It always boggles me, the relentless pursuit of learning. I have a very frustrating habit of jumping topics as soon as I start to read something. Yesterday
I got my eyes caught at open source OS for embedded devices. TBH I started off the journey aiming at some available Open Source SaaS boilerplate for some hobby
project I am after then ended up in OSRTOS. This is fascinating how I got drifted there. But this always let me discover some topic
I was not aware before.

Again, today, when I kicked off another journey I found myself on this repo, https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts. Being in AI Engineering I always get
carried away by topics of NLP. I guess, next destination would be demystify Diffusion based models. Let me see!

Date was 26 July, 2020.
Melbourne is in strict lockdown. The news broke early in my morning time, bolt from the blue. It was my beloved father. I did not realise at first
the gravity of the situation. To be honest it did not strike me around that time. Reality took over to take care of all rituals. I would rather say, all my the kiths
& kins, they took care of it, as I could not travel back home, Bangladesh, due to the situation.

Then the agony started surfacing, it becomes unbearable, when I ponder about it. Reason it becomes so hurtful is there is no one to appeal to, for reverting or annuling
it. It is such a gaping hole, not to be filled.

My father was just an ordinary father, no fancy, just uncool, down-to-earth dad. A moderately old person without any ostentation, lower-middle classed guy. But the
very best thing he adhered to is his honesty, principle, integrity and love of simplicity.

Every time I reminisce of him, a crushing wave sweeps over me, of this aching helplessness. May ALLAH bless him, keep him safe.

This is first time in my life…in a situation unprecedented. We already know how COVID-19 (trademark CoronaVirus) has extorted our lives. Starting in Wahun, China and then invading Italy, Spain, France and now our homecity and loving Melbourne.

Situation is more surrealistic. In the early times I felt like an enactment of apocalyptic movie. Like some over makebelieve Hollywood movies where US duly (;), wink, wink) dubbed as saviour of the whole universe or planet. But this real-life saga has left the US utterly into limbos and they are now more concerned than most other first world counties. As of now, it has 3,782 cases. Hope, this situation gets under control in the US. Heart goes with the countries less fortuante like Bangladesh, Italy or likewise where healthcare has already surpassed boiling point and gone amuck in such a spike of cases.

Last night, in an extraordinary move to quail the spread Victorian Prime Minister anounced State of Emergency (SoE). It is the first time in my life I am going through situation like this. All public run shows, entertainment, hospitality industries have postpones their services. Some of the iconic spots like NGV, Melbourne Arts Gallery have closed their doors until further notice. I could not imagine, I would have to experience days like this.

People have been advised not to step out of home unless they need to. So most of the workplaces (my employer SEEK including) have decreed the peeps to Work From Home (WFH). So, the feeling is we have ushered into different days (cannot say new to not ascribe it auspicious, it is actually eerie). More virtual correspondence, less physical presence. I hope we find order in chaos.

Another unsolicited consequence of SoE is dwindling supply in supermarkets where we unleash our feudal instinct triggered by panic of uncertainty that may be lurking. Panic waves are really like waves in ocean. When it spews in far middle in the ocean, it is moderately weak, but as it rolls towards the shore, becomes surging waves crushing the what comes on its way. A number of times, before I stepped into the grocery stores, in the last couple of days, I was aiming not to overbuy anything. But on some occasions, I broke the rules somewhat feeling peer pressure. But I apologize if I overstepped on those moments.

Anyway, life is like amazing agile vine. Prune it, it will thrive some time. Leave it in drought, will stay dormant, but will bring forth green buds. Take care folks.

Here in SEEK AI, to manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC), we
use Terraform (aka TF) a lot. I have been a avid user of AWS CloudFormation for a while
but recently converted to TF. Here are some reasons:

• The CLI toolkit terraform is more versatile in its domain. It comes with everything for
  managing Infrastructure like planning, destroying, state management, tainting resource for destruction. Whereas aws cli
  is a mixed bag of all commands.
• Managing version and applying delta is so easy due to efficient resource graph
  management by TF
• Creating and reusing modular resource configuration is easy with TF. For aws cli it is done
  via creating separate CloudFormation stack and using output of those stack which act as independent entities.
  But for TF, it is all under the same graph. So, for CloudFormation, you can accidentally delete a stack, crippling
  the functionality of the stack, which is unlikely in TF

But, TF is not perfect like humans. Some lacking I have felt is emanating from limiter number of providers. Although you
can create custom providers, still for small functionality it seems to be a hassle to maintain and publish them in repo, such an overfill
of effort when you can do without it.

But there are ways to give your workflow a boost with provisioner. A provisioner allows you to
execute scripts at some resource life-cycle like resource creation or destroy. This is handy as you can:

• Use your own script with any runtime available on the host running Terraform, like python, nodejs, php and so forth.
  So it definitely frees you from Terraform’s DSL which is HCL.
• Complement the functionality available from out-of-the-box functions and interpolation and providers
• It is fun to extend custom capabilities with less effort

Let’s consider a use case:

We need to create a custom title for an IAM Policy Document that will have the IP address
as a part of the title and in Condition statement

So basically we need to retrieve the public IP address of the host running TF and put it in
a file. We then can make use of file intrinsic function or local provider’s data source to
read content of the file and make use of it.

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#!/bin/bash

ip=$(curl -s https://api.ipify.org)
echo "My public IP address is: $ip"

I will start with a bit of humour. Actually, I find it hard to entertain people with joke, as the way I tell the joke does not keep it funny anymore as I cannot stifle the laugh before I deliver the climax of it. Anyway, I will be paraphrasing:

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“In early 2012, a story broke about a man who had come into a Target store wielding a fistful of coupons addressed to his high-school-aged daughter. He had come to berate the manager because this set of coupons were exclusively for things such as baby clothes, formula, and furniture.

On hearing the man's complaint, the manager apologized profusely. In fact, he felt so bad that he wanted to follow up several days later over the phone to explain how this had happened. Only this time, on the phone, the father was the one apologizing. It seems his daughter was, in fact, pregnant. Her shopping habits had given her away.

The algorithm that gave her away was most likely based, at least in part, on collaborative filtering.”

_Excerpt From: “Python Machine Learning Blueprints.” Apple Books. _

It is 2018 and holiday season has just kicked off. Some solid time with family and friends. After long it is summer in Melbourne. Really enjoying the sun this year after long wait for it. Also, mango season is here, yum. After couple of year of scarcity yummy juicy mangoes are affordable now. Have some glut.

Stay cool and safe everyone.

Holiday season in 2018. I am getting excited not because it is Christmas but I have found a new window to the world to express my liberty to write, in some other way. This blog is going to be my microphone.