The No Title^® Tech Blog

I recently stumbled upon a situation where I needed to quickly convert a Base64 string coming from a web api and save it into a file in disk in order to inspect its contents. Sure, I could have spun up a small program in C# or Python. But honestly, that felt like an overkill for what was essentially a one-off task. In the past I had used an online Base64 converter for a similar task, so it crossed my mind, but sharing potentially sensitive data with unknown third-party services didn’t feel right. So, I searched for an alternative. Surely, there had to be an simpler, more direct solution.

This time, we are releasing both Optimize Images and Optimize Images X at the same time. The original CLI version now uses temporary files with in-memory buffers, which prevents unnecessary I/O, and also displays more detailed and more useful version information. Optimize Images X, the GUI version, is now compatible with Python3.7+ and has the ability to open or preview a selected image.

So, just 3 days after the first public beta, here we got the second beta for Optimize Images X. It includes an important hot fix for Windows and Linux, and two new usability features.

Just for fun, this month I set myself to start a new Python project. It’s the same as Optimize Images, but with a big X and a nice graphical user interface. It wants to help you reduce the file size of images, and hopefully make your websites load faster.

You may wonder how I came up with this topic. I usually code in a graphical IDE like PyCharm or Visual Studio, or even a text editor like VS Code or BBEdit. But sometimes you need some lightweight application that is capable of opening and efficiently edit a file. I often return to VIM for quick edits in small files. Sometimes, just for the convenience of not leaving the shell. Other times, because it’s a powerful editor that runs perfectly under a SSH connection. And a few days ago, it was the only application I had installed on Windows which would let me open, navigate and read a several GB heavy text file without complaining.

If you’re a developer or a systems administrator, sooner or later you will meet that HUUUGE, GIANT, ENORMOUS file. A file that weights several gigabytes of more or less cryptic system or application logging messages, with no rotation scheme in place. Since log files are usually built by appending the most recent information to the end, probably you just need to check out the last 100 or 1000 lines, in order to find out why an application has crashed or failed to operate properly some seconds or a minute ago. Turns out that reading such huge files may not be as simple as editing them in Notepad. Probably, an application like that won’t even be able to the file. So, what else can you do?

One of these days, while setting up a couple of Linux virtual machines to test my Python applications, I was faced with a series of obstacles on CentOS 7 that I needed to overcome. Since this is the kind of issues that many other Python developers may encounter when setting up a Linux machine, I will share what I learned with this experience.

This is the tutorial I wish I had around some years ago, when I first tried to learn how to use Vim. If you’re just beginning to know this amazing text editor, please keep reading, I am writing this tutorial right for you!