This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

My Goal

I am applying to Canadian universities for fall admission as a CS major. This will be my second degree, and one of the requirements of getting admitted for a second degree is to show that you have a significant interest in the subject. My plan is to get online certificates to show that I am actually dedicated to learning CS and getting a job in the field. I am actually dedicated, I just need a way to show it on paper. I have some experience with software development (only the basics), but there aren't any records of it since it was just informal study.

My Problem

I can't decide which certificates I should pursue. I am torn between EdX and Udemy. I would Tilderinos' help in choosing between the two. I would also appreciate any general advice you may have.

Here are the courses I plan to take on EdX (prices in USD):

UBC's MicroMasters Program in
Software Development - $832

Harvard CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript - $199

IBM's Professional Certificate in
Cloud Application Development Foundations - $169

Here are the courses I plan to take on Udemy:

The Ultimate 2021 Fullstack Web Development Bootcamp - $15

The Complete 2021 Web Development Bootcamp - $15

The Ultimate MySQL Bootcamp: Go from SQL Beginner to Expert - $30

Angular - The Complete Guide (2021 Edition) - $15

Comparisons

To reiterate, I have two goals going into this. One is to actually learn web development, since I would like to become a fullstack developer (but my options are semi-open). The other is to prove to the Canadian universities that I am dedicated to learning and to give myself an edge over applicants.

If I go with EdX, then I have to pay a much steeper price for the certificates. These courses also take a long time to get through and the projects don't seem as relevant to real word applications. But I will also be learning from established institutions like Harvard and UBC. EdX certificates also come with the distinct advantage that a human is checking the problem sets you submit. This will show the Canadian universities that I have actually spent the time and effort to go through the courses and pass them.

If I go with Udemy, I will get through the courses in less time and their projects seem more related to real world projects. If I go through the courses faster, I will also have more time to start on some personal projects, and I can show my dedication to learning through those projects. Personal projects and also volunteer work will also help establish a resumé for future work. The courses on Udemy are a lot cheaper too. But they don't have the same level of verification or prestige that EdX does.

So in summary, EdX has prestige and quality courses, but a steep prices and a huge time commitment. Udemy is cheaper and gives me more opportunities to do personal projects and volunteer work, but it's certificates aren't fully trustworthy from the Canadian universities' perspective.

Final Words

What do you think? Which path should I take?

For those of you wondering, why I am going to university instead of a bootcamp, it's because I plan to immigrate to Canada and becoming a student seems the straightest way of getting PR. I need to leave my third world country as soon as I can, for mental health and economic reasons. I have been mostly unemployed ever since the pandemic started so I can't get work in Canada (or the U.S.) on my first degree (a management degree). I already tried that route. I can't find proper work here either.

Also, I am sorry if I posted in the wrong group, or if I shouldn't have posted it anywhere at all. I desperately need advice on what to do and I don't have a trustworthy network here that can help me through this. I'm sorry and thank you for your help.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

So, I'm a privacy advocate (or paranoiac, depending on your perspective). I run both uMatrix and NoScript plug-ins (among others) in my Firefox browser, so I can see when and where websites send calls out to other locations, and block the ones I want ... google analytics, google fonts, google-apis, google tag manager, and gstatic are all ubiquitous out there, probably 99% of websites use at least one of them (PS: Tildes is in the 1%; yeay, Deimos).

And note ... there may well be nothing at all wrong with any of those sites/services ... but Google has a global all-encompassing Terms and Conditions policy that says, you use anything of Theirs, and They are allowed to harvest your personal data and make money off of it.

And I do not accept those terms.

Okay, that's the prologue. The deal is, I have a small piece of documentation, just basic "how to use this" info, for a WordPress plug-in. It is in .html format, with bundled bootstrap and jquery and a few other assets.

Nothing, anywhere in the entire folder, references gstatic. And yet when I open this local, on-my-computer-only html file ... my browser tells me that it is trying to connect to gstatic.com.

Anyone happen to know why/how that is happening?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This below is a summary of some real-world performance investigation I recently went through. The tools I used are installed on all linux systems, but I know some people don't know them and would straight up jump to heavyweight log analysis services and what not, or writing their own solution.

Let's say you have request log sampling in a bunch of log files that contain lines like these:

127.0.0.1 [2021-05-27 23:28:34.460] "GET /static/images/flags/2/54@3x.webp HTTP/2" 200 1806 TLSv1.3 HIT-CLUSTER SessionID:(null) Cache:max-age=31536000
127.0.0.1 [2021-05-27 23:51:22.019] "GET /pl/player/123456/changelog/ HTTP/1.1" 200 16524 TLSv1.2 MISS-CLUSTER SessionID:(null) Cache:

You might recognize Fastly logs there (IP anonymized). Now, there's a lot you might care about in this log file, but in my case, I wanted to get a breakdown of hits vs misses by URL.

So, first step, let's concatenate all the log files with cat *.log > all.txt, so we can work off a single file.

Then, let's split the file in two: hits and misses. There are a few different values for them, the majority are covered by either HIT-CLUSTER or MISS-CLUSTER. We can do this by just grepping for them like so:

grep HIT-CLUSTER all.txt > hits.txt; grep MISS-CLUSTER all.txt > misses.txt

However, we only care about url and whether it's a hit or a miss. So let's clean up those hits and misses with cut. The way cut works, it takes a delimiter (-d) and cuts the input based on that; you then give it a range of "fields" (-f) that you want.

In our case, if we cut based on spaces, we end up with for example: 127.0.0.1 [2021-05-27 23:28:34.460] "GET /static/images/flags/2/54@3x.webp HTTP/2" 200 1806 TLSv1.3 HIT-CLUSTER SessionID:(null) Cache:max-age=31536000.

We care about the 5th value only. So let's do: cut -d" " -f5 to get that. We will also sort the result, because future operations will require us to work on a sorted list of values.

cut -d" " -f5 hits.txt | sort > hits-sorted.txt; cut -d" " -f5 misses.txt | sort > misses-sorted.txt

Now we can start doing some neat stuff. wc (wordcount) is an awesome utility, it lets you count characters, words or lines very easily. wc -l counts lines in an input, since we're operating with one value per line we can easily count our hits and misses already:

$ wc -l hits-sorted.txt misses-sorted.txt
  132523 hits-sorted.txt
  220779 misses-sorted.txt
  353302 total

220779 / 132523 is a 1:1.66 ratio of hits to misses. That's not great…

Alright, now I'm also interested in how many unique URLs are hit versus missed. uniq tool deduplicates immediate sequences, so the input has to be sorted in order to deduplicate our entire file. We already did that. We can now count our urls with uniq < hits-sorted.txt | wc -l; uniq < misses-sorted.txt | wc -l. We get 49778 and 201178, respectively. It's to be expected that most of our cache misses would be in "rarer" urls; this gives us a 1:4 ratio of cached to uncached URL.

Let's say we want to dig down further into which URLs are most often hitting the cache, specifically. We can add -c to uniq in order to get a duplicate count in front of our URLs. To get the top ones at the top, we can then use sort, in reverse sort mode (-r), and it also needs to be numeric sort, not alphabetic (-n). head lets us get the top 10.

$ uniq -c < hits-sorted.txt | sort -nr | head
    815 /static/app/webfonts/fa-solid-900.woff2?d720146f1999
    793 /static/app/images/1.png
    786 /static/app/fonts/nunito-v9-latin-ext_latin-regular.woff2?d720146f1999
    760 /static/CACHE/js/output.cee5c4089626.js
    758 /static/images/crest/3/light/notfound.png
    757 /static/CACHE/css/output.4f2b59394c83.css
    756 /static/app/webfonts/fa-regular-400.woff2?d720146f1999
    754 /static/app/css/images/loading.gif?d720146f1999
    750 /static/app/css/images/prev.png?d720146f1999
    745 /static/app/css/images/next.png?d720146f1999

And same for misses:

$ uniq -c < misses-sorted.txt | sort -nr | head
     56 /
     14 /player/237678/
     13 /players/
     12 /teams/
     11 /players/top/
<snip>

So far this tells us static files are most often hit, and for misses it also tells us… something, but we can't quite track it down yet (and we won't, not in this post). We're not adjusting for how often the page is hit as a whole, this is still just high-level analysis.

One last thing I want to show you! Let's take everything we learned and analyze those URLs by prefix instead. We can cut our URLs again by slash with cut -d"/". If we want the first prefix, we can do -f1-2, or -f1-3 for the first two prefixes. Let's look!

cut -d'/' -f1-2 < hits-sorted.txt | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
 100189 /static
   5948 /es
   3069 /player
   2480 /fr
   2476 /es-mx
   2295 /pt-br
   2094 /tr
   1939 /it
   1692 /ru
   1626 /de

cut -d'/' -f1-2 < misses-sorted.txt | uniq -c | sort -nr | head
  66132 /static
  18578 /es
  17448 /player
  17064 /tr
  11379 /fr
   9624 /pt-br
   8730 /es-mx
   7993 /ru
   7689 /zh-hant
   7441 /it

This gives us hit-miss ratios by prefix. Neat, huh?

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

On my desk I have two screens -- one off to the side for movies, TV, etc and my main in front. Sometimes I find myself wanting subtitles on my main screen. The main issue I've found, at least with macOS, is that the SRT players suck.

I figured, why not just generate a tiny black video with embedded subtitles?

ffmpeg -i subs.srt -t 3:00:00 -s 40x10 -f rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb24 -r 25 -i /dev/zero subs.mpeg

Set the ratio to be super small without being too small. This video is 40px by 10px and the video only takes a few seconds to generate. For me, this generated at ~850x speed.

From there, jack up the subtitle font size and shift it up a little bit so nothing gets cut off. This also works really well with tiling window managers.

Screenshot

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I'm setting up a server with nextcloud, plex, matrix and some other things I don't yet know, for some friends and family, (about 20 people if I get lucky)
and now I heard of a thing called single sign on/unified login. (Login to different services with the same user/pw and/or login once, access to all services)

so far I found out about Keycloak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keycloak

is this what I'm looking for? does anybody have experience in this? Are there other/better/simpler solutions for this?

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?