Microsoft released the first Surface Go tablet in August 2018. Its small size, 1.15-pound weight, and relatively low price were of interest to many at the University. ISC testing revealed that the Surface Go's low-end Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y processor made it relatively slow in an era when almost all new tablets and notebooks are fast. This slowness would typically have disqualified it from significant interest at the University.
Today, Tuesday, August 4th, 2020, Apple introduced new iMac desktop systems. These systems form the basis of the macOS configurations in the University's Desktop Recommendations and Desktop Purchasing Guide.
With the advent of macOS 10.15 Catalina (expected to release sometime in early fall 2019), Apple will be removing support for all 32-bit applications. Apple has been warning about this for a few years now and has gotten increasingly aggressive at informing users who run macOS 10.14 Mojave that they have dated applications that won't work in the future.
This blog entry will detail one person's efforts to clean his system of 32-bit applications (or at least become aware of the applications that will be an issue).
In this blog post I describe how to build and deploy a very simple Python Lambda function at Amazon Web Services. I'll describe how I use my local workstation to develop the functionality and how to configure the AWS Identity and Access Management roles to configure the Lambda function's authorized access.
In an earlier blog post I discussed DynamoDB and the fact it does not seem to be particularly well suited for storing time–based data. In part one of this series I discussed the overall architecture of applications based on micro–services and the functionality I am trying to build. I considered using a very small mySQL based RDS instance, which would translate directly from the existing code, but I felt that using a database would possibly more expensive than simply using S3.
AWS provides a tutorial on how to access MySQL databases from a python Lambda function. Though it is thorough, I found there were a few things that could use a little extra documentation. This blog post addresses that and provides fully working code, including scripts for some of the steps described in their tutorial. I'll follow the same order of the instructions AWS provides.
In part 1 of this series I described the functionality of an aspect of the facilities and real estate services web site, part of the energy management aspect of the sustainability program. Since this functionality depends on the ability to gather data from an FTP server, that's the first functionality I implemented.
In a prior blog post I described how I was looking into DynamoDB for storing time based data, which did not work as expected. This work was part of a larger effort to investigate 'micro-services' such as AWS Lambda. Such services allow applications to be built up from small parts, each of which designed for specific aspect of the application, with a defined interface (many times using JSON).
This blog post explains how to enable Penn Web Login for using the Amazon Web Services console. It uses PennGroups mapped to AWS IAM roles for authorization.
Recently I was working on a little thought experiment to see if we could use AWS Lambda for a small web application we wanted to move off-premises. This particular application consists of a a front end, which grabs time based measurements from a simple MySql table. When looking at the table, the creation script looks something like this: