MySQL on MacOS: Discoveries

For a long time, I’ve installed MySQL within my development virtual machine (VM), loaded it with a minimal subset of production data, and pointed the database hostname to 127.0.0.1 through the VM’s /etc/hosts file.

However, working from home, I realized that the my slower DSL connection did not affect the amount of time it took to pull a fresh subset of production data into the VM.

I finally went to the trouble of installing MySQL on the host side, and configuring everything to work with that, so that filling it does not require the data to cross any hypervisor boundaries at all.  And I learned some things!

1. The installer sets it up to launch as _mysql user
2. Using the wrong CA certificate causes padding errors
3. MySQL 8.0.14+ allows a separate "administrative management" port
4. MySQL’s AES_ENCRYPT() function makes the worst possible choice by default
5. The speedup is dominated by MySQL's disk access

(Not) Learning Rust

I want Rust to succeed.  It seems like the best gambit for fixing C, where the slightest mistake is likely to be a security hole… or to be turned into one by a newer compiler version.

On the other hand, actually learning it has proven extremely difficult.  Very little of Rust is explained in terms of something else; and all of the basic mechanics of the language feel weird.

After the Rust Book and the Cookbook and maybe some other stuff from Awesome Rust, I went through the tutorial about writing very bad linked lists; there were places that were like, “Can we do X? [code that does X].”  I would stop there, run that code, and try to solve the error myself.  I never could. I would read on, and it would be, “The error tells us we need to call F” so I’d try to figure out how to call F.  I never could figure it out, even with that hint. And I still didn’t have the capability to go from error message to even discovering F, let alone understanding that F would apply to the error.

I threw myself at the wall several times, and failed to advance past the part where one writes a number-guessing game for the CLI.

Moreover, I don’t have a motivating project to “learn Rust” with.  It’s mostly an exercise in following other people’s code, breaking it, or trying to improve it, and ending up with incomprehensible and unactionable errors.  The compiler errors try to be helpful, but if the code starts out far enough off the rails, it’s just flailing, same as me.

When a survey comes in that says “Opinions of Rust are very favorable, but people aren’t using it,” I understand.  I understand completely.  We all want something to fix entire bug classes, but keep the bare-metal performance, and Rust is basically without competition there.  But we can’t all devote enough time and energy to learning Rust from scratch.

Python has descended into chaos

At my employer, Python is not our primary language; the main system was built in Perl and is now a Perl/PHP hybrid. The surrounding systems have been built/replaced with PHP, but the core code is resistant to change. Management doesn't want to mess with the part where the actual money flows in.

For seamless session handling—local memcached on dev machines, but shared storage in production—we have memcache-dynamo. It started life in Perl. I rewrote it in Python, as part of the quest to replace all Perl with something more popular in modern times. (I figured async/await syntax would be easier for future developers than React-PHP.) It's been working fine on Ubuntu 18.04 for some time, but then I wanted to update to Ubuntu 20.04.

It quickly turned irritating. The Python 3.6 dependencies didn't work on 3.8. It turns out that the updated dependencies for 3.8 don't work on 3.6, either. I guess this explains why pipenv is so insistent that "requires 3.6" means "exactly 3.6".

Python 3 isn't just a version with some backward-incompatible changes; it's fundamentally a new culture with new values. And honestly, that probably means less Python in my future. I don't want to promote another language into the main systems, and Python no longer seems to be suitable for fire-and-forget background services.

(In the end, I wrote a new layer on our installer that checks the Python version, then copies e.g. Pipfile-3.8 and Pipfile.lock-3.8 into their standard location before starting pipenv. It's a horrible mess and I hate it so much. Please, don't start a Python 3 transition every year!)

Black Lives Matter

This is a very focused blog.  One of the few comments I received on my old s9y blog was, “The technical content is great, but it could use fewer political and religious diatribes.”

We don’t exist outside of these social, political, or economic systems, though.  We are not separate from our own unconscious and its biases.  At the end of the day, if I truly believe in equality, in liberty and justice for all, then I must be willing to work for that.

The other crucial problem is that my silence will be interpreted as assent, which is a serious problem when my silence is interpreted as supporting something I deeply oppose.

Black lives matter.  Black quality of life matters.

Defunding and demilitarizing the police is an excellent first step.  But actions speak louder than words, and we really have to change those actions as a society; we have to start believing that petty crime does not justify lethal force, and genuinely prosecute those who act otherwise.  We should find it normal for police to de-escalate a situation.

And police reform (at a level that genuinely impacts the statistics and improves the lives of actual people) itself is only the first step.  Defunding the prison system and releasing non-violent offenders who were swept up in the war on drugs is overdue as well.  This is a problem we made ourselves, and our cultural narrative about it drives it toward being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What’s next after that?  I don’t know.  That’s where listening to other people is important.  All I can guarantee is that we will accomplish nothing if we deflect or ignore the topic entirely.

Further food for thought:

• The Implicit Association Test
• You Are Two, a video by CGP Grey about the invisible mind
• Delusions of Gender, a book by Cordelia Fine about how culture shapes reality

On "Perl 7"

Previous history:

1. SawyerX: Announcing Perl 7.
2. Grinnz: Perl 7: A Risk-Benefit Analysis.
3. RJBS: On Perl 7 and the Perl Steering Comittee.

My comments at this point:

Hey #perl core. Is there anywhere I can upload a cpanfile, so you can know what's important in production? Like Debian's popularity-contest, but specialized. (We install most everything via Ubuntu repositories, so you don't get downloads/test feedback.)

The perl7 thing is probably accelerating our plans to phase Perl out entirely. I'm not sure what we'll do if Ubuntu 22.04 ships a "Perl 7" that can't run Perl 5 code.

To be honest, ~20% of hits to our client-facing site are served by CGI.pm because of some failures on my part (should have used CGI::Emulate::PSGI?) and on management (50% time savings is great, but let's work on features... forever.)

Anyway, it's going to be real hard to sell "work on Perl7 support" to a management team who have been ramping up the priority on "rewrite the application."

(Lightly edited from my twitter thread.)

Now, I realize I'm nobody, and nobody has to listen to me, but I think the popularity-ranking thing is kind of important, and maybe even a "State of Perl" survey to find out what's even broken. All I know from my vantage point is that Perl looks fairly dead already, despite how much I loved it. The Perl 7 crisis has so far been more anxiety-inducing than inspiring.

Updated 2022-03-19: Perl 7 is basically dead? Business as usual? I still can't help illuminate the DarkPAN for them, and management is inching closer to sunsetting our own Perl code. RIP.

pipenv's Surprise

Warning: Python 3.6 was not found on your system…
You can specify specific versions of Python with:
  $ pipenv --python path/to/python

I am left with no clear path to making this project run with the system Python 3 across just two versions of Ubuntu LTS.  It doesn't work on Focal (Python 3.8) as-is, and if I update the Pipfile.lock, it won't run on Bionic (Python 3.6).  It doesn't have shebangs for python3.6, as it expects to run on Python 3.6 or up.  This is how SemVer works!

Maybe the answer is to build my own tools in order to run this in a way that suits me. Which is: I really want a build phase to create a tarball, which can be extracted and run in-place later. All the complexity of vendoring should be finished by the time deployment (from tarball) occurs, for reliability and reproducibility.

I do not want to write this project a third time, probably in a language I hate, just because virtualenv is both wholly inadequate, and central to Python tooling.

(Something like the way the awscli-bundle is packaged is an interesting start, but it still has to grind through a lot of code to "install" itself. It's not unzip-and-go. Also, I've got no idea how they build that in the first place.)

Unexpected Noise in Ardour

I've been learning to mix with Ubuntu Studio 19.10 and Ardour5, but I've had a puzzling issue: noise.

My workflow has been to load in the .wav files I want to mix, and then start working, but it always had some low-level noise on the channels.  Even when Ardour was not supposed to be playing, the noise would be there.

It turns out that Ardour still connects the inputs to the track, and passes them through the effects chain.  This is why the noise responds to the fader, noise gate effects, and the like.  The solution is to go to the input on each mixer strip and switch it from 1 (or 2, or 1/2, etc.) to "Disconnected" instead.  Otherwise, at minimum, thermal noise gets added on the channel.

I happened to discover this through a pair of accidents: I had a cheap headset mic connected and noise was worse than ever, but also, all of the meters jumped when some background noise happened.  Disconnecting the inputs fixed the noise, without affecting the ability to play back the imported audio.

(This isn't the normal fare for my blog, but if I put it on tumblr instead, it'll never be seen again, and what good is that?)