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Today we have an unusual code golf: build a program (using only printable ASCII characters, tabs and newlines) that prints out exactly the characters in the printable ASCII space (characters 32 to 126) that don't appear in your program's source code (in any order, however many times you want).

As usual, the goal is to produce the shortest code to do this.

My (admittedly not very good, but does the job!) entry:

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Article
· May 24 15m read
VIP in GCP

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in GCP, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to GCP, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in GCP as subnets always span the entire region). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without using Load Balancers suggested in most other GCP reference architectures.

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It's Friday and a long weekend is upon us, so let's have a round of code golf!

Nowadays, it's rare to find a text message without at least one emoji. 😃😄😎🙂😊😀😁😆😂
But back in the day, people had to be creative to express their emotions in text. They would use emoticons, which are symbols made up of keyboard characters :^) =] ) B).
Our challenge for today is to create a function that receives a string as argument and returns the total number of smiling faces or happy faces.
Each smiley face must have one smiling mouth, which should be marked with ), ], }, D or >.
A smiley face can have a pair of eyes but it does not have to. Valid characters for eyes are :, ;, 8, B or =.
A nose is optional, and can be represented these characters: -, ^, c, o and ~.

Valid smiley face examples:

    :) :D ;-D :~) :‑) :-] =)    
    :] :-> :> 8-) :D 8‑D )
    8) :-} :} :o) :c) :^) =]
    :‑D 8D =D B^D

Input

"count how many smiley faces are here :)"

​

Output

1

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Hello Community,

I'd like to share with you our article with @Regilo Regilio Guedes de Souza on AWS Amazon blog Automating application-consistent Amazon EBS Snapshots for InterSystems IRIS databases. Our team has created this step-by-step instruction to create application-consistent snapshots for InterSystems IRIS databases. In this article, we outline how to automate pre-scripts to pause I/O and flush buffer to disk and post-scripts to thaw I/O, as shown in the following figure:

Architecture diagram for automating application-consistent EBS Snapshots for InterSystems IRIS databases.

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Work Queue Manager (WQM) is a feature of InterSystems IRIS that enables you to improve performance by distributing work to multiple concurrent processes programmatically. The idea is that you split the work into chunks, and WQM distributes the chunks across worker processes and can provide the info that the work is done.

However, recently, I got an interesting question: there's a large logical transaction composed of ~1,000,000 individual objects and SQL inserts and updates. Some updates are CPU-intensive, so the original idea was to use WQM to split an update into chunks to speed things up.

But, here's a catch: if one of the individual 1,000,000 changes fails (there's a variety of application-level checks so that it can fail, and that's not even that abnormal a behavior), the entire transaction must be rolled back. That creates a problem: each chunk must report success before committing their individual transactions, and someone must get all these reports and decide if we are committing or not.

Unfortunately, it looks like WQM does not have a bidirectional communication between workers and manager, so I suggested an approach using events:

  1. Start jobs.
  2. Wait for all jobs to report success using $System.Event.WaitMsg().
  3. Send Commit or Rollback using the $System.Event.Signal().
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Welcome to the next chapter of my CI/CD series, where we discuss possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab.
Today, we continue talking about Interoperability, specifically monitoring your Interoperability deployments. If you haven't yet, set up Alerting for all your Interoperability productions to get alerts about errors and production state in general.

Inactivity Timeout is a setting common to all Interoperability Business Hosts. A business host has an Inactive status after it has not received any messages within the number of seconds specified by the Inactivity Timeout field. The production Monitor Service periodically reviews the status of business services and business operations within the production and marks the item as Inactive if it has not done anything within the Inactivity Timeout period.
The default value is 0 (zero). If this setting is 0, the business host will never be marked Inactive, no matter how long it stands idle.

Open Exchange app
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Multi-tap or multi-press is the name given to the historic technique of writing SMS on the first mobile phones with a keyboard of 10-12 numeric keys.
For example, to type LOL you need to press 5 three times, 6 three times and 5 three times again.
Your task is to write a function that takes a string as input and returns the repeated digits associated with each character according to the multi-tap system.

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Article
· Dec 19, 2023 8m read
VIP in Azure

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in Azure, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

The main issue, when deploying to Azure, is that an IRIS VIP has a requirement of IRIS being essentially a network admin, per the docs.

To get HA, IRIS mirror members must be deployed to different availability zones in one subnet (which is possible in Azure as subnets can span several zones). One of the solutions might be load balancers, but they, of course, cost extra, and you need to administrate them.

In this article, I would like to provide a way to configure a Mirror VIP without the using Load Balancers suggested in most other Azure reference architectures.

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If you work with Productions, highlighting connections between Business Hosts is a very convenient feature, allowing developers to get a visual representation of a data flow.

This feature works by default with all system Business Hosts. If a user writes their own Business Services, Processes, or Operations, they must implement the OnGetConnections method for this functionality to work with their custom Business Hosts (or use Ens.DataType.ConfigName properties for connections).
That said, the SMP shows only the first layer of connections of the selected Business Host. Sometimes, we need to get connections of connections recursively to build a complete data flow graph. Or we might need this connection information to check which downstream systems might be affected by a change upstream.

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Discussion
· Aug 21, 2023
AWS Batch

Has anyone tried AWS Batch with InterSystems IRIS docker images?

I have a noninteractive workload (but it requires internet access from the job to deliver results), so I'm considering using it as a simpler alternative to ECS since Fargate backs both, and that's enough for my use case.

I wonder if anyone tried and cares to share the results, issues, cfn templates.

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Discussion
· Jul 28, 2023
Code Golf: Parenthesis

Our previous code golf ended with an overwhelming win, so now it's time for another one.
Parenthesis Hell is a Lisp-like esoteric programming language(esolang).
As a Lisp-like language, the code consists only of nested matched pairs of opened and closed parenthesis.
Your task is to write a method that receives a string of parenthesis and returns 1 if the order of the parenthesis is valid. For example, the string of parenthesis (())() is valid because it contains a matched pair of opened and closed parenthesis at each position. The string ()((()))) is not valid because it contains one unmatched parenthesis.

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I'm trying to execute SQL on a EC2 via SSM:

import boto3

instanceid = "i-123456789"
sql = """SELECT path FROM Security.Applications WHERE ID = '/csp/sys'"""
template = """su - irisusr -c 'cat << EOF | iris sql iris -U %SYS
                """ + sql + """
                        q
                        EOF'
                       """
template = [line.strip() for line in template.splitlines()] 
template = """\n""".join(template) 
ssm_client = boto3.client('ssm') 
response = ssm_client.send_command(
            InstanceIds=[instanceid],
            DocumentName="AWS-RunShellScript",
            Comment=AWS,
            Parameters={'commands': template})

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