NOTE: Leave a hand of onions without frying for next step
  • Let if try for over 10 minutes or until brown (but not burned!)
  • Remove the onions and let them dry with kitchen paper to absorve the oil. Separate them so they dont stick each other.
  • Repeat the process with another batch of onions untill all are done.

  • In the same saucepan as the onions. Remove some oil, try to clean any debris.
  • Once is hot again, add the leftover onios. Fry until golden.
  • Reduce to low-middle heat.
  • Add the rice, mix very well so it doesnt stick to the bottom
  • Add a couple of tbs of tomate sauce
  • Add the pasta water. Top up if needed.
  • Once the rice is done. Add the lentils and pasta. Mix all carefull
  • For serving, add the rice/lentil/pasta base
  • Add some tbs of tomate on top
  • Add some crispy onions on top.

In the middle of the process:

Final:

It didnt taste like the one I remember but it was quite good.

For next time, I need to make the Dakkah, Garlic Vinegar sauce.

Git merge vs rebase, diff, patch, stash

This week I have had a bit of a struggle with git when trying to develop a change and I was getting constant conflicts when trying to get my branch up to date with main.

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing: A refresh for merge vs rebase. When I first started with git, the environment was pro rebase. But after that job, all places were pro merge. Somehow I visualize better a rebase. I will start using rebase to see if I really understand.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/git-diff-and-patch/: That’s how I finally managed to push my change into master. I had a diff generated by my gitlab PR and applied it into master.

https://opensource.com/article/21/4/git-stash: Something I already commented about but hardly used.

https://opensource.com/article/21/3/git-cherry-pick: Never used it but I was reading about this week as I thought was my only way out from the merge conflict nightmare I was in.

AusNOG 2023

Nice NOG meeting:

Vendor Support API: Interesting how Telstra uses Juniper TAC API to handle power supplies replacement. I was surprised that they are able to get the RMA and just try to replace it. If they dont need it, they send it back… That saves time to Telstra for sure. The problem I can see here is when you need to open ticket for inbound/outbound deliveries in the datacenters, that dont have any API at all. If datacenters and big courier companies had API as 1st class citizends, incredible things could happens. Still just being able to have zero-touch replacement for power supplies is a start.

No Packet Behind – AWS: I think until pass the first 30 minutes, there is nothing new that hasnt been published in other NOG meeting between 2022 and 2023. At least the mention the name of the latest fabric, Final Cat. As well, they mention issues with IPv6 deployment.

There are other interesting talks but without video so the pdf only doesnt really give me much (like the AWS live premium talk)

RFKill

Somehow my linux laptop sometimes disables WIFI when I upgrade it. It doesnt really bother me as I can enable it by an icon in the UI but one day my UI lost the panel with that icon after another upgrade. So I had to learn how to enable the wifi. Via this page, I learned about the different status and then checking the options of rkfill command got my WIFI enabled back again.

# rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: yes
	Hard blocked: no
1: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: yes
	Hard blocked: no
# 
# rfkill unblock wifi
# 
# rfkill list
0: phy0: Wireless LAN
	Soft blocked: no
	Hard blocked: no
1: hci0: Bluetooth
	Soft blocked: yes
	Hard blocked: no
#

At some point, I would like to test bluetooth in my laptop.

Wistron

I have never heard of Wistron until I reached this page. Maybe it is because:

Wistron typically only sells to hyper-scalers

I guess the hyperscalers put their own NOS on top? Anyway, quite interesting the model with 16 ports for Optical SN (that is 4x400G per port).

MITRE ATT&CK

From another security maillist, Mitre is mentioned a lot but till this week I didnt really dig a bit about. So copy/paste:

MITRE ATT&CK® is a globally-accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations. The ATT&CK knowledge base is used as a foundation for the development of specific threat models and methodologies in the private sector, in government, and in the cybersecurity product and service community.

In similar subject, at some point, I would like to see how vulnerable my VPS is. Still not sure if would be usable or how to use Mittre to do that. At least to get some audit/basics done and improve my “security” knowledge a bit. As usual… time.

Google Spanner

From an email list, I read something about Gmail migration to Spanner. I was a bit surprised because I use gmail and didnt know anything about it. That email sent me to this page. That migration had to be a monster one! More details here. From the first page, I had a bit more info about Falcon. In summary, that is part of a bigger picture about building the “AI-driven” future infrastructure.

FP8-LM

From the AlphaSignal email list, that most of the times go over my lame knowledge, I found this piece of info, quite interesting:

FP8-LM: Training FP8 Large Language Models

Goal: Optimize LLM training with FP8 low-bit data formats.
Issue: High cost of LLM computational resources.
Solution: FP8 automatic mixed-precision framework for LLMs.
Results: Reduced memory by 42%, increased speed by 64%.
Insight: FP8 maintains accuracy, optimizes training efficiency.

Repo. Paper

This is something I want to really understand at one point. FP (Floating-Point) instructions can be from several sizes (8, 16, 32, 64). So the bigger, the better precision. I guess for some scientific tasks that is important. But looks like for AI, with FP8 could be good enough.