Today as I was finishing my Go+SvelteKit article, I ran into frustrating
Chrome error message:
Failed to load module script: Expected a JavaScript module script but the
server responded with a MIME type of "text/plain". Strict MIME type checking
is enforced for module scripts per HTML spec.
Don't you just love Chrome? It knows what it needs to do (load a JavaScript
module), but utterly refuses to do that because of a wrong MIME type. This
happened with a client-side SvelteKit application, when it tried to open some
part of the .js code.
At the time of writing, it seemed I could not find the answer easily to this
one, but there actually seems to be a StackOverflow solution discussing
this. But to help others hitting the same issue:
The problem on my Windows install was likely that Windows 10 registry did not
contain a MIME type definition for .js files. Informing user how to tweak
registry to get your program working is not ideal, but thankfully you can
augment the mime types:
import "mime"func main() { // Windows may be missing this mime.AddExtensionType(".js", "application/javascript") // And then you create the FileServer like you normally would http.Handle("/", http.FileServer(http.Dir("static")))}
After adding the mime fix, remember to force reload Chrome page (hold Control key down while you press refresh), otherwise the problem persists as Chrome does not
really bother reloading the offending files.
I've had an iPad Pro 12.9" for some time, and been happily using it for sheet
music when playing the piano. However, having to interrupt your playing to
swipe to the next page does get annoying. You can get a $100 commercial
AirTurn pedal,
but since one can get a microcontroller from Ebay/Aliexpress for $4 and a
simple foot pedal switch
for $2, I thought it would be a fun one evening hacking project. It turned out
quite nice:
Getting started: ESP32 devkit
The sheet music applications on iPad (and Android) usually have
bluetooth keyboard support, turning the page when user presses an
arrow key or spacebar. So the minimum viable product is just a
bluetooth-enabled microcontroller that can pair with the iPad and
send a single key upon request.
The ESP32 chip has both WiFi and Bluetooth, and I chose it for this project, as
it is readily available in a compact form factor, and it's easy to program with
Arduino. Searching [AliExpress](https://www.aliexpress.com for ESP32 should
give you plenty of options.
I had a ESP32 board labelled with "ESP32 DEVKITV1" in my parts box, and it was
quite easy to set up with this ESP32
tutorial:
Install the driver for USB-UART bridge
Add source URLs for ESP32 to Arduino and install ESP32 support
Select "DOIT ESP32 DEVKIT" from the board menu
Hold down "Boot" button on the board while selecting "Upload",
release when the console says "Connecting..."
Before you proceed with the tutorial, check that you can get the
lights blinking or flash some other example code successfully for
the board. There are plenty of resources around if you hit into
any issues! I had to google the step 4 myself, although it would
have sufficed to read the linked tutorial carefully...
A while ago I updated my site to
Eleventy.js. This improved
my blogging process considerably, as Markdown is quick to write,
and especially code samples are easy to copy-paste without any escaping.
I put all my posts into one Github repository. Using Visual Studio
Code, I get nice realtime preview, and once I'm
done, I just git commit, git push on my computer, and git pull on the
server, and regenerate the site with Eleventy.
Now only issue is that one usually finds 5-10 things to change after every
post, and while VS Code has great git support built in, even the simple update
process gets a bit tedious with commands being run on SSH side. So I started
wondering if I could use the Github
webhooks
to automate the regeneration. Turns out: YES.
Simple Script to Pull Markdown from Github and Regenerate
First component is of course a small shell script to automate the git pull and
regeneration. One could do a more elaborate one, but this worked for me server-side:
#!/bin/shcd ~/myblog_post # here are the .md filesgit pullcd ~/myblog_eleventy # here's the 11ty site generatornpx @11ty/eleventy --input=. --output=../apps/myblog_static # hosting dir
Node.js Mini-Server for Github Webhooks
Next, I needed to set up a web server that would get the HTTP POST from
Github whenever I push changes. Here your configuration will depend on
hosting you have, but Opalstack for example
has simple installation of a Node.js application. I usually disable the
automatic restarting (crontab -e etc.), use ./stop script and run my server manually for a while to see everything works, before restoring the crontab.
If you choose to forego Github webhook security mechanisms, the code is really
simple, but in that case, anyone knowing the addess of your server can flood
you with fake push requests. So let's take the high road and use this gist to
verify Github hooks! I chose to use Polka so I needed to modify
the headers part of the code just a bit:
const { exec } = require("child_process");const polka = require('polka');const { json } = require('body-parser');const crypto = require('crypto')const port = 12345;const secret = 'ohreally :)';const sigHeaderName = 'x-hub-signature-256';const sigHashAlg = 'sha256';// Middleware to verify Github "signed" POST requestfunction verifyPostData(req, res, next) { console.log('Verifying signature', req.headers[sigHeaderName]); if (!req.rawBody) { console.log('Request body empty'); return next('Request body empty'); } const sig = Buffer.from(req.headers[sigHeaderName] || '', 'utf8'); const hmac = crypto.createHmac(sigHashAlg, secret); const digest = Buffer.from(sigHashAlg + '=' + hmac.update(req.rawBody).digest('hex'), 'utf8'); if (sig.length !== digest.length || !crypto.timingSafeEqual(digest, sig)) { console.log('Got request with invalid body digest'); return next(`Request body digest (${digest}) did not match ${sigHeaderName} (${sig})`); } console.log('Verification done.'); return next()}polka() .use(json({ verify: (req, res, buf, encoding) => { // Store raw body data in req rawBody variable if(buf && buf.length) req.rawBody = buf.toString(encoding || 'utf8'); } })) .get('/', (req, res) => { res.end('Hello, polka!'); }) // just for testing .post('/myblog', verifyPostData, (req, res) => { console.log('Article repo updated, generating site...'); exec('~/blog_eleventy/gen.sh', (error, stdout, stderr) => { if(error) console.log(`error: ${error.message}`); if(stderr) console.log(`stderr: ${stderr}`); console.log(`stdout: ${stdout}`); }); res.end(`Hello, Github!`); }) .listen(port, () => { console.log(`> Running on localhost:${port}`); });
Continuing from my Project Euler Problem
1,
here are the next two Euler problems and some reflection!
Project Euler Problem 2
The second problem asks to find the sum
of even Fibonacci numbers
numbers below four million. For procedural languages, this is quite walk in the
park, but for me a concise method to produce the series in Clojure proved a bit
of a brain nugget!
Python 3
For Python, I decided to make a simple generator that yields the Fibonacci
numbers below a given treshold N. Rest is just list comprehension:
def fib(N): i, j = 0, 1 while j < N: yield(j) i, j = j, i+jprint(sum(i for i in fib(4e6) if i%2==0))
C++
In C++ it's natural to just loop with a conditional addition. This
time I decided to drop using namespace std; to save a few characters.
Without i, j = j, i+j syntax, the temporary variable ij is a bit ugly.
#include <iostream>int main() { int i=0, j=1, s=0; while(j<4000000) { if(j%2==0) s += j; int ij = i + j; i = j; j = ij; } std::cout << s << std::endl;}}
Javascript
Here I could go either way, towards the Python list comprehension or C++
loop. Since generators are part of JS, I chose to try them out!
function *fib(N) { let i=0, j=1; while(j < N) { yield j; [i, j] = [j, i+j]; }}console.log([...fib(4e6)].reduce((a,b) => a + b*(1-b%2), 0));
I combined the sum and conditional using reduce. Note that b*(1-b%2)
evaluates to zero for off values of b!
Clojure
In Clojure, I wanted really to avoid just looping with while to get a feel
of the different ways to generate the Fibonacci numbers. There are
many ways to do it, including recursion (which gets really slow unoptimized)
and lazy-catsolution
that really eluded comprehension, until I realized that with lazy sequences,
you can do (map + s (rest s)) and items are pulled from the linked list
just in time to construct the next item.
I've long thought about learning
Lisp. Some time
ago I ran across Clojure and the map, set and
vector implementations felt like a modern addition. It's running on top of
JVM which is nice in
a sense, but a major pain in the ass when installing. Well, I swallowed my
wow to never install JDK again and got Clojure running quite painlessly.
To learn the ropes, I thought it would be a fun idea to rewrite Project
Euler problems 1-10 with Clojure to see how
it would compare against my language of choice for these types of algorithmic
problems, Python.
Just to make it more fun, I decided to implement them in my second favorite
language, Javascript as well. Since ECMAScript
9,
it's actually a pretty powerful and concise language, and coupling it with
Node.js unleashes some serious usage options outside
just web pages. Npm dependency hell sucks, but that's a topic for another post.
For more bare metal, I'm also doing C++ (basically sticking to C functionality
until maps and sets make themselves useful). Let's see how the languages stack up!
Project Euler Problem 1
The first problem in Project Euler is simple, add up numbers below 1000 that
are divisible with either 3 or 5 (or both). Modulo operator % can be used
to get the remainder of a number when divided by 3 and 5, and basically we
add all numbers that have either modulo as zero.
Python 3
With Python, the most concise implementation is to use the sum(iterable) and
a list comprehension, netting us a nice one-liner:
print(sum(i for i in range(1000) if i%3==0 or i%5==0))
After Angular, React.js and Vue, svelte is the new and
cool kid on the block. I have to admit, the compile-to-plain-javascript
philosophy is nice, and what is especially cool is the fact that with
Rollup.js you can easily bundle a svelte
app into easy-to-embed component.
I wanted to make a simple embeddable Svelte component for a friend of mine,
that would be as simple as possible to include in a blog post, web site or
similar with just:
The script should ideally just put the component in the same place. Turns out
this is really easy with Svelte. Let's dive in!
Setting up Svelte
You may want to read more about
rollup-plugin-svelte and
Making an app from excellent
Svelte tutorial to get more familiar with the tools used here, as I'll only
cover the bare essentials.
First you need to install the necessary plugins. We'll start with Rollup and
install it globally so you can just use rollup command to do things. If
you want, you can also install rollup
locally.
I initially got an error saying something about imports and after a bit of
googling found out that my Ubuntu version of node was very old (node -v
outputted 8.x.x when 10+ was needed) – if you encounter the same issue,
upgrade to a newer node (nvm is a great too to
do this).
Next make a product directory and install svelte and rollup-plugin-svelte:
We'll go really barebones with this tutorial, just a simple heading and a
paragraph. Create a Svelte component Embed.svelte:
<script>export let name; // from props</script><h1>Hello, {name}!</h1><p>This component was brought to you by <a href="https://codeandlife.com/">Code & Life</a>.</p>
Then we'll need a simple .js script to import that our mini-component and
inject it to the DOM of whatever page has included the resulting script.
Let's call this embed.js: