Including qrencode generated QR codes in a PDF using prawn / ruby

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I’m porting an old app into docker, and trying to avoid using stuff where the end of life has been and gone so I’ve updated ruby, and the version of linux they were using. And now I find that reason prawn doesn’t render qrencode generated QR codes any more. I think it might be because qrencode adds an alpha channel to the border of the png.

Install imagemagick and inspect a qrencode png which doesn’t work:

Colorspace: sRGB
...
Background color: white
Border color: srgba(223,223,223,1)
Matte color: grey74
Transparent color: none

Whereas if run the same png through imagemagick with convert test.png newtest.png:

Colorspace: Gray
...
Background color: gray(255)
Border color: gray(223)
Matte color: gray(189)
Transparent color: gray(0)

Causes newtest.png to render in your prawn pdf.

Coronavirus hits Oslo

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I’ve been meaning to post about some of the strange things in this country – one of them is how they have a hairdresser on every corner. I mean, within a 5 minute walk from my flat there are at least 4 I can think of, probably more. B and I get uneasy if we don’t see one on a street we’re walking through “Are we still in Norway??” we say to each other in mock alarm.

Anyway, so I got an email from my work (the University of Oslo) explaining it was stopping all physical lectures and lessons – ‘fine, probably sensible’ I think. Get told we are cancelling our international workshops and that all the schools in the country are closing – ‘oof, but still it’s probably necessary’, you know? But you know things are serious when they close the hairdressers, which is apparently the latest measure. Yikes!

A series of peculiar things that I’ve seen Norwegians put their children into

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  • A carrier attached behind a bike, this one most often hurtling along on busy roads
  • An attachment to a weird sort of carriage thing
  • A carrier attached to the front of a bike
  • A skateboard which attaches to a pram
  • A sort of wheelbarrow / bike hybrid
  • A sleigh thing on skis, looks lovely and cosy in there

I’ll add to these when I spot more of them out in the wild.

18 degrees C: Cape Town (left, winter) vs Oslo (right, summer)

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Yesterday it hit 18 in Oslo, and as is completely usual here everyone around me threw off their clothes, stripped down to their underwear and spreadeagled themselves in the sun (yes when it first happened I was extremely surprised). I should have taken a photo of myself too – I was wearing jeans and a fleece and got some very funny looks. Anyway, a few hours later a friend of mine in Cape Town sent me a message complaining of how cold the winter was. I checked yr.no and CT was 1 degree warmer! There’s a lot of variation in body’s tolerance of heat/cold I suppose.

The frozen North

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I don’t like posting personal things on this blog, but I’ve had one of the most stomach droppingly horrible times of my life in the past few months, and I am struggling to put into words everything I want to express. I sort of feel like I should write something. I’ve had this blog since I was a teenager and I regret not having written something about the most momentous events in my life which have happened since then. But I just don’t seem to be able to, I’m not one of nature’s tweeters or bloggers. So instead I’m posting a couple of pictures, and they’ll have to stand in for everything I want to say about sadness, love, isolation, the spirit of adventure and restlessness.

Serverless User: arn:aws:iam::etc is not authorized to perform: dynamodb:PutItem on resource

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When following the serverless tutorial here I got an error message which was really hard to debug. Running the following:

AWS_PROFILE=rukaya serverless invoke local --function create --path mocks/create-event.json --aws-profile rukaya

gave an error message like this: “User: [some ARN] is not authorized to perform: dynamodb:PutItem on resource”.

I set up a role for my user, I gave the role almost every permission under the sun, I gave the user account itself the permissions directly, but no joy.

I have two aws accounts set up on this machine – one for my personal stuff and one for work. The personal one is called ‘rukaya’, the work one has my company’s name in it. It took me quite a while to explicitly check the arn number realise that AWS was using my work account even though I was setting AWS_PROFILE and using –aws-profile in the serverless command.

The reason serverless was ignoring my commands is not because it hates me (my theory for the past half hour), but because I had forgotten I was setting AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=worksecret and AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=workkeyid in my environment variables for a script. Unsetting that sorted the problem. It’s pretty silly that your environment variables override your explicit commands, but *shrug*.

Anyway, nobody else on the internet seems to have had this issue so perhaps I’m the first, but I’m posting this on the off chance someone else encounters this.

Automate screenshot scraping with watir and ruby

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require 'watir'

def resize_browser(browser)
 height = browser.execute_script("return Math.max(document.body.scrollHeight, document.body.offsetHeight, document.documentElement.clientHeight, document.documentElement.scrollHeight, document.documentElement.offsetHeight);")
 browser.window.resize_to(1200, height)
end

# Load from external csv
app_ids = [41109, 41110, 41112]
browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome, headless: true
app_dir = 'apps' 
FileUtils.rm_rf(app_dir) if Dir.exist?(app_dir) 
Dir.mkdir(app_dir)

app_ids.each do |app_id|
 dir = "#{app_dir}/#{app_id}"
 Dir.mkdir(dir)
 
 tabs = ['one', 'two', 'three'] 
 tabs.each do |tab|
 browser.element(:css, "div[data-tab='#{tab}']").click
 resize_browser(browser)
 browser.screenshot.save("#{dir}/#{tab}.png")
 end
end

browser.close

Cancelling Telkom

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Oh frabjous day! I’ve managed to find an internet provider which isn’t ADSL, which means I can finally ditch Telkom. Oh Telkom, it’s crazy but ringing you up every two or three days to complain about slow/dropping internet just isn’t my idea of fun.

Trying to cancel your account with them is just as much of a headache as being with them though! If you ring them up to cancel they tell you that you have to do it online, and when you log into the new self service panel that they have there isn’t an option to cancel it. If you hunt around for ages you can find something to move your line, but that’s not much help now is it!

Then I googled how to do it and found this:
https://secure.telkom.co.za/today/media/downloads/Retention_Cancellation__Three_easy_ways_to_cancel_online_V1.pdf

“Three easy steps” – my left foot! Once you’ve spent the prerequisite 3 or 4 minutes hunting around their badly designed site for the right menu options you’ll get to the service page. There they’ve not named the services things like “landline” and “adsl”, but random things that you have to just do your best guess at. Secondly their website doesn’t actually work properly, half of the select dropdowns are obscured because their CSS is shit. And thirdly… check this out:
Screen Shot 2018-06-01 at 18.28.46

 

If you’re the business owner you have to upload your ID, and if you’re dead you have to upload a certificate to prove it. However, I am neither a business owner nor dead (I checked my pulse and everything). What to do? If you click continue the validation kicks in and you get told you must upload something. And so I uploaded a png with my ID on one half, and a picture of my cat with the caption “ALERT! CAT STEALING OWNER’S IDENTITY!” on the other. That should give them a bit of excitement. Half an hour after I set out to cancel my account I felt relief, happiness and satisfaction finally when I clicked submit, marred by the barely civil message on the next screen informing me that  my service is not cancelled and they have to ring me to confirm cancellation. Bet they don’t, the bastards.

Stop a minute though. Did any of that make sense?

But I mean, do you really need your ID to cancel services if you’re logged in using Telkom credentials on their own secure platform? Especially when apparently it isn’t cancelled and they have to ring you to confirm before they cancel? Ooh don’t get me started on how annoying that is – why can’t you just cancel it over the phone in the first place then?

But to go back to the point at hand: do people go around hacking people’s Telkom credentials and then, like, cancelling their service?? That doesn’t sound quite right. If I was bad and had illegal access to someone’s Telkom account I’d use it to make MORE accounts for myself, not cancel current ones. Surely???

It’s almost like Telkom just wants to make it difficult enough for people to cancel so that they don’t bother and give in and just carry on paying for the shitty service that they don’t use. But I’m sure those little angels of amazing customer service wouldn’t be doing that now, would they?

Of course, I could always just not pay my bill 🙂

Django on IIS ValueError at [url]: underlying buffer has been detached

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I got a similar error message to this stackoverflow post while running Django on IIS (also forced to do it because of organisational constraints):

ValueError at [url]
underlying buffer has been detached

This error was getting triggered because I had committed a pdb.set_trace() without noticing. It’s a weird one to track down because the page will seem to load normally at first, and then navigating to a subpage will cause the error. Anyway I hope this post helps someone, because googling comes up with f-all helpful.

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin

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I thought this book was absolutely brilliant. There were several themes I found really interesting, but for me the book was primarily about freedom (and how suffering/pain is a part of freedom) vs locked rooms and building walls. Trump’s literal wall makes a great metaphor if you need to explain to somebody why this book is still relevant over 40 years after its debut.
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