If you’re running a Bitcoin full node and want to run RPC commands against the Bitcoin client from a remote machine the easiest and safest way to do this is using Port Forwarding over an SSH connection. What is Port Forwarding used for? Secure access to a port that is otherwise not listening on a […]
Author archives: Bob Peers
Generating New Product Names using Neural Networks
So everyone knows Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence / Cognitive Computing, call it what you will, is the new marketing catchphrase for people trying to sell their software products and services. You can be sure if it’s not already baked in then it’s in the roadmap for 2020. It used to be ‘Big Data’, but […]
Getting Database and Table Sizes in Postgres
Total Database Size This SQL simply gets the total size of the database in a human readable format. SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size(‘postgres’)) as db_size List all Tables This lists all the tables in the database public schema. SELECT tablename FROM pg_catalog.pg_tables WHERE schemaname = ‘public’ Search Schema for Column Name I often need to search all the […]
Pretend Money
In light of today’s news on the European Central Bank restarting the money printers only 9 months after they turned them off. File under funny but true.
Setting Up a Local Blockchain with Ganache
Why would I want to do this? Interacting with Blockchains and blockchain technology probably seems for most people like a very complex task. How to even get started? Don’t they run on some servers spread across the globe? How would I make a transaction and see the result? Wouldn’t I use to use real money […]
Monitoring a Bitcoin Node Using Node-RED
Now my Bitcoin Full Node is fully synchronized and running I thought it would be good to set up some simple monitoring to check it’s still up and up to date with the Bitcoin Blockchain. Bitnodes API Helpfully there’s already a site that monitors all the full nodes and also provides a handy API at […]
Running a Bitcoin Full Node on a Raspberry Pi 4
First Attempt I’ve wanted to run a Bitcoin full node for a while now. Not because it makes any money, quite to the contrary, it actually costs money to run a node, but to better understand a technology there’s nothing better than learning by doing 🧠A full node is a program that fully validates […]
Uploading Files Over SSH Using KNIME
If you have SSH access to a server and want an easy, visual way of uploading files that can be automated and scheduled then using KNIME works great. Fortunately KNIME already has an SSH Connection node so the set up is very easy. The basic flow is as follows: Make a connection the ssh server […]
Looking Up Offset Rows in PostgreSQL
A common task when either reporting or doing data analysis is to extract data from a database table or view and then lookup corresponding values from either previous or next rows. A good example of this was a recent KPI report I made for E-commerce where the KPI depended not only on the total daily […]
The Right Tool for the Job
During my career I’ve heard this countless times and to some extent it’s just taken as granted that you should always use the right tool for the job. Isn’t this obvious after all? Why would you knowingly choose the wrong tool? But the conversations often miss the realities surrounding the choice. Decisions are not made […]