Month: August 2018

Posted on

Photos from Vintage Computer Festival West 2018

Aug 4-5th was the Vintage Computer Festival West at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Here’s a few photos of some of the exhibits:

  • View of the exhibitors
  • @foone ‘s floppy and optical disk display
  • Mechanical teletype machines
  • Timex Sinclair 1000, US version of the ZX-81
  • Timex Sinclair 1000
  • Sinclair ZX-81
  • Acorn Archimedes
  • BBC Micros
  • Tim Paterson talking about his career and creation of 86-DOS
  • Tim Paterson’s homebrew joystick
  • 86-DOS / MS-DOS original source

Posted on

Error installing Zappa on MacOS: “error: could not create /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/requestlogger”

Attempting to install Zappa on MacOS with:

pip install zappa

I get an error:

error: could not create '/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/requestlogger': Permission denied

Searching for this error I found similar errors installing other packages, and the recommendation seems to be to use the –home option to install to your home dir. So instead, this worked:

pip install --home zappa

 

Posted on

Using AWS SageMaker to train a model to generate text (part 3): What I learned about Python AWS Lambdas this week

This is a follow-on from my investigation on how to use AWS SageMaker as an AWS replacement to my current approach to generate text from a Machine Learning model. Up until this point I’ve been running torch-rnn on a server locally. You can follow part 1 and part 2 of my progress so far.

In summary, here’s what I learned this week:

  • Some Python modules are OS platform specific. That means, if you install a module on MacOS, you can’t zip it up as a dependency in a .zip deployment for a Lambda which runs on Linux, as it won’t be OS compatible
  • The maximum size for an AWS Lambda deployment is 50MB. Zipping up what I’ve built so far (only a minimal script but relying on a number of modules) I’ve got a 500MB zip file. Clearly that’s too large to deploy as a Lambda
  • Following some suggestions here,  there are Python frameworks (such as Zappa) to help build Python based AWS Lambdas and address some of the issues with modules and deployment. Clearly I’ve got some learning here to get his to work 🙂
Proudly powered by WordPress