Generic Journal: June 18th 2019 - Too many things on my mind
I was going to do another language journal. But, then I felt like I had more on my mind than just that. But, we'll see where this goes.
So, firstly, Japanese. I am, what feels like, as absurd length of time into this journey. If I'm being honest with myself, I never thought I would stick with something this long. I figured in the beginning that by this point I'd either be "fluent enough" or have given up. That neither has happened feels kind of incredible.
I'm not disappointed that I haven't reached whatever vague goal I thought I might achieve during this span of time. I'm much more impressed simply by the fact that I'm still going, despite the fact that it is still challenging.
Not a ton has changed. I feel like my progress is actually pretty steady at this point. I'm actually able to get decent listening practice from anime now. Though, it is still a more guided form than anything. My reading is growing steadily as well, both in volume, speed, and to a lesser degree complexity. Flashcards are basically just there because my exposure isn't deep enough to remove the crutch and my other sources are wide enough to keep the vocab up on their own.
Basically, when I watch anime now, I can follow along with the dialogue 95% of the time. I could probably follow without the dialogue, maybe 40-60% of the time depending on the anime. And sometimes, I'm even preempting either the translation (in either direction depending on what I hear/read first) or even just guessing the correct following lines.
In terms of reading; I finished Handa-kun volume 3 yesterday, which wraps up my latest Box Of Manga. Given I had to deal with half of an Squid Girl as well, I've read some more Harry Potter already, and I'm daily reading bits and pieces of news on my phone, I'm actually getting through A LOT more than I was previously.
Beyond Japanese, there is work. Or well, work related things. The past few days have been quite involved. I've even worked after hours a few days. The impetus has largely been that we've whittled away at the more mundane tasks and I've been engaged in things I actually enjoy doing and some things that are pushing me out of my comfort zone. And I love that as well.
I ultimately didn't find myself in love with what pushed me out of my comfort zone: Elasticsearch + Kibana + X Pack Security + Docker. Fundamentally, the documentation is a dumpster fire. Doubly so if you're using Docker.
To avoid getting deep into the details, I was looking into securing Elasticsearch and Kibana. It turns out they recently made enough of their x-pack security features free to suite our needs. But, if all you do is follow their instructions... you still won't have a functioning environment as best as I can tell.
Basically, turning on x pack security at all, instantly requires you to secure Elasticsearch with SSL. Not a huge deal. I prefer that, even though my initial objective was just adding authentication to Kibana. The problem? The walkthrough talks about configuring SSL on Elasticsearch. And that all works. And then at the end they're like "OK, now use this tool to change the default passwords and update your username and password in your kibana.yml file".
Problem? You just turned SSL on in Elasticsearch, and Kibana by default will A) try and communicate over HTTP which will be rejected, and B) would be rejected even if configured to talk over SSL, because it still needs to know the cert data to talk to Elasticsearch apparently.
NONE OF THIS is covered in the videos or doc.
Then, add Docker into the equation. Now, we're not even bitching about one off guides or YouTube videos. Basically, we were using Docker Environment Variables in the past. Their doc just says that most will work. There is no list of the ones which do or don't. Nor is there a reliable mapping between the Docker Environment Variable format and the corresponding ones from the kibana.yml file.
After fighting for hours with every possible permutation of docker environment variables, I simply chose the ones I figured actually did what I needed, converted them back into the kibana.yml format, removed all my variables. And voila!
In short, not only are there no complete guides on configuring this. But, the basic guides give you hope that you could configure it with Docker Environment Variables... when in fact, it doesn't seem to be the case.
But, the challenge was fun. And in the end, I got it working. Of course, turning on SSL in Elasticsearch broke our apps communication with it for now. But, that isn't my problem :)
My suspicion is that they hope the crap documentation will drive people to pay for support a subscription. The settings I ultimately needed were pieced from intuition and several other forums spanning a host of slightly related problems.
So, firstly, Japanese. I am, what feels like, as absurd length of time into this journey. If I'm being honest with myself, I never thought I would stick with something this long. I figured in the beginning that by this point I'd either be "fluent enough" or have given up. That neither has happened feels kind of incredible.
I'm not disappointed that I haven't reached whatever vague goal I thought I might achieve during this span of time. I'm much more impressed simply by the fact that I'm still going, despite the fact that it is still challenging.
Not a ton has changed. I feel like my progress is actually pretty steady at this point. I'm actually able to get decent listening practice from anime now. Though, it is still a more guided form than anything. My reading is growing steadily as well, both in volume, speed, and to a lesser degree complexity. Flashcards are basically just there because my exposure isn't deep enough to remove the crutch and my other sources are wide enough to keep the vocab up on their own.
Basically, when I watch anime now, I can follow along with the dialogue 95% of the time. I could probably follow without the dialogue, maybe 40-60% of the time depending on the anime. And sometimes, I'm even preempting either the translation (in either direction depending on what I hear/read first) or even just guessing the correct following lines.
In terms of reading; I finished Handa-kun volume 3 yesterday, which wraps up my latest Box Of Manga. Given I had to deal with half of an Squid Girl as well, I've read some more Harry Potter already, and I'm daily reading bits and pieces of news on my phone, I'm actually getting through A LOT more than I was previously.
Beyond Japanese, there is work. Or well, work related things. The past few days have been quite involved. I've even worked after hours a few days. The impetus has largely been that we've whittled away at the more mundane tasks and I've been engaged in things I actually enjoy doing and some things that are pushing me out of my comfort zone. And I love that as well.
I ultimately didn't find myself in love with what pushed me out of my comfort zone: Elasticsearch + Kibana + X Pack Security + Docker. Fundamentally, the documentation is a dumpster fire. Doubly so if you're using Docker.
To avoid getting deep into the details, I was looking into securing Elasticsearch and Kibana. It turns out they recently made enough of their x-pack security features free to suite our needs. But, if all you do is follow their instructions... you still won't have a functioning environment as best as I can tell.
Basically, turning on x pack security at all, instantly requires you to secure Elasticsearch with SSL. Not a huge deal. I prefer that, even though my initial objective was just adding authentication to Kibana. The problem? The walkthrough talks about configuring SSL on Elasticsearch. And that all works. And then at the end they're like "OK, now use this tool to change the default passwords and update your username and password in your kibana.yml file".
Problem? You just turned SSL on in Elasticsearch, and Kibana by default will A) try and communicate over HTTP which will be rejected, and B) would be rejected even if configured to talk over SSL, because it still needs to know the cert data to talk to Elasticsearch apparently.
NONE OF THIS is covered in the videos or doc.
Then, add Docker into the equation. Now, we're not even bitching about one off guides or YouTube videos. Basically, we were using Docker Environment Variables in the past. Their doc just says that most will work. There is no list of the ones which do or don't. Nor is there a reliable mapping between the Docker Environment Variable format and the corresponding ones from the kibana.yml file.
After fighting for hours with every possible permutation of docker environment variables, I simply chose the ones I figured actually did what I needed, converted them back into the kibana.yml format, removed all my variables. And voila!
In short, not only are there no complete guides on configuring this. But, the basic guides give you hope that you could configure it with Docker Environment Variables... when in fact, it doesn't seem to be the case.
But, the challenge was fun. And in the end, I got it working. Of course, turning on SSL in Elasticsearch broke our apps communication with it for now. But, that isn't my problem :)
My suspicion is that they hope the crap documentation will drive people to pay for support a subscription. The settings I ultimately needed were pieced from intuition and several other forums spanning a host of slightly related problems.
Comments
Post a Comment