Kev's Development Toolbox

June 18, 2018

Increasing VMware ESXi guest desktop resolution for Ubuntu 14.04

By default, my Ubuntu 14.04 desktop guest running under VMware ESXi has a maximum resolution of 1360×768 when accessed with the Remote Client, which although usable is not great on my MacBook Pro:

In the guest settings for my Ubuntu guest, I have rather limited graphics settings:

I tried bumping up the memory and see if that opens up some additional settings but that didn’t change anything, although for higher resolutions it’s most likely I would need more gpu memory, but that’s not the issue with the limited settings here.

Searching for ‘ESXi linux guest maximum resolution’ I found this article:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/527747

which suggests to install a ‘desktop’ version of the open-vm-tools:

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

Let’s try that. After a reboot, now we’ve got higher resolutions! Awesome!

June 11, 2018June 10, 2018

Building a Card Playing Twitter Bot: DynamoDB schema

Following on from yesterday’s post on getting started with my Blackjack Card Game Twitter bot, I’m persisting the game state per player to AWS DynamoDB. Here’s what my schema looks like so far:

Each row persisted represents a game in progress, keyed by the player’s Twitter handle. More updates to come shortly.

June 10, 2018

Building a Card Playing Twitter Bot: gameplay dialog

I’ve built a couple of other Twitter bots, I have @kevinhookebot which generates random tweets generated from a trained ML model:

to expect the latest version that the dataset, that the same shows of the past complete of didn’t they started to do a company interesting

— Kevin Hooke Bot (@kevinhookebot) June 7, 2018

and I have a product name generator which generates humorous product names using the Tracery template library:

AlphaSquirrel (alpha)

— ProductNameBot (@ProductNameBot) June 9, 2018

For my next project I’m thinking about what it would involve to build a multiplayer card game playing bot, a simple card game to get started, like Blackjack. The Twitter REST apis I’ve used so far will be reusable for this project, but the interesting parts are the interaction between a player and the bot, the game logic, and the persistence of game state (each of which I’ll discuss in future posts).

I’ve been thinking about the interaction for the gamevand think it will look something like this:

Player: @blackjackcard deal

Bot: @player bot deals you 4 Clubs and 7 Spades. Reply hit or stick

Player: @blackjackcard hit

Bot: @player bot deals you 4 Hearts. You now have 4 Clubs, 7 Spades, 4 Hearts. Reply hit or stick

Player: @blackjackcard stick

Bot: @player the bot currently has 3 Hearts, 9 Clubs, and takes a card

Bot: @player the bot takes 10 Diamonds and now has 3 Hearts, 9 Clubs, 10 Diamonds. Bust! You win!

The interesting part of the gameplay interaction is that there’s only 3 commands:

deal: start a game (get dealt your initial two cards)
hit: get dealt another card
stick: keep current hard

This makes the options that the bot needs to handle pretty simple. Next up, I’ll talk about persisting the game state to AWS DynamoDB.

May 30, 2018May 29, 2018

AWS Lambda error: HTTP 502 ‘Execution failed due to configuration error: Malformed Lambda proxy response’

Calling an AWS Lambda via API Gateway with the Lambda Proxy Integration option, you might see an HTTP 502 response and this message:

“Execution failed due to configuration error: Malformed Lambda proxy response"

Wed May 30 05:00:41 UTC 2018 : Execution failed due to configuration error: Malformed Lambda proxy response
Wed May 30 05:00:41 UTC 2018 : Method completed with status: 502

This is a rather cryptic message, but it’s saying is the response is not in the expected format.

Per this doc, the expected response should be in this format:

{
    "isBase64Encoded": true|false,
    "statusCode": httpStatusCode,
    "headers": { "headerName": "headerValue", ... },
    "body": "..."
}