2025#

Using Pageant with VSCode Remote SSH

While Putty and Pageant are widely used tools for SSH connections, you can also integrate Pageant with VSCode to establish remote SSH connections without administrative privileges. While the default ssh-agent service offers similar functionality, it's disabled by default and requires administrative access to start if disabled, making Pageant a more flexible alternative. Here's how you can set it up:

Installing Ollama without root

Inspired by the official guide, here is my method for installing (or updating) Ollama without root access.

mkdir -p ~/src
cd ~/src
curl -L https://ollama.com/download/ollama-linux-amd64.tgz -o ollama-linux-amd64.tgz
mkdir -p ~/opt/ollama
tar -C ~/opt/ollama -xzf ollama-linux-amd64.tgz

Add Ollama to $PATH:

echo 'export PATH=$PATH:~/opt/ollama' >> ~/.bashrc
. ~/.bashrc

Then you can run ollama in your terminal:

nohup ollama serve &

ollama -v
ollama list

# Pull the embeddings model for AnythingLLM RAG
ollama pull nomic-embed-text

# Run the smallest deepseek model
ollama run deepseek-r1:5b

To stop the Ollama server:

killall ollama

# or
killall -u $USER ollama

Process, port, and file usages in Linux

Use lsof, fuser, ss, pgrep, pstree, ps, htop, etc. to find process, port and file usages in Linux.

PySpark database connectors

General

Use spark.jars to add local ODBC/JDBC drivers to PySpark, and use spark.jars.packages to add remote ODBC/JDBC drivers, PySpark will download the packages from Maven repository.

For spark-shell: https://docs.snowflake.com/en/user-guide/spark-connector-install#installing-additional-packages-if-needed

Python Type Hints

Python is a dynamically typed language, meaning variable types don't require explicit declaration. However, as projects grow in complexity, type annotations become increasingly valuable for code maintainability and clarity.

Type hints (PEP 484) have been a major focus of recent Python releases, and I was particularly intrigued when I heard about Guido van Rossum's work on MyPy at Dropbox, where the team needed robust tooling to migrate their codebase from Python 2 to Python 3.

Today, type hints are essential for modern Python development. They significantly enhance IDE capabilities and AI-powered development tools by providing better code completion, static analysis, and error detection. This mirrors the evolution we've seen with TypeScript's adoption over traditional JavaScript—explicit typing leads to more reliable and maintainable code.

The majority of this post is based on MyPy documentation.