Convert Microsoft LDAP ObjectGuid from base64 to Python UUID

I needed to convert an objectGuid from Microsoft AD which was provided to me in base64. What I did not know is the Microsoft uses little-endian UUIDs instead of big-endian like the rest of world uses. This caused issues trying to convert the binary to UUID. Luckily, Python's UUID has bytes_le (little-endian) just for this use case.

Blogging this for the future.

Python FizzBuzz

I watched Tom Scott's One Simple Interview Question on YouTube earlier and decided take a stab at a flexible implementation of FizzBuzz.

Moto X4 on Google FI - Microphone Muffled / Bad - Possible Fix

I've been having people complain they cannot hear me or that I sound extremely muffled when I making phone calls on my Moto X4. I confirmed it was definitely the phone because I tested it with a wired headphones/microphone without issues.

Many forums suggest returning the device as a RMA. This really isn't an option for my nearly 2 year old phone which is out of warranty. One interesting comment I read was related to the position of the microphone holes -- one of which is very near the fingerprint reader. My phone is always in a case, so the rear microphone hole seemed clear but the front microphone hole seemed slightly dirty.

The phone is rated IP68 which allows for submersion in water for 1 hour up to 1 meter. Since my next option was to buy a new phone, I decided to put the IP68 rating to the test.

Of course, what I did next -- only do at your own risk. I am not responsible for anything you decide to do to your own phone.

With 100% rubbing alcohol, I cleaned out the microphone holes with a cotton swab and let dry. Using a recording app, the sounds was marginally better.   More drops of alcohol but this time I used an electric toothbrush to vibrate all the junk which was more than I expected (ick).

Voila, things sounded 100% better and I no longer need a new phone!

Moto X4 on Google FI - Enable RCS Messages

On my Moto X4 (Google FI), I couldn't enable RCS messages in the Messages application as it was stuck "verifying" my phone number. After a bunch of support forums, this is the procedure that ultimately worked for me.

1. Turn on Airplane mode.
2. Open the Settings -> Apps & notifications.
1. If you don't see all your apps, first tap See all apps or App info.
2. At the top right, tap More More and then Show system.
3. Find the Carrier Services app.
1. Tap Force stop and confirm.
2. Tap Storage and then Clear data.
4. Go back to the "App info" screen and find the Messages app.
1. Tap Force stop and confirm
2.  Tap Storage and then Clear data.
5. Turn off Airplane mode.
6. Open Messages and checked the settings, it should said "Connected - Chat features are ready for use".

I'm blogging this so I don't forget the process if this ever comes up in the future.

Python Sort List of Dictionaries with Accented Characters

I needed to sort a list of dictionaries by a label key. It happens that the labels are in FR and normal sorting causes issues with ordering when accented characters are present. I happened to have PyUCA installed from PyPi.

Custom 404 Page for Django CMS

For a side project, I needed a 404 page that was editable by users in Django CMS. Suffice it say, it took a while to figure out how to do it without having the Django cache the CMS page response and provide the right 404 http status code. Other techniques wrongly serve the page as a 200 OK which is wrong for search engines.

1. First create a 404 page in Django CMS and publish it.
2. Set you handler404 in your urls.py (change the path to your view file accordingly):
   handler404 = 'shared.views.page_not_found'
3. The view:
   
   

   1:  from cms.views import details  
   2:  from django.http import HttpResponse  
   3:  def page_not_found(request, exception):  
   4:    response = details(request, '404')  # 404 is the slug you named your page in Django CMS
   5:    return HttpResponse(content=response.rendered_content, content_type='text/html; charset=utf-8', status=404)  
   

Gunicorn dyno death spiral on Heroku -- Part II

After a lot of investigation, we've figured out there is an issue with NewRelic, Postgres and Gunicorn. I summarized the issue here:

https://discussion.heroku.com/t/gunicorn-dyno-death-spiral/136/13

After discussing this with Graham Dumpleton over Twitter there is an issue with libpq. Below is a summary of a rather long Twitter discussion. Anything in quotes is from Graham but could have been paraphrased or reworded slightly to make sense here. Didn't want anyone to think that using Graham's words as my own...

The real issue is caused by "the use of the NewRelic agent in a background thread which does SSL HTTP calls -- surfaced issues with libpq SSL connections to database." This can be replicated by the use of a script someone wrote when the bug was reported to Postgres in October, 2014 (see link below). It's not the fault of the NR agent -- just that it uses a background thread and triggers the same behavior. That's why you can reproduce the issue without the NR agent.

So the "NR agent will create a background thread, but if you had other threads for other reasons which did SSL connections, [it] still occurs. If process is completely single threaded without multiple request handler threads, nor background threads doing SSL, [then it] is okay."

http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAHUL3dpWYFnUgdgo95OHYDQ4kugdnBKPTjq0mNbTuBhCMG4xvQ@mail.gmail.com

So in a perfect storm, libpq deadlocks which causes large issues for Gunicorn. The reason why is how Gunicorn is designed and that a "main thread is used to handle requests and if that deadlocks then signals aren't handled or if it uses a pipe of death, it will never return to accept on connection where it gets message to shutdown."

By default, "Django creates a new database connection per request which exacerbates the problem." So the problem can mostly be alleviated by using some sort of database connection pooling -- either what is built-in into Django 1.6+ or something like django-postgresql-pool or PGBouncer however it still can cause issues for Gunicorn as the db pool only reduces the likelihood of the problem. Also, because of the way the main thread works -- that is why I personally saw that the Gunicorn timeout directive have no affect on the problem because the worker was still waiting for Postgres and therefore was still alive despite the fact that Heroku killed the request on the client side.

The only real work around until libpq is fixed is to use something other than Gunicorn like Uwsgi and deal with the Harakiri requests OR don't mix DB calls when calls to HTTPS resources. In our case, we are using Amazon S3 so some requests need to make a bucket request to get information and sometimes cause this deadlock issue.

I know many other people in my local user group that have written off Gunicorn on Heroku thinking the issue was Gunicorn and/or New Relic. However, the problem is in Postgres and it is exacerbated when the NR agent is used.

While we (GreatBizTools) has a workaround in place, it would be great if Heroku (and maybe you can get New Relic) to poke at the Postgres folks to fix this deadlock into that was reported to them in October, 2014. I can't image the number of folks that have been caught out in the rain in the past year or so by this. There are several blog posts that (now wrongly) point fingers at Heroku for not supporting Gunicorn correctly.

We can't be the only people to use Heroku on Python with New Relic and Postgres? It must be a really popular combination.

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Edit: Heroku is now aware of the issue and is working with respective parties in order to rectify this low level issue. -- January 16th, 2015