Mostly Software

  • Wednesday

    • Chess cheating – magnus/hans.
      • Love the centipawn math analysis from a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5nEFaRdwZY. Compares accuracy to rating. There’s a known trajectory as you get better at chess with experience (for normals, for prodigies, for all) of how your accuracy improves as your elo rating improves. Hans’ accuracy basically stayed the same from 2300-2700, which effectively means through those years he had an engine set to 2700 (on avg). Before that (<2018), he showed the continuous improvement of a human.
      • Full chess.com report (72pg, but the actual report without appendices is only 20pg): https://www.chess.com/blog/CHESScom/hans-niemann-report.
    • Sleep:
      • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3nVp4Rhn74.
        • “We can force ourselves to stay awake but it’s much harder to force ourselves to fall asleep.”
        • “It’s very hard to control the mind with the mind…you need to look to some mechanism that involves the body.”
      • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwrrKlII4XA.
        • THC blocks/reduces REM sleep (bad) and speeds sleep onset (good).
        • That’s why tolerance breaks = crazy dreams. Your brain is experiencing normal REM for the first time in a while.
    • Remember wordpress is php/mariadb.
    • Fixed the broken shelf in the kitchen and tightened all other hinge mount bolts.
    • This makes me happy: https://www.reuters.com/technology/eu-parliament-adopts-rules-common-charger-electronic-devices-2022-10-04/
      • Forced standardization to avoid predatory behavior and waste. Hope the US follows suit.
    • Elon proceeding with Twitter purchase: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922105787/tm2227435d1_ex99-s.htm
    • Cloud hosting: AWS vs DO.
      • AWS has a cool migration service; instead of building a server and running an app from scratch, you can install an AWS replication agent on an existing server and let AWS recreate in EC2.
      • You can’t delete an instance forcibly from your EC2 dashboard. Just terminate the instance, and AWS will remove it from your dash over the next couple minutes/hours as all associated resources are flushed. Same happens with volumes. The dash will show them for a bit, just wait.
      • My brian.mahlstedt@gmail.com root account was created in 2020, so its 12 months of free tier have expired already. I can use the southbaysupercontest account, but I intend to run both sbsc and this blog in EC2 and it’s probably easier to run in one place. I’ll pay the regular (it’s still cheaper than DO).
      • EC2 billing – the are many options.
        • General.
          • FreeTier is just the temporary first year, for certain services; not an allocation type.
          • All of these are per-second bills. You only pay for what you use.
        • 3 standard allocation types.
          • On Demand (default). If there is room in your region, you’ll get it – and then it’s yours (same as reserved). $0.0138/hr (~$10/mo) for t2.micro in us-west-1.
          • Reserved. You are guaranteed. Commit to a virtual server in a region for 1 or 3yrs. $0.007/hr (~$5/mo) for t2.micro in us-west-1 with 3yr commitment.
          • Spot. If there is room in your region, you’ll get it – but if other requests come in (on demand or reserved), you’ll be terminated. $0.0041/hr (~$3/mo) for t2.micro in us-west-1.
        • Other (less common).
          • Dedicated host. Physical server. It’s yours.
          • Savings Plans. Not exactly sure the difference between these and Reserved instances (RI).
      • I went over the free tier COMPUTE options yesterday, but there are a few more considerations:
        • Storage:
          • Free tier allows up to 30GB (General Purpose, EBS, SSD). After that, gp3 is $0.08/GB/month. To compare to my 25GB droplet, that’s $2/mo. But I’ll use a little less.
          • gp3 is the newer version of gp2. Higher perf. More IOPS, etc: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/migrate-your-amazon-ebs-volumes-from-gp2-to-gp3-and-save-up-to-20-on-costs/
        • Domain/routing.
          • Create an elastic IP so the EC2 instance doesn’t change IP over time.
          • I currently use GoDaddy as my domain registrar. Move over to AWS Route 53. Not sure how their annual prices for my domains compare, but I’ll check before transfer.
          • And then use Route 53 as DNS (if you use it as the domain registrar, this automatically happens, else you can do it separately).
          • Not sure about pricing (for just the DNS records and routing). It’s dependent on usage. Anywhere from 0-50 cents per month, I believe.
      • So overall: with compute+storage+routing, it will be about $6/mo on AWS. Same as DO, but many more services. And I can mess with cost savings and pricing models (switch to per-second usage, etc) so I think I can get it down lower. And I’ll get more exp with AWS instead of DO, which has less market share.
      • I’ll do this migration next monday, after sunday football day and before wednesday line/pick opening. Don’t want to do it today, just in case there are issues/delays. Giving myself 3 days is better, just in case.
    • bmahlstedt.com migration.
      • To practice before monday (and bc I need to do it anyway), I’ll do the above to migrate this blog from hosting on DO to AWS.
      • I don’t have a vanilla droplet running wordpress on DO, it’s a wordpress-specific DO instance.
      • Seahorse is a trusted AWS partner that specializes in migrating to AWS. First evaluated using their plugin to migrate to Lightsail (basically a bundled compute/storage/dns/etc solution for sites on aws, instead of manual mgmt with EC2).
      • There’s an alternative: “All-in-One WP Migration” plugin on WP. Exports a single file. Then you can import at the new location, customizing as you please. This is the from-scratch EC2 approach. I’m going to use the seahorse approach for lightsail experience.
      • Tried the seahorse wp plugin and was running into issues. It also had 1 review, whereas the from-scratch plugin had over 7k.
      • Used the plugin to export a single file of my whole site (~600MB, includes db). Then go to a fresh ec2 instance, install wordpress, then install the same plugin in wp, then import that same file you exported earlier. All on wp v6.0.2.
      • Used Amazon Linux instead of Ubuntu. Mostly just to learn about their distro with some first-hand exp. 64bit x86, t2.micro (1 vcpu 1GiB mem), new keypair, new network security (ssh all and http/s), 25GiB gp3 EBS SSD. Reserved instance, not spot. AZ us-east-1.
      • Connected successfully on my local vscode: ssh -i “bmahlstedt.com.pem” ec2-user@ec2-44-203-160-108.compute-1.amazonaws.com
      • There’s an upload limit of 512MB with the free extension. My wp blog is larger than that. To remove the limit costs $69/yr (lol) https://servmask.com/products/unlimited-extension
      • I’ll just leave bmahlstedt.com on digital ocean.
      • Undid everything, terminated the instance, etc.
      • Later came back and played a bit more with seahorse.
        • Successfully migrated to lightsail with a clone of this blog. Pretty cool/easy tool.
        • Launches to eu-west-1, creates IAM for you, all done. You don’t have to provide any AWS info. Free.
        • Runs for 36 hours for you to play with it, then taken down.
        • I noticed it did NOT copy over all my posts, so something happened with the db backup/restore.
        • It’s $110 for a single-use license to migrate once to AWS. I’ll skip.
          • The process is obviously just do the same steps, using your own IAM keys so your site clones to your lightsail.
      • Later came back and played a bit more with backups.
        • Remember I already have another plugin that does backups for my wp site, UpdraftPlus.
        • ~470MB of the ~600MB full site export was the 5 backups.
        • It backs up in two places.
          • (1) Remotely to gdrive. I reauthed and confirmed this worked.
          • (2) Locally, on the wp server (in the updraft folder).
        • You may configure how many backups it keeps (FIFO deletion). Cannot do zero, must do at least 1. This applies to local backups (stored on the server that’s hosting the wordpress site) as well as remote backups (gdrive in my case).
        • The site is actually only ~90MB but it was keeping 5 copies, hence the 470 above.
        • So now that my site is actually only ~200MB (one for the site, one for the single backup), I could use the all-in-one migration tool to setup wordpress on a vanilla EC2 instance and import over. But whatever. I’ll keep the blog as-is on DO for now. That’s enough migration investigation.
        • For comparison – the UpdraftPlus suite comes with a Migrator as well (obviously, it’s just a backup/restore task), and it’s $30 (compared to seahorse’s $110).
    • Supercontest.
      • Updated banner, posted lines, submitted my picks.
      • The app required TWO modifications since superbook changed the format of the lines on the weekly card. So silly.
        • (1) “PRO FOOTBALL – ” as prefix in the date row.
        • (2) “London, UK” as suffix in the time cell (where appropriate).