Week in review

Last week was a short week, between taking PTO on Friday and feeling a bit under the weather earlier in the week. Whilst I didn’t meet a re-wilded bison, I did meet a moose, so that's something.

Tezos Foundation write up

The main task was writing words for the Tezos Foundation report, trying to sum up our frustrations in English. In the end I used a Systems Readiness Level metric to evaluate various aspects of the Tezos developer experience, and tried to draw parallels to other web-service technologies. It's not really a glowing report, but hopefully it's more actionable than just "it was a bad scene, man".

Biodiversity pipeline

I had a catch-up with Alison, and whilst the biodiversity work isn't the highest priority, I'm trying to keep it ticking over. One thing we're hitting is that we need to modify the libraries that were originally written by Daniele, who's not had chance to respond to various requests we've made, so I've forked both his repositories into the 4C github organisation. I then hit issues with pip dependencies for non-mainline repositories, and have solutions, but ones I want to run past Anil before I do so.

Docker and podman

I want to use containers under the hood for a bunch of things I get ecologists to run, as we keep hitting issues with GDAL versions and python libraries, and a bunch of silly problems that would go away if we just ran everything in the same environment.

I already have the container environment built, as it is what's used for CI, and locally I can use this fine, but Docker is a problem on a shared machine like our compute server. You either run it in rootless, which is then a pain to set up per user, and not something I want to have to guide ever non-compsci through. Rooted is just unacceptable - for those who've never actually tried, hopefully this explains why:

% ls /root
ls: cannot open directory '/root': Permission denied
% docker run --rm -v /root:/root debian ls /root
hello.txt
% sudo ls /root
hello.txt

So, as an alternative user-space container launcher I had a play with podman, which in theory does what I want. In practice, I managed to mess up the NAS mount on our compute server - which is why one shouldn't fiddle with complex software when feeling under the weather! I managed to run the wrong option, and it turns out podman will try chown mounted volumes to the current user, which feels an incredibly poor design choice. So I managed to chown the entire NAS to me, breaking it for everyone else. This is particularly frustrating, as once set, the chown can't be undone without invoking the department sys-admins as I don't have that sort of access to our NAS.

Thus this little experiment got stalled whilst I waited for assistance and will continue my experiments on some other machine for now - though not my on machine, as that runs Fedora rather than ubuntu, and that has different permission issues around mounts. 🤦

This coming week

• Try figure out whether this Tezos Foundation doc is done
• Try to catch up with Patrick on pipeline things
• Get back to the database evaluation I was doing a few weeks ago. Alison has given me the subset of data for Brazil only she was playing with, which will make that slightly more interest to work with.
• Try not to take out any critical infrastructure