Declaration of VAR

Resizing images with ImageMagick vs sips

For quite a some time I was using sips from standard Mac OS bundle to resize (mostly scale down) images. But I always had some suspicions about its results quality, so I decided to compare it with ImageMagick.

The figure above shows results of an image being scaled down to 100px width using both tools, and as you can see, ImageMagick conversion quality is better.

New Qt blog retarded design

Geniuses from Qt marketing team have (again) changed the website design. The blog now looks especially retarded:

I couldn’t tolerate this, so I wrote a custom CSS for Stylus.

Amazon, MXNet and Qt - The Great Robot Arm challenge

This February on the Embedded World 2019 event in Nuremberg The Qt Company had a joint demo together with Amazon - “The Great Robot Arm Challenge”.

If video doesn't play in your browser, you can download it here.

Amazon guys wrote a good article covering the deep-learning part. In turn, I wanted to tell about the Qt part.

NGINX, uWSGI and Python scripts

You have a static HTML page with a form on it. And you want this form to be processed by a Python script when submitted. And you serve your page with NGINX. To make all that work you will also need an application server such as uWSGI.

Let’s see, how it’s done.

The fuck is this CORS and how do I send my bloody request

So I was working on some web view and I needed to send an XMLHttpRequest using JS. Usually I was working with my own backend, but this time it was a different remote host (our YouTrack instance), and my request failed with the following error:

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://some.host?params=ololo. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing).
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://some.host?params=ololo. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).

That’s how I learnt about the existence of CORS, as it turned out I never sent cross-origin requests before.

Microsoft Azure AD authentication on your website

You might have wondered how to add the Microsoft sign-in to certain corporate websites inside your company (which are available from the internet) in order to restrict access to employees of your organization only.

At least I have, and it turned out to be not so difficult actually.

Players queue for Heroes of Might and Magic

It’s not like we at work don’t have things to do, but suddenly we decided to play Heroes of Might and Magic. So we created a virtual machine, installed the game and started a hot-seat game via RDP.

For notifying about next players turn we created a Slack channel. But soon enough it became annoying to announce next turns manually, so I created a simple web-application for that.

Barefaced phone scammers

I got a phone call the other day. The man on the other end told me (with a strong indian accent), that he is from “Computer Solutions” (or something). That already sounded fishy, but he also used my full name, which lowered my guard for a bit, so I did not hang up right away.

Right after “how are you” he said that according to their “systems” my computer is in danger, because, as they can “see”, there was some “hacking software” downloaded to my computer, and they will now help me to get rid of it.

Chunked upload to Twitter with C# / .NET Core

While images can be uploaded to Twitter in one request, uploading a video is a different story.

And although I’ve managed to implement it, I am not entirely happy with the result, and later you will see why is that.

DNB, communication and Face ID

Some more experience with norwegian bank DNB. In 2019.

In particular, about their implementation of Face ID, the way they do communication and other things.