Benincosa — Armchair Notes

Jetson nano New Years Eve AI fun

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:03:14 GMT

When I started working at NVIDIA we were given some money to buy things at the employee store. Rather than buy tshirt swag, I right away bought a jetson nano. I've been playing with it off and on in the year in a half since I've been here. So here's a nice project I did to end 2025: A simple app that recognizes people and greets them with a nice sounding voi

P90X - 20 Years Later - Where are they now?

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 14:58:26 GMT

Tony Horton Creator of P90X Around March of this year (2024) I had time off before starting a new job. When you are a man in your 40s, what better way to spend that time than to try to get in shape? None of the new programs out there today do anything for me like P90X did for me years ago. Apple Fitness+, Peloton, YouTube videos etc. They are all for people

Some Changes

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 19:05:30 GMT

I'm going to start writing about some topics that are not strictly technical but are interesting to me. I now work at NVIDIA and most of my technical writing will probably move over to some platform over there. I will still write about some technical things that are interesting to me, but since this is my place on the internet I'll be expanding a bit to some

Setting up reverse proxies on nginx ingress controller on Kubernetes

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 18:20:22 GMT

In another installment of stupid Kubernetes routing tricks I bring you the following problem: I'm have a website running on webflow. Which for some reason still doesn't support hosting .well-known routes. It turns out, we really need those. I have most the rest of my subdomains in Kubernetes. So I figured the thing to do is to just use Kubernetes as a revers

New Apps

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 22:50:40 GMT

Here is my list of apps I've had on the back burner that I'm hoping to have some time in Q42023 to work on. None of these domains work yet, but they all will use the same base app: https://weightwithfriends.com https://recepitumble.com https://turgyd.com Intrigued? Yes, I thought you might be. Well here's the description and the pitch for each of them: Weigh

The Renaissance 1,000 Challenge

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 19:02:12 GMT

Oh you want it all? Think you are complete? Ok: here's the challenge to be the new renaissance person: You must publish a book that has some success. I'm not talking self publish but go with a major publishing house. Ok, if you're famous already maybe you can just self publish. Anyway, let's make this an easy goal: It has to have been read by 1,000 people. Y

Engineering @ WeaveGrid

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 01:47:10 GMT

For a little over two years now I've been pretty busy working for a growing company founded in San Francisco by Apoorv Bhargava and John Taggart. I was hired in December 2020 during the pandemic and one of the first remote employees outside of the bay area. We're around 70 people now as I write this and when I started I was somewhere in the low teens. I thou

2023 - The Road Ahead

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 14:52:03 GMT

Well, 2022 is a wrap and it was wonderful! I took a pretty big chance in 2019 when I left Cisco and joined Zenabi. Little did I know what would happen since then: * Working with some incredible people and really getting back into full time software development. We launched a few projects and serviced a bunch of clients. * Seeing Zenabi crumble towards the en

Increasing the size of persistent volumes

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 14:36:58 GMT

My coworker and I needed to increase the amount of days that Prometheus keeps logs from 15 days to around 90 days. This meant that we wanted to increase our storage, or our persistent volume. We use the kube-prometheus-stack helm chart for installing helm and have customized it to have persistent storage. It turned out that all we had to do was the following

Kubernetes Pod Anti Affinity

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 14:42:44 GMT

We have a couple of pods that get pretty intense memory use. It's possible there is a memory leak because it OOM'd a node due to a spike in usage. One of our temporary solutions while we investigate is to put a pod anti-affinity rule in the deployment. What this means is that we don't like it when pod instances run on the same node. That way we spread them o

Kubernetes Cron Jobs vs. AWS Lambdas

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 18:10:47 GMT

I've always stressed that it should never be Kubernetes or Serverless, but rather: What is the right tool for the job. Both technologies are great and both technologies carry their own baggage. This week as I was working on some design and thought about its implementation I had to decide whether I should add a Kubernetes CronJob or make it a lambda service.

Kubernetes Ingress pass through to internal services (not on the Kubernetes cluster)

Thu, 16 Dec 2021 18:29:21 GMT

This is a pretty confusing title but the gist of it is this: We have a service, let's suppose its a database, running internally. We can get to it from our Kubernetes cluster, but resources outside of Kubernetes can't get to it. And the only way we can get to Kubernetes services is through a resource. We're going to use the nginx ingress controller. To start

EKS Additional users

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 14:17:06 GMT

In our EKS Kubernetes cluster we want multiple AWS users to be able to use the kubectl command to examine resources and for now, they can even have admin access to a few select groups. The way I've always done this in the past is I create new stanza in the aws-auth configMap in the kube-system namespace. This is how AWS tells you how to do it in their docume

Prometheus Service Monitors

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 18:47:23 GMT

Prometheus is confusing. It's such a great project and there is all kinds of information out there, but it's taken me a bit of legwork to understand it. The first issue is: How are you going to install it? Since I'm running this on Kubernetes it makes sense to use whatever most people are doing. And commonly, the answer is Helm. I'm not a big fan of Helm bec

AWS Client VPN SAML authentication with Google G-Suite

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 21:28:40 GMT

Note: Video for this Blog Post is Here. When dealing with cloud resources the two opposing needs are security and accessibility. When we often deploy resources in a private network inside of an AWS VPC that are not accessible directly from the outside. To access these resources, we can use a bastion server or VPN. The bastion server is a server that is acces

Lens and EKS

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 15:22:04 GMT

Lens is a really cool front end dashboard for Kubernetes clusters. One issue I ran into from connecting to the cluster was that I typically use different AWS Profiles for different clusters. Typically I'll do something like: export AWS_PROFILE=eksdude To set my user. To put this in Lens so that it can connect, we just add this to the environment variable in

Allowing Applications in AWS EKS to access other AWS services

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 18:20:57 GMT

I have an application that runs in a container. The application is pretty simple in that all it does is list the contents of a DynamoDB database I created. The code is here, as well as all the YAML files for deploying to EKS. The problem is, when we pull this up on a standard EKS cluster we get the following issue: I've purposely allowed my application to di

ARCoachingOverlayView and SwiftUI

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 12:38:32 GMT

These last few weeks I've been diving into Apple's RealityKit for iPhone. I've chosen to use SwiftUI instead of UIKit as I like the similarities between it and ReactJS. I thought I'd start posting a few things I learn as I find Apple's documentation is great if you already know what you're doing. Unfortunately, if I knew what I was doing I probably wouldn't

Building a Business

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 10:21:23 GMT

Our first humble delivery of our Yard Card Greeting Business: https://lawnfairy.fun I've done many coding projects in my career but until this year I've never created a project that actually earns money. I have always had big aspirations to do this, and I've always talked about it, but until September of this year I had never done it. Well, I've done it! Hum

Javascript Unique Objects By Key

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 22:30:23 GMT

Suppose you have an array of objects in javascript: [{id: "a", foo: "bar1"}, {id: "b", foo: "bar2"}, {id: "a", foo: "bar3"}] In the above contrived example 2 of the 3 objects have the same id value of a. We'd like to filter this array so that the result is: [{id: "a", foo: "bar1"}, {id: "b", foo: "bar2"}] Javascript doesn't have a built in unique function li

React Hooks: useState with Arrays

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 17:38:55 GMT

I spent a good portion of the work day today trying to code up a simple form to accept a list of zip codes and put them in an array. The final form looks as follows: As you can see there are a few zip codes and then we can click the 'Add Zip Code' button and we get a new set of inputs. To make this work, our form code looks as follows: import React, {useStat

Increasing Upload Sizes with the Nginx Ingress Controller Kubernetes for Wordpress Sites

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 14:23:00 GMT

Previously I had installed wordpress pods on Kubernetes and it made it very easy to administer and add multiple sites for clients. However, as time went on they started getting more aggressive in the different themes they were uploading. To solve the problem required configuration changes in two places. The Ingress ControllerThe PHP file on the Wordpress pod

my own ngrok

Thu, 21 May 2020 11:49:28 GMT

ngrok is a great service that redirects public internet traffic to a service running on a private network, such as your laptop at your house. Lately, as I've been doing a lot of development with oauth2 sign ins on webforms, I've had to use ngrok to test. The free plan allows about 24 hours of connection and the paid for plans don't really cost much ($5 a mon

Compressing Python dictionary objects before storing in json S3 files.

Tue, 24 Mar 2020 16:17:48 GMT

Here's a quick little script I wrote since I need to test uploading files into s3. In this case the file generated will be 78 bytes. When unzipped 170 Bytes. The reason I wrote this is because I have to upload large amounts of data in json form into S3. Saving space in S3 results in pretty great savings. Here is the code: #!/usr/bin/env python3 import boto3,

Fail2ban and Web Services

Thu, 13 Feb 2020 21:33:00 GMT

One of the problems of running my own servers and hosting my own sites is that for some reason people like to hack them and try to guess passwords with SSH. Fail2ban solves this problem by allowing only a few failed login attempts before banning the offending server for a specified duration of time. This is enough to make it so brute force attacks on your we

Own your own content

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 10:05:53 GMT

Reading this morning on Hacker News was this article on how the old Internet has died because we trusted all our content to Facebook and Google. While hyperbole abounds in the headline and there are plenty of internet things out there that aren't owned by Google nor Facebook (including this AWS free blog) it is true much of the information and content is in

2019 Year in Review

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 19:49:52 GMT

Another ride around the sun comes to a close and a new adventure begins in just a few days. I like to take a few minutes at the end of each year and think about how this year went compared to what I thought would happen when I wrote this review 12 months ago. I was pretty sure last year around this time that my time with Cisco would be coming to an end. Sure

Updating Facebook UTMs on Ads

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 18:17:09 GMT

One of the ways that advertisers measure the return on investment of advertising is tying ads to revenue. So for example, for every 1,000 clicks on an online digital Ads, how many of those people actually buy the product? The way this is tracked is that you put in what is called a UTM tag on the link you are advertising. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module

Cloudfront S3 static site hosting and index.html

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 14:51:57 GMT

This article I followed was a little outdated. Things do change a lot in 3 years. It's mostly the same as the function seems to work but the implementation does not. Following the hints here I was able to get this to work. The big one was you need to refresh your browser. I think its pretty ridiculous that AWS doesn't enable this default behavior with a

KUBAM update

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 09:23:01 GMT

While working at Cisco I developed a project called KUBAM: A simple bare metal provision tool for UCS. I updated the kubam.io page and am now offering support for $500 / node per year. I couldn't do this at Cisco because I could never get it officially recognized by the powers that be. That is nothing against them, they have their own agenda and objectiv

Kubernetes Cron Job vs. AWS Glue

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 14:02:52 GMT

As I've been dealing with streaming data one of the architectural decisions I've had to make is how to run periodic batch jobs on the data as it comes in. In the case of web traffic, it is logged into a database. What my batch jobs do is take the data from the MariaDB MySQL database, convert the data to Parquet format and then store the data in AWS S3. On

Golang: AWS SDK, Cognito and API Gateway

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 10:29:24 GMT

The situation is as follows: Create an application with the serverless framework. This uses API Gateway, Lambda, and all kinds of cool stuff. Authenticate on the application using Cognito. Write a client that can call the API created by API gateway in Go. Steps 1-2 are covered everywhere on the internet. My favorite reference is this serverless stack tutor

Ingress on AWS

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 19:33:05 GMT

While looking for different options on how to run an ingress controller on AWS I found that EKS recently announced support for an open source project that creates an ALB ingress controller. One of the advantages of an ingress rule is that I can have many services be reachable via one external load balancer. In the research I found that the EKS ALB ingress

Book Review: Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 23:35:25 GMT

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="316"] Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind[/caption] If you ever want to get a real perspective on the destruction our species has done to the planet and most of the other species on this earth, this is a great read. I was fascinated by the accounts of our ancestors spreading from Africa to the rest of the world.

Last Day at Cisco

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 14:49:56 GMT

[caption id="attachment_3691" align="aligncenter" width="224"] My desk in the Cisco Lake Oswego office from May 31, 2011 to February 22, 2019. This photo taken in 2012. Doesn't look too different :-)[/caption] On Wednesday I attended the funeral of Brad Jackson, a beloved former Cisco colleague. His story is not one for me to tell, but suffice to say we wil

Book Review: Bad Blood

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 16:42:07 GMT

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="572"] Bad Blood - Finished this pretty fast.[/caption] I finished this book in about 1.5 weeks. I had some airplane travel time but I was riveted. I was appalled, saddened, and shocked at the same time. The book is a true story about a company named Theranos founded by Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes that appe

Kubernetes contexts

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 16:10:55 GMT

Today we had to work on switching between two kubernetes clusters. The commands of the day are: kubectl config get-contexts kubectl config use-context It's surprisingly not so simple. Perhaps there are tools out there that people know of to make it easier? What I've been doing is taking to ~/.kube/config files and concatenating them together. A

2018 - What did I do this year?

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 16:21:04 GMT

Big things of course! Took the whole family to Europe for 2.5 months. This was the greatest. Kids got such an education on this. So happy we got to do this. I worked with a lot of customers and internal Cisco people while over in Europe. It was nice to finally be on their timezone to do this! Rewrote the https://kubam.io project including back end and f

ESXi Kickstart and automated vCenter registration

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:32:52 GMT

I haven't worked on VMware for a while but needed to work on a project to automatically install ESXi on a few servers. I invented a tool called KUBAM that was originally for deploying Kubernetes on UCS Bare Metal (KUBAM) but have realized there are a lot of people that can benefit from the use of vMedia policy installations. I've written a few articles on

A brief history of on-prem serverless development

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 13:14:37 GMT

My colleague Pete Johnson, at Cisco has released a blog about a project called FONK. I wanted to talk a little bit about why its important. iOS Developers Let's first start back with the dawn of mobile application development. Pretend you are an iPhone developer back in 2008. You know Objective-C and you know how to make killer user interfaces and you mak

Technical Details on Gas on Ethereum

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 10:19:12 GMT

I've been working over the last year off and on on different smart contracts. What follows are some technical details I sent to some of my colleagues here at Cisco regarding gas price and gas limits. Two important parts of Ethereum that are not understood very well: Units and Gas. Units 1 Ether in Ethereum is divisible up to 18 decimal units. The smallest

Bluetooth Speaker and Microphone on Raspberry Pi

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 14:06:38 GMT

If you want your own Jarvis from Ironman the first step is to have a computer that can listen to what you say and then talk back to you. The software for that is the hard part but with some AI and RNNs we can get some pretty good functionality. That comes later, so let's first start up with the microphone and audio. I am using a Raspberry Pi 3 and will no

Kubernetes OnPrem Storage

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 15:40:54 GMT

Lately I came across a few bare metal servers in our lab and decided I would test some of my ideas on setting up a bare metal kubernetes cluster on these nodes. I started thinking that if I were to do so I would need some persistent storage. There were a few options I could choose from: I could NFS mount to all the nodes a server that had a ton of disks in

Docker based Jupyter Notebook on B200 M5 with Tesla P6

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 12:57:29 GMT

We have a fresh system, let's install Docker. Here we are using CentOS 7.5 and logged in as root. First make sure your date/clock is correct, if not, fix: date +%Y%m%d -s "20180917" date +%T -s "13:39:00" hwclock -w Install Docker yum install -y yum-utils yum-config-manager --add-repo https://download.docker.com/linux/centos/docker-ce.repo yum install -y do

Hands on with NVIDIA P6 and UCS B200 M5

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 10:59:39 GMT

Just got access to a new UCS B200 M5 blade! My goal is to create a tensorflow lab on it. Let's get cracking! It was installed with CentOS 7.5 cat /etc/redhat-release cat /etc/redhat-release CentOS Linux release 7.5.1804 (Core) Let's make sure there is indeed a GPU: lspci ... d8:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP104GL [Tesla P6] (rev a1) Ok, now we n

Ubuntu 18.04 Jump server setup

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 16:40:08 GMT

In my environment I have limited IP addresses, so we're creating a new network and then allowing one server, the jump server, to sit between these network. To do this, my jump server, aka: jump104 is "dual-homed". This means it has two network adapters: One on the public network, and one on the internal private network. We are going to make this server a

CI/CD continued: Drone

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 05:57:06 GMT

In my previous post I showed how we setup a CI/CD server. In this post we'll go into more detail in explaining how drone works. I've previous written about how drone does secrets. Well that has changed a bit, so in this update with drone 0.8.5 we'll show how it works. This time, we're working on a python application. Mac Command Line Before we begin we n

CI/CD server behind a firewall

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 04:48:24 GMT

The goal of this post is to show how to create a CI/CD server that sits behind a firewall. When we do a git push then we would like a webhook to be fired off to our CI/CD server. The CI/CD server would then run our jobs and create our artifacts. Normally this is pretty simple when you have a server that sits at a public IP address on the internet. But th

5 tools to get started developing smart contracts on Ethereum

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:38:08 GMT

Ethereum changes pretty quickly in terms of developing environments. When I first started I just created my own private ethereum cluster and worked on that. Things have gotten a lot easier. Here's how you get started: Remix - This is your IDE or development environment. I've been using VIM and got a solidity VIM plugin as well. Remix is great because y

Sailing the seas of Crypto Currencies: Sharks and Landmines

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 14:08:32 GMT

I've been into Bitcoin and Crypto currencies now since late 2013. One of the fun things I did was back in 2015 was invest $100 (at the time) of Bitcoin into a presale funding project called Augur. The idea with Augur was to be a prediction market. It was one of the first of what has become known as ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) which are like IPOs but jus