Thought Bricks

I finally got to the very last part of building a recommender engine. Starting from my post a couple of months ago on the topic, I created a very simple Flask app that serves the model created by the nearest-neighbors recommender. It’s not very exciting but at least shows how it can be done. As I mention in the README for the project, the results are not exactly what I was hoping for but I think that beer recommendations are more complicated than “if you like this, you will like that”.

This is a very realistic take on SAP strengths. As an “operating system” for business, it’s really strong. There is quite a lot of depth in the ERP applications and, despite warts, they just work for many, many businesses. However, the SAP cloud offerings represent a risky move for many customers. They have years of experience and operations based on their existing SAP ERP. In some cases, this is supported with extensive customization.

I just saw that RedHat is changing the way they are running the CentOS project. I’m not a fan of this and it seems like a money grab. I’ve used CentOS where I needed the equivalent of RHEL but didn’t need support (e.g. experimentation, testing, etc.) I do have a RHEL Developer Subscription, so I could use the real McCoy for some of this testing, but it just isn’t as convenient in some cases.

The recently announced mac1.metal instance type on AWS is interesting. I can imagine it would be very useful for building iOS apps and the like that require a Mac or running site tests with the Safari browser. The aren’t running the new M1 chip, but are on some pretty decent Intel i7 processors, so they should be plenty fast. I don’t suppose you care too much about power consumption if it’s in the cloud.

I’m very curious about the new Apple M1. The specs sound really great and the battery life is impressive. However, I don’t need one now and have other things to spend my money on. I probably have about a year or so with my MacBook. It’s slow but seems to still get the job done for what I do with it. Plus, that should give them the time to get more stuff ported natively to the new chip.

All of my professional work is with enterprise software. This can be very interesting due to the scale of problems and challenges of security, scalability, etc. It can also be enormously frustrating. I found this humorous manifesto that describes the experience of trying to perform agile development for enterprise customers. What I like about it is that it points out that there are reasons for all of the process and procedure that go beyond Kafkaesque nonsense.

I’ve been using Simplenote for about a year. I was looking for an open source cross-platform note taking app that supports Markdown and Simplenote fit the bill. Simplenote works quite well and I’ve not had any problems with it. However, it fell short on one key requirement: the ability to easily embed images into my notes. I tend to take a lot of screenshots and they are good way to document certain things (especially very GUI intensive apps like SAP) and not having them as an easy option was problematic.

I’ve been using Hugo for a little while now on Linux. Since I had my MacBook with me this weekend, I wanted to give it a try. It was easy. The first thing to do was to do a git clone for my blog content. Nothing surprising there. Next, I installed Hugo using brew install hugo. That took a few minutes but got me v0.76.5/extended on the Mac. No issues.

Building on the excellent work by Max Humber that I mentioned in my previous post, I wrote some code to collect some data and create a nearest-neighbors recommender. The code and instructions for use can be found at https://github.com/rericsson/hop-prescribe. In a nutshell, this will get some data from Beeradvocate, create a model and save it into a file so it can be published. My next entry on this topic will be about publishing the model as a web service.

I try to maintain my privacy as much as possible online. I recognize there are limits to what we can reasonably do, but one of the easiest things to do is switch to Firefox. Chrome is a very nice browser, but I’ve switched to Firefox for all of my personal web use. I do sometimes use Chrome on my work computer as it is a “requirement” for some of the apps we use.