Always support compressed response in an API service

If you run any web service always enable support for serving compressed responses. It will save egress bandwidth costs for you. And, more importantly, for your users. Over time, the servers as well as client devices have become more powerful, so, compressing/decompressing data on the fly is cheap.

Perito Moreno Glacier

A day in El Calafate - Patagonia, Argentina

El Calafate is the gateway to Argentina’s Patagonia region. However, there isn’t much to do in this city as such beyond the Perito Moreno Glacier. If you are flying into El Calafate, then I would recommend first going to El Chaltén. And then spend your last day in El Calafate before flying out from the airport that’s less than 20 minutes away by taxi. I took an 11500 AEP guided bus tour to Perito Moreno Glacier that included a pick-up and drop-off back to my hotel. Alternatively, one can take a bus from the bus terminal for 8500 AEP. Apart from that one has to pay 5500 AEP for glacier entry. There is an option to do a 1-hour boat tour of the glacier for 8000 AEP. And for 70,000 AEP, one can hike on the glacier. However, I had done that earlier in Alaska , so, I decided to skip that. ...

hugging-face-down

Hermetic docker images with Hugging Face machine learning models

Hugging Face is GitHub for machine learning models. Their on-the-fly model download scheme, however, is difficult from a DevOps perspective. Here’s how to disable it.

American Elections

The United States has a federal system of government. The more interesting aspect is how Americans vote thrice for the federal government.

February 25, 2024 Â· 3 min      Politics

The sound of "ch"

There are at least three different ways “ch” gets pronounced in English words and that tells you the origin of those words.

API services should always have usage Limits

Every public-facing API service should have API usage limits. If this seems overkill then ask yourself if would it be OK if a single IP sends a million requests a second. This does not apply just to publicly documented services but even to undocumented services that are publicly accessible.

Laguna De Los Tres

Hiking in El Chaltén - trekking capital of Argentina

El Chaltén, a small town in Patagonia, Argentina is a hiking heaven. There are three major hiking paths in El Chaltén, and all of them are easily accessible from the town. One is located in the south, the other two are in the north-west and north-east side of the town, respectively. Here’s my recommendation on how to do all those hikes in three days. Day 1 - Tower Lake (Laguna Torre) Start the day with a 20-km round-trip hike to Laguna Torre. If you plan it well, you can even take a walk on the Glacier at the end. The hike is pretty well marked and it is hard to miss the trail. It took me about 2-1/2 hours to reach the lake. And a further 30 more mins to reach the final viewpoint, Mirador Maestri. It takes about 6 hours to finish the hike. ...

Natural Laws vs Man-made Laws

An American’s experience in Luxor made me write this. The story is long and vivid, but the core theme is how she and many other foreigners were duped into buying and then selling properties losing money in the process.

Status Symbol

When Sony’s Walkman was expensive, we used them with cheap earphones. Once the music players were cheap, we shifted to more expensive headphones as a status symbol.

January 27, 2024 Â· 1 min      Misc

Using Python & Poetry inside Docker

The ultimate guide to using Poetry inside Docker