Another shiny new MacBook pro

See https://slott-softwarearchitect.blogspot.com/2014/03/shiny-new-macbook-pro.html

At the time (2014), the 8Gb machine was way more than adequate for all my needs as a writer.

Enter bloat.

Mac OS Catalina has essentially filled this machine to the breaking point. Six short years is the lifespan. Things (generally) work, but it now crashes frequently. Sometimes, streaming TV won't play properly. I've tried a large number of remedies (reboot WiFi, reboot computer, reset Bluetooth) and it glitches too offten to be comfortable.

(Rumors suggest the crashes seem to be associated with going to sleep. The machine crashes when it's idle. I come back to it and find it has restarted, and needs to restart my apps. It's not horrible. But it's an indication of a deeper problem. And it's time.)

It works. But. I've spent too many years waiting for slow computers and slow networks. An hour a day (cumulative) for 300 days a year for 40 years means I've spent 1.3 years of my life waiting for a computer to do something.

I’m reluctantly replacing my kind-of-working "Late 2013" vintage machine with a new 13” MacBook Pro. At least 16Gb RAM. At least a terabyte of storage. Hopefully, things will not be "glitchy" and I won't have constant crashes.

I’ve gotten used to having an 27" Thunderbolt Display, and a USB Querkywriter keyboard, and two USB disks doing backups. That's a lot of stuff plugged in all the time. Also. I really need a slot for SD cards (the boat uses micro SD cards, as does the old GoPro camera.). So. A fancy USB-C hub will be essential, I think.

The question is 2 ports (power and hub) or 4 ports (power, hub, and two other things)?  I suspect I can live with 2 ports.  4 ports ships immediately.

I have several use cases:

• Writing Python books (e.g. Modern Python Cookbook 2e, https://www.packtpub.com/product/modern-python-cookbook-second-edition/9781800207455)
• Writing fiction. (Still editing second drafts, don’t hold your breath)
• Creating a MicroPython (or Arduino) device to track my boat’s position and act as an alarm if the anchor drags
• Boating (in a vague, general way)

Writing books actually requires some computing power. But. Not *too* much power. The general reader doesn’t always have a huge computer. If my examples require more computing power than my readers have access to, that’s a problem. The advantage of having a smallish computer is I’m not overstepping what’s available to my readers. This is a handy way to take a tax deduction to pay for this extravagance.

Writing fiction requires a small machine. Scrivener works on an iPad Pro. I’m good with almost anything. Even an iPhone can be used for writing and editing fiction. It’s hard, of course, with a tiny screen. But not impossible. And. I'm trying to learn the craft, so tools aren't as important as understanding character arc.

Creating MicroPython-based devices is a bit confusing right now. A lot of the development environments depend on a reliable USB connectivity to the Arduino or Circuit Playground Express board. I worry about the (potential) complexity of introducing a USB hub into the mix.  I suspect I only need to replace some of my USB cables; the Arduino boards all seem to use a bulky USB type B. The CPX use USB type Micro B. (I thinks one can be replaced with a USB C to USB B “printer cable”, the other is a USB microB to C adapter. Or, maybe a USB C to USB A adapter can be used with my vast collection of legacy cables. Don't know.)

Boating involves connecting external devices like the GPS antenna to the laptop and tracking position or planning routes. This is a Bluetooth thing, generally. 

It does require considerable power for the laptop; the 60W power brick becomes a constraint. The boat have an inverter and can handle the load gracefully. A computer is a dedicated 5A draw, though; twice what the fridge pulls (and the fridge runs infrequently.) We have 225Ah available. The computer could be as bad as 120Ah if it was left on for 24 hours during an overnight passage.

The good news is that the use cases are more-or-less exclusive. The boating use case is rare. We have more thrifty navigation systems permanently installed on the boat. Many folks are using CPX and Arduino’s with MacBook Pro’s, so I shouldn’t worry too much, just buy new cables.

The best part?

Since I use Time Machine, the new machine recovers from the Time Machine backups. It has to be left to run overnight, but. Boom. Done.

(On the to-do list -- encrypt the backup volumes. Ugh. But. Necessary.)

Modern Python Cookbook 2e -- Out with the old

 Most of the things that got cut were (to me) obviously obsolete. For example, replacing collections.namedtuple with typing.NamedTuple seemed like a clear example of obsolete. A reviewer really thought I should skip all NamedTuple and use frozen data classes. 

More important are some things that I learned about in my formative years. I think they're important because they'll little nuggets of cool algorithm. But. Pragmatically? They're too hard to explain and don't really capture interesting features of Python.

Back in '01. Yes. The turn of the millennium. 

(Pull up a chair. This is a long yarn.)

Back in '01, I was starting to look at ways to perfect my Python and literate programming skills.

(And yes, I was using Python on '01.)

I had a project that I'd learned about in the 80's. That's in the previous millennium. A thousand years ago. Computers were large, expensive, and rare.

And. Random Number Generators (RNG's) were a bit of a struggle. In the 80's, more sensitive statistical methods were uncovering biases in the RNG's of the day. Back in the 70's, Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Seminumerical Algorithms had covered this topic pretty well. But. Not quite well enough for language libraries or OS's to offer really solid RNG's.

(The popular Mersenne Twister algorithm dates from '97.)

One of my co-workers at the time showed me a technical report that I have no real bibliographic information for. I read it, captivated, because it described -- in detail -- Knuth's statistical tests for random number generators. 

This lead me to Knuth Volume 2. 

This lead me to implement *all* of this in Pascal (in the '80's.)

This lead me to implement *all* of this in Python (in the '00's.)

There were 10 tests. Each is a tidy little algorithm with a tidy little implementation that can run on a big collection of data to ascertain how random it is. 

1. Frequency Test - develops frequency distribution of individual samples.
2. Serial Test - develops frequency distribution of pairs of samples.
3. Gap Test - develops frequency distribution of the length of gaps between groups samples in a given range.
4. Poker Test - develops frequency distribution for 5-card "hands" of samples over a small (16-value) domain.
5. Coupon Collector's Test - develops frequency distribution for lengths of subsets that contain a complete set of values from a small (8-value) domain.
6. Permutation Test - develops frequency distribution for the permutations of ordering of 4-sample selections.
7. Runs Up Test - develops frequency distribution for lengths of "runs up" where each value is larger than the previous value; one variation covers the case where runs are statistically dependent.
8. Runs Up Test with independent runs and a relatively large domain.
9. Runs Up Test with a "small domain", that has a slightly different expected distribution.
10. Maximum of T - develops frequency distribution for the largest value in a group of T values.
11. Serial Correlation - computes the correlation coefficient between adjacent pairs of values.

What's important here is that we're gaging the degree of randomness of a collection of samples. All of these are core data science. Finding a truly random random number generator is the same as looking at a variable and seeing that it's too random to have any predictive value. This is the Type I Error problem.

Doing this with RNG's means starting with a specific seed. Which means we need to run this for a large number of seed values and compare the results. Lots of computer cycles can be burned up examining random number generators.

Lots.

The frequency test, for example. We bin the numbers and compare the frequencies. They aren't the same; they're within a few standard deviations of each other. That means you don't use 5 bins. You use 128 bins so you can compare the bin sizes to the expected bin size and compute a deviation. The deviation for expected needs to pass a chi-squared test.

Back in the day, chi-squared values were looked up in the back of a handy statistics book. 

That seems weak. Can we compute the exact chi-squared values?  

(Spoiler alert, Yes.)

Computing expected chi-squared values means computing Sterling numbers, Bernoulli numbers, and evaluating the partial gamma function. Knuth gives details on Sterling numbers. I have no reference material on Bernoulli numbers. 

The Log Gamma function is ACM collected algorithms (CALGO) number 291 and 309. The incomplete gamma function is CALGO 435 and 654.

Fascinating stuff. 

To me.

Of this, only one thing ever saw the light of day.

The Coupon Collector's test. Given a long sequence composed of selections from a small pool of distinct values ("coupons"), how many samples from the overall sequence do you have to examine to collect one of each distinct coupon value? This yields a kind of Poisson distribution of the number of samples seen before getting a full set of coupons.

If there's eight kinds of coupons, the smallest number of samples we have to examine is eight. Lucky break. One of each and done. But. Pragmatically, we'll see a distribution that varies from a low of 8 to a high of -- well -- infinity. We'll see a peak at like 15 to 18 samples before collecting all eight coupons and a long, long tail. We can cut the tail at 40 samples and have a statistically useful distribution to discern of the source samples were randomly ordered.

Why did this -- of all things -- see the light of day?

It involves set manipulations.

def collect_coupons(samples: Iterable[int]) -> Iterator[int]:

    while True:

        coupons = set()

        count = 0

        for u in samples: 

            coupons |= u

            count += 1

            if len(set(coupons)) == 8:

                break

        yield count

I've used a number of variations on the above theme to use set manipulation to accumulate data.  There are a lot of ways to restate this using itertools, also. It can be viewed as a clever "reduce" algorithm.

But.

It's so hard to explain. And. It's not really used much by data scientists to reject type I errors because few things fit the coupon model very well.

But. 

It's a cool set processing example.

So.

It's safely out of the book. 

Modern Python Cookbook Journey

For the author, a book is a journey.  

Writing something new, the author describes a path the reader can follow to get from -- well -- anywhere the reader might be to the author's suggested destination. Not everyone makes the whole trip. And not everyone arrives at the hoped-for destination.

Second editions? The idea is to update the directions to reflect the new terrain.  

I'm a sailor. Here's a view of the boat.

What's important to me is the way the authorities produce revised nautical charts on a stable, regular cadence. There's no "final" chart, there's only the "current" chart. Kept up-to-date by the patient hard work of armies of cartographers. 

Is updating a book like updating the nautical charts? I don't think so. Charts have a variety of update cadences.  For sailors in the US, we start here: https://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/charts/chart-updates.html. The changes can be frequent. See https://distribution.charts.noaa.gov/weekly_updates/ for the weekly chart updates. This is supplemented by the Notices to Mariners, here, too: https://msi.nga.mil/NTM. So, I think charts are much, much more complex than books.

Sailors have to integrate a lot of data.  This is no different from software developers having to keep abreast of language, library, and platform changes.

The author's journey is different from the reader's journey. A technical book isn't a memoir. 

The author may have crashed into all kinds of rocks and shoals. The author's panic, fear, and despair are not things the reader needs to know about. The reader needs to know the course to set, the waypoints, and hazards. The estimated distances and the places to anchor that provide shelter.

For me, creating a revision is possibly as difficult as the initial writing. I don't know how other authors approach subsequent editions, but the addition of type hints meant every example had to be re-examined.  And this meant discovering problems in code that I *thought* was exemplary. 

While many code examples can simply have type hints pasted in, some Python programming practices have type hints that can't be trivially introduced to the code. Instead some thinking is required.

Generics

Python code is always generic with respect to type. Expressions like a + b will work for a surprisingly wide variety of object classes. Of course, we expect any of the numbers to work. But lists, tuples, and strings all respond to the "+" operator. This is implemented by a sophisticated check of a's __add__() and b's __radd__() methods.

When we write hints, it's often intended to narrow the domain of potential types. Here's some starting code.

def fact(a):

   if a == 0:

       return 1

   return a*fact(a-1)

The implied type hint is Any. This means, any class of objects that defines __eq__(), __mul__() and __sub__() will work. There are a fair number of these classes.

When we write type hints, we narrow the domain. In this case, it should be integers. Like this:

def fact(a: int) -> int:

    if a == 0:

        return 1

    return a*fact(a-1)

This tells mypy (or other, similar analytic tools) to confirm that every place the fact() function is used, the arguments will be integers. Also, the result will be an integer.

What's important is there's no run-time consequence to this. Python runs the same whether we evaluate fact(2) or fact(3.0).  The integer-based computation clearly matches the intent stated in the code. The floating-point computation is clearly at odds with the stated intent.

And this brings us to the author's journey.

Shoal Water

Sometimes we have code that works. And will always work. But. The type hints are hard to express.

The most common examples?

Decorators.

Decorators can be utterly and amazingly generic. And this can make it very, very difficult to express the domain of types involved.

def make_a_log(some_function: Callable) -> Callable:

    @wraps(some_function)

    def concrete_function(*args, **kwargs):

        print(some_function, args, kwargs)

        result = some_function((*args, **kwargs)

        print(result)

    return concrete_function

This is legal, but very shady Python. The use of the Callable type hint is almost intentionally misleading. It could be anything. Indeed, because of the way Python works, it can truly be any kind of function or method. Even a lambda object can be decorated with this. 

The internal concrete_function doesn't have any type hints. This forces mypy to assume Any, and that will lead to a possibly valid application of this decorator when -- perhaps -- it wasn't really appropriate.

In the long run, this kind of misleading hinting is a bad policy.

In the short run, this code will pass every unit test you can throw at it.

What does the author do?

1. Avoid the topic? Get something published and move on? It is simpler and quicker to ignore decorators when talking about type hints. Dropping the section from the outline would have been easy.
2. Dig deeply into how we can create Protocols to express a narrower domain of candidates for this decorator? This is work. And it's new work, since the previous edition never touched on the subject. But. Is it part of this cookbook? Or do these deeper examples belong in a separate book?
3. Find a better example? 

Spoiler Alert: It's all three.

I start by wishing I hadn't broached the topic in the first edition. Maybe I should pretend it wasn't there and leave it out of the second edition.

Then I dig deeply into the topic, overwriting the topic until I'm no longer sure I can write about it. There's enough, and there's too much. A journey requires incremental exposition, and the side-trip into Protocols may not be the appropriate path for any but a very few readers.

After this, I may decide to throw the example out and look for something better.  What's important is having an idea of what is appropriate for the reader's journey, and what is clutter.

The final result can be better because it can be:

• Focused on something useful.
• Any edge cases can be corrected to work with the latest language, library, and mypy release.
• Where necessary, replaced by an alternative example that's clearer and simpler.

Unfortunately (for me) I examine everything. Every word. Every example.

Packt seems to be tolerant of my slow pace of delivery. For me, it simply takes a long time to rewrite -- essentially -- everything. I think the result is worth all the work.

Modern Python Cookbook 2nd ed -- Advance Copies -- DM me

This is your "why wait" invitation.

Advanced copies will be available.  

IF.

And this is a big "if".

You have to write a blurb. 

I'll be putting you in contact with Packt marketing folks who will get you your advanced copy so you can write blurbs and reviews and -- well -- actually use the content.

It's all updated to Python 3.8. Type hints almost everywhere. F-strings and the walrus operator. Bunches of devops and data science examples. Plus a few personal examples involving sailboat navigation and management.

See me at LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-lott-029835/ and I'll hook you up with Packt marketing folks.

See https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Python-Cookbook-Updated-programmer/dp/180020745X for the official Amazon Book Link. This is for ordinary "no obligation to write a review" orders.

DM me directly slott56 at gmail to be put into the marketing spreadsheet.

Over-Solving or Solving Problems You Don't Have

Sometimes we call them "Belt and Braces" solutions. As a former suspenders person who switched to belts, the idea of wearing both is a little like over-engineering. In the unlikely event of catastrophic failure of one system, your pants can still remain properly hoist. There's a weird, but defensible reason for that. Most over-engineering lacks a coherent reason. 

Sometimes we call them "Bells and Whistles." The solution has both bells and whistles for signaling. This is usually used in a derogatory sense of useless noisemakers, there for show only. Again, there's a really low-value and dumb, but defensible reason for this. 

While colorful, none of this is helpful for describing over-engineered software. Over-engineered software is often over-engineered for incoherent and indefensible reasons.

Over-engineering generally means trying to solve a problem that no user actually has. This leads to throwing around irrelevant features.

Concrete Example

I lived on a boat. I spent a fair amount of time fretting over navigation. 

There are two big questions: 

1. How far apart are two points, really. 
2. What's the real bearing from one point to another.

These are -- in some cases -- easy to answer.

If you have a printed, paper chart at the right scale, you can use dividers to compute a distance. It's actually a very easy task. Similarly, you can read the bearing off the chart directly. There's a trick to comparing a course to a nearby compass rose, but it's easy to learn and very accurate.

Of course, we don't want to painstakingly copy our notes from a paper chart to a spreadsheet to add them up to get total distance. And then fold in speed to get time and fuel consumption. These summary computations are a pain.

What you want is to do all of this with a computer.

1. Plot the points using a piece of software like OpenCPN (https://opencpn.org).
2. Extract the GPX file.
3. Compute distances, bearings, and durations to create a route.

"So?" you ask.

So. When I did this, I researched the math and got a grip on the haversine formula for doing the spherical geometry computation of distances between points on a sphere.

It's not too bad. The formula are big-ish. But manageable. See http://www.edwilliams.org/avform.htm#Dist for the great circle distance formula.

For airplanes and powered freighters crossing oceans, this is perfect.

For a small sailboat going from Annapolis, Maryland, to the Bahamas, this level of complexity is craziness. While accurate, it doesn't really solve the problem I have. 

I don't actually need that much accuracy. 

I need this much accuracy.

And no more. This is the essential hypotenuse distance using an R-factor to convert the difference between latitudes and the distance between longitudes into pretty-close distances. For nautical miles, R is 60×180÷π. 

This is simpler and it solves the problem I actually have. Up to about 232 miles, the answer is within 1 mile of correct. The error grows quickly. Double the distance and the error seems to jump to 8 miles. A 464 mile sailing journey (at 6 knots) takes 3 days. Wind, weather, tides and currents will introduce more error than the simplifying assumptions.

What's important is this can be put into a spreadsheet without pain. I don't need to write sophisticated Python apps to apply haversine to sequences of way-points. I can do a simpler hypotenuse computation on waypoints converted to radians.

Is there a lesson learned?

I think there is.

There's the haversine a super-general solution. It handles great-circle routes elegantly. 

But it doesn't solve my actual problem. And that makes it over-engineering.

My problem is what we call rhumb-line sailing. Over short-enough distances the world may as well be flat. Over slightly longer distances, errors in the ship's compass and speedometer make a hyper-accurate great circle route moot. 

(Even with several fancy GPS-based navigation computers, a prudent mariner has paper backups. The list of waypoints, estimated times and directions are essential when the boat's GPS reciever fails.)

I don't really need the sophistication (and the potential for bugs) with haversine. It doesn't solve a problem I actually have.

Overcoming Incuriosity -- Sailing Over The Horizon

I'm in regular contact with a few folks who seem remarkably incurious.

Seem.

Perhaps they're curious about something other than software. I don't know.

But I do know they're remarkably incurious about software. And are trying to write Python applications.

I know some people don't sail out of sight of their home port. I've sailed over a few horizons. It's not courage. It's curiosity. And patience. And preparation.

I find this frustrating. I refuse to write their code for them.

But any advice I give them devolves to "Do you have an example?" With the implicit "Which I can copy and paste?"

Even the few who claim they don't want examples, suffer from a paralyzing level of incuriosity. They can't seem to make search work because they never read beyond the first few results on their first attempt. A lot of people seem to be able to make search work; and the incurious folks seem uniquely paralyzed by search.

And it's an attribute I don't understand.

Specific example.

They read through the multiprocessing module until they got to examples with apply_async() and appear to have stopped reading.  They've asked for code reviews on two separate module. Both based on apply_async().

One module was so hopelessly broken it was difficult to make the case that it could never be made to work. There's a way the results of apply_async() have to be consumed, and the code not only did not reflect this, it seemed like they had decided specifically never to consider an alternative. (Spoiler alert, it requires an explicit wait().)

The results were sometimes consumed -- by luck -- and the rest of the time, the app was quirky. It wasn't quirky. It was deplorably wrong. And "reread the apply_async()" advice fell on deaf ears. They couldn't have failed to read the page in the standard library documentation, no, it had to be Python or Windows or me or something.

The other module was a trivial map() application. But. Since apply_async() has an incumbency, there was an amazingly elaborate implementation that amounted to rebuilding apply() or map() with globals and callbacks. This was wrapped by queue processing of Byzantine complexity. The whole mess appeared to stem from an unwillingness to read the documentation past the first example.

What to do?

My current suggestion is to exhaustively enumerate each of the methods for putting work into the processing pool. Write an example of each and every one.

In effect: "Learn the methods by building throw-away code."

I anticipate a series of objections. "Why write throw-away code?" and this one: "That's not realistic, what do you do?"

What do I do?

I write throw-away code.

But that's no substitute for a lack of curiosity.

Modern Python Cookbook 2nd ed -- big milestone

Whew.

Chapter rewrites finished.

Technical reviews in process.

Things are going pretty well. Look for Packt to publish this in the next few months. Details will be posted.

Now. For LinkedIn Learning course recordings.