journal of issadarkthing

Changing Domain Name Tanks My Seo

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 12:35:02 +0800

When I first started working on Maybank Bank Statement Converter, I didn’t think much about the domain and completely deployed the site on vercel. Vercel gives you free hosting on free tier and also handles domain for you. Well that includes free Vercel domain i.e. the .vercel.app. So my domain used to look like maybankconverter.vercel.app which doesn’t look great and feel like just a demo project.

I disregarded about assigning domain to the project and left the project on run without constantly checking it. Few months passes, I received an email from one of the user of the site asking for support to parse credit card statement. I was so excited about it and gladly reply to that person that I will support credit card parser soon. So I got a hunch to check my website on google analytics and my website has actual users. Even on google search console my website was constantly being queried everyday. I was so glad and happy about it and only then I made my mind to assign a domain to the projec to make it more serious.

So this what has happened, I assigned a subdomain to the project and now instead of it being maybankconverter.vercel.app it now looks maybankconverter.raziman.online. Despite assigning a subdomain instead of buying a whole domain it does look better without the vercel.app as part of the url. I left the project running to check again within few days more.

I stopped getting visitors, no new users coming to site anymore. My website is not even ranked on google search. I transfer my site properly using google transfer site tool and yet it doesn’t seem to acknowledge that my previous site is the same as the new site. I am dissapointed, I thought I have done the domain transfer correctly as suggested by google search console blog.

Google search console for the new domain result

Conclusion, put up a good domain for your project immediately. Do not leave the project running and start getting traction only to realize you’ve been using default domain name by your hosting provider. Transferring domain does not immediately transfer the traction really well. You will lose all the traffic and new users you’ve been gaining lately. But I am sure given enough time your site your site can crawl back up on google search ranking.

LLM fine-tuning

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 08:44:44 +0800

Introduction

Recently at a startup I was a able to get a hold on a project that uses LLM that is specific for a particular knowledge domain for a company. This is due to no SOTA (state of the art) LLM models are able to satisfy the accuracy of the output when it comes to a very particular knowledge domain.

I equipped myself with some knowledge to be able to fine-tune a LLM model and stumbled upon unsloth. unsloth is open-source framework for LLM fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. It also helps in optimizing fine-tuning pipeline by reducing the memory consumption and time taken to train LLM.

I won’t be explaining on how to do LLM fine-tuning because unsloth has already given a wonderful documentation explaining step-by-step process on how to fine-tune local LLMs, rather today actually I wanted to announce or to give back to the community a docker setup required to run on DGX Spark. DGX Spark is a piece of hardware made by Nvidia for you to experiment, fine-tune and inference LLM model. It has 120GB of unified memory meaning that ram and vram are combined under this unified memory model. Which means theorectically we can fit 200B parameter model on this machine.

When I first starting out trying to setup unsloth on DGX Spark, it did not work right out of the box. There were dependencies issues, incompatible libraries, it’s docker image is for x86_64 which is incompatible with our machine that uses aarch64. This whole thing trying to setup on supposedly AI supercomputer is not user friendly and took me the whole day before I ever get into actual fine-tuning. So I’ve written a Dockerfile that is proven to be working on DGX Spark machine.

Get started

git clone to your local machine:

$ git clone https://github.com/raziman18/unsloth-dgx-spark.git
$ cd unsloth-dgx-spark

Create necessary .env file: This command actually is to match UID and GID of host and container to prevent mismatch permission issue inside of /app due to mounted volume.

$ echo "UID=$(id -u)\nGID=$(id -g)" > .env

Build the image:

docker compose build

To start the container just run the following commands: Note that docker-compose.yaml included reasonable default to get started but of course if you want to configure something just edit the docker-compose.yaml before running the start command.

docker compose up -d

Finally you can get your fine-tuning journey started on http://localhost:8888. The jupyter notebook also already included code to start fine-tuning and how to export it to GGUF which is a format that is used by ollama.

Jupyter Notebook included with fine-tuning and eval scripts

References

Maybank Bank Statement Converter

Mon, 26 May 2025 15:15:24 +0800

Maybank usually sends their bank statements monthly through email. Whenever I looked at it, I always thought I could parse the PDF file and store all the data somewhere in DB where I can do my own analytics and search through all the transactions. I’ve neglected to do this project before as I was busy with my actual job as a software engineer. On some weekend I finally found the time to work on this idea.

I started of by parsing the PDF to turn it into a text. This is done through this library pdf-parse. What I like about this library is that it can work on browser as well, so parsing the PDF can be done on the client side instead of having to send back to the server side which could incur cost and most importantly degrades the privacy aspect of the tool where your personal bank statement is sent to some random server on the internet.

Once we are done turning the bank statement into a text form, we can actually use regex magic to capture the information line by line. Before we start, we need to take a look at the format of the bank statement.

Maybank Bank Statement

As you can see in the image above, each row has date, transaction details, transaction amount and transaction balance.

Regex magic

The following regex is used to parse and capture all the details in a single row.

/^(\d{2}\/\d{2}(?:\/\d{2})?)(.+?)(\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3})*\.\d{2})([+-])((?:\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3})*|\d*)?\.\d{2})$/gm;

^(\d{2}\/\d{2}(?:\/\d{2})?) captures at least the transaction date. It does match patterns such as “26/05”. The pattern “26/05/23” is matched also. Maybank statement date formats DD/MM or DD/MM/YY are handled by our regex.
(.+?) captures all of those transaction details. It does so in quite a non-greedy way. Descriptions such as “TRANSFER TO ACCOUNT” or “MAYBANK2U PAYMENT” will be matched in any text between the date along with the amount.
This captures the amount for the transaction (\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3})*\.\d{2}). It recognizes numbers using commas to separate thousands (like “1,234.56”). The function also ensures that it has exactly two decimal places.
([+-]) - It captures if the transaction credits (+) or debits (-).
((?:\d{1,3}(?:,\d{3})*|\d*)?\.\d{2}) - This captures all of the balance within the account, after when the transaction occurs. It handles again numbers with separators or without commas.

The gm flags at the end are important too including g means global so matching all occurrences, with m meaning multiline in treating each line just as a separate input.

Using this regex, we can iterate through matches in our PDF text extracting structured data from each transaction line. Each match will give to us five capture groups that can correspond with date, details, amount, sign, and then balance. Each match will provide these specific groups.

Let’s look at just such a transaction line simple example of just how this all might work out.

5,678.90 from 26/05/23 MAYBANK2U PAYMENT TO XYZ 1,234.56

Our regex would capture:

Group 1 happened “May 26, 2023”. It was a date.
Group 2: “MAYBANK2U PAYMENT TO XYZ” (transaction details)
Group 3: (amount) Is “1,234.56”
Group 4: debit is indicated using “-”.
Group 5: “Balance of 5,678.90”

Creating the site

Once the parser have been figured out, let’s now create a site where user can visit and simply upload their bank stament to be converted to CSV or Excel. For this site actually it’s a bit overkill to use react but since that is the web framework I am familier the most I might as well use it. The UI of the site should be modern, intuitive, and easy to use. Even a non-techy person should know how to operate this site. You simply drop your bank statement in the box and click “Convert” and will convert the file into your desired format CSV/Excel.

Maybank Bank Statement Converter

Conclusion

Well that’s it, the site have been deployed and can be accessible by anyone. It is good to do programming that’s actually useful in your daily life, you’ll feel more appreciative of your work since you did yourself. Hopefully somewhere in the future I will support for more banks and credit card statements.

https://maybankconverter.raziman.online

Polishing React

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 12:11:57 +0800

I’ve picked up React again where I tried to learn in the last 2 years. But this time I won’t leave the project halfway. So I decided to create a simple website where people can leave a message to me anonymously. This may lead people to sending me hate messages or bullying but let’s ignore that it. So the idea is taken from a known service called CuriousCat. I want to make it more personalized where it can be only used by me.

I started by using an existing framework for react, that is Next.js. Next.js is a popular open-source framework for building server-side rendered React applications. It allows developers to create web applications that can be rendered on both the server and the client, providing better performance, SEO optimization, and a smoother user experience.

The basic application structure:

Different services and applications used

I want to seggregate the backend from the frontend because it is easier to focus on two different area backend and UI in building any application. Decoupling backend and UI will also help in building client for different platform i.e. Android, iOS, windows and linux.

User Interface

I am by no means creative when creating UI/UX to give the best app experience to users. Thus, I just use a great UI library for React that is MUI. MUI has always been my go-to library when building UI components. Not only it gives great default, it is also extensible where the developers can build on top of it without having a deep knowledge in CSS.

Backend

The backend was built using express, a fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for node.js. I’ve been using this library for quite a while, and built a couple of projects using it. The library is pretty much stable and reliable since there has not been much breaking changes ever since I started using it. The library also is very easy to use and easy to get started, I’d suggest to anyone who are trying to learn basic http server to use express as it has very good default and does not contain too much boilerplate to run the server. As for the database, I use sqlite which is just sql server but the data is saved in a file. Of course this is not comparable to other database such as MySql or Postgres but it is good when you just want to make a simple server that does not have many users and for a quick prototyping.

Deployment

The application is deployed on vercel. The integration between Next.js and Vercel makes the whole deployment process very simple and easy. Just deploy your repository to Github and import your repository to Vercel. So whenever you push your commit, it also deploy changes to the website.

Thinking bigger

Halfway making this website, I think to myself that what if I want to enable users to use the application as well. This will not only help me in handling user registration and login process but also gives me more motivation when there are people actually using it.

Product

Finally, after making logo and put a name on it. I’ve made an application namely anonmi. After making a couple of adjustments and change of mind the application is finally complete. This is an overview of the website.

Front page of Anonmi

User page

The application is of course open source. You may check the source code for the application https://github.com/issadarkthing/anon-site.

References

https://anonmi.online (Anonymous messaging application made by me)
https://github.com/issadarkthing/anon-site
https://react.dev
https://vercel.com/
https://expressjs.com/
https://mui.com/
https://nextjs.org/
https://curiouscat.live/

My Programming Language (Part 1)

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 18:52:53 +0800

It is always a dream for me to implement my own programming language. Borrowing ideas from other programming languages out there and add it to my language by my own desire. For example clojure’s persistent data structure helps programmer to think in functional way without sacrificing memory. Haskell’s lazy data structure enables programmers to create infinite data and also Go’s parallelism using goroutines.

My programming language is called Spirit. It is a clojure inspired language implemented in go. This project is actually is a fork of Sabre, I built my language on top of this project.

(defn program []
  (print "hello world")

(program)

Language features

There are few main differences between my language with the language I am inspired from. Below are the top features I’ve implemented in Spirit.

Function hoisting for `defn` and `defmacro`

One of the feature I miss from javascript land is function hoisting. Function hoisting is when the order of the function definition is not important. The function can be declared at the bottom of the file and the program still can run. This helps me to not have to think of the order of the declaration.

(hello "jiman" 5)

(defn hello [x i]
  (when (not (zero? i))
    (do 
      (print x) 
      (hello x (dec i)))))

Function apply in clojure is equivalent to <> in spirit

apply is similar to array destructing when passing an array to a variadic function in javascript. This concept is similar to clojure but I want to make it as a keyword (sort of) instead. Fewer keystrokes to type :)

When applying values inside of Vector into + throws an error.

(print (+ [1 2 3])) ; ArgumentError: wrong number of args (1) to '<>'

But <> can be used to fix the error.

(print (<> + [1 2 3])) ; 6

All functions that acts on Seq returns the same concrete type Seq.

For example, applying map function on Vector returns Vector instead of List. This gives more predictable API as we can ensure that the function returns the same type.

(map #(+ 1 %1) '(1 2 3)) ; (2 3 4)
(map #(+ 1 %1) [1 2 3]) ; [2 3 4]

Keyword is used instead of String as key when parsing JSON object.

In clojure, when parsing JSON object the keys in the JSON object are converted to String instead. This is inefficient because Object in Spirit uses Keyword to index. If String is used to index Object, it will have to be coerced into Keyword first, that’s just unnecessary work.

(parse-json "{ \"name\": \"jiman\" }") ; {:name "jiman"}

Object Oriented system

OOP is a one of the well known programming language that is popularized by Java and C++. This language feature is a way to manage your code. It makes the abstraction easier as data and function are coupled together.

Defining class in Spirit

(defclass Car
  {:name "toyota"
   :mileage 1000}
  
  (defmethod add-mileage [self mile]
    (assoc self :mileage (+ self.mileage mile)))
  
  (defstatic kind []
    "transportation"))

Inherit from base class

(defclass Human
  {:age 0
   :name ""
   :state "alive"}

  (defstatic code-name []
    "Homo Sapien")
  
  (defmethod aging [self]
    (assoc self :age (inc self.age)))
  
  (defmethod get-age [self]
    self.age)
  
  (defmethod add-age [self age]
    (+ (self.get-age) age)))


(defclass Student <- Human
  {:id ""
   :car (Car {})}
  
  (defmethod get-id [self]
    self.id)
  
  (defmethod get-factorial [self value]
    (if (= 1 value)
      value
      (* value (self.get-factorial (dec value))))))

Instantiate a class

(def student (Student {:id "10" :age 20}))

And few other examples

; accessing member
(assert (= student.id "10"))

; invoking method
(assert (= (student.get-id) "10"))

; inherit method and member
(assert (= (student.get-age) 20))
(assert (= student.age 20))

; use default value if member is not initialized
(assert (= "" student.name))

; access other method inside a method
(assert (= (student.add-age 10) 30))

; access nested member
(assert (= "toyota" student.car.name))

; access static method
(assert (= "transportation" (Car.kind)))

; inherit static method
(assert "inherit static method" 
        (= "Homo Sapien" (Student.code-name)))

(assert "recursive method" 
        (= 3628800 (student.get-factorial 10)))

Introduction to ipfs

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 12:49:17 +0800

Imagine an unlimited cloud storage. Where you can store as much data as possible without having to pay a single cent? This is very useful to those who wants to share a piece of file that may exceed the upload limit of any cloud storage services out there.

You can take a look at a new technology called InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system. Much like torrent but better since it also incentivize nodes who owns the data to ensure data persistence, the nodes will be incentivized by a cryptocurrency namely Filecoin. ipfs is developed in go programming language and the project is open source.

Let’s make a quick demo to show ipfs in action:

Adding a file to the ipfs is as simple as running a single command line ipfs add <file>

uploading aizawa image to ipfs

To download the file from ipfs, we need to know the cid of the file. The output of running ipfs add command returns the cid. We can use that to retrieve the whole file from the ipfs back to our local filesystem using ipfs cat <cid> > sample.png.

Using sxiv an image viewer tool can display our uploaded file on ipfs.

Link to the project repository https://github.com/ipfs

Here are the resources you can learn more about ipfs:

Gomu Terminal Music Player

Thu, 19 Aug 2021 12:30:55 +0800

As I was learning Go programming language, I developed a software that I been yearning for when I was a child due to the limitations of most music players nowadays. Go programming language or “golang” is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. The language itself is easy to learn and you can get the hang of it fairly quick.

Gomu or Go Music player is an open-source standalone TUI program. It is intended to be used inside of the terminal and it is keyboard driven which means that you will be using your keyboard the most for navigating through the application. The keybindings are mostly inspired from vim.

Gomu default keybindings

The application is able to download audio from youtube and extracts the audio from it in order to save space in your hardware. Not only that, if the downloaded video/audio from youtube has closed caption, it will be able to extract that and display it as lyric. Of course, if the video has missing close caption you would also be able to fetch the lyric from this website by using 1/2 keybindings depending on the song language (1 is for english and 2 is for chinese)

Quitting gomu and re-open it will cause it to resume for the recently played song from the queue. The queue is persistent upon closing so you won’t have to manually re-add your songs back to queue. The songs are organized according to their layout on the filesystem. By default, gomu will search song in ~/Music directory. You can always change this in the config ~/.config/gomu/config

Did I tell you that it has embedded programming language? It uses anko a golang like scripting language. This scripting language is used to script some things like adding event listener when the song changes and call notify-send to show notification about the currently played song. It is also used to change or add new keybindings.

If you want to try out gomu for yourself, you can go to this repository. Feel free to contribute 😄

Password Checker

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 12:40:59 +0800

Have you ever wondered if your password has been breached or exposed to the internet before? If you use the same password for multiple websites, that’s unfortunate because it may have been exposed to the public. To testify this, we can use haveibeenpwned api to (not really) give our password and check against public data.

First off, we have to hash our password using sha-1. In linux, you can use command sha1sum to transform text into sha-1 hash. Hash is a one way operation meaning that you can only transform the input to the output deterministically and not vice versa.

PASSWORD="$(echo -n "$RAW" | sha1sum | awk '{print $1}' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]')"
PREFIX="${PASSWORD:0:5}"

After that we need to extract first 5 characters from the hashed password and append it to this url https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/$PREFIX where $PREFIX is the variable which holds the first 5 character of our hashed password.

To make a request against the api, you can use curl. Option -Ss is used to silent the verbose output and only show error message if it fails.

RANGE_PASSW=$(curl -Ss "https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/$PREFIX")

The output of the curl command will look like this:

F971582870552CF5BA8DD23C8EC01F99A0A:2
F984473B8ED4FBC1C83E03146668A2CEBEC:2
F9F50FE2D40187D3681AA1BDD6733C8914E:2
FA4D46A28BB6C52C0260CE565C771D4A8E0:2
FAFFD17C2F38B0A9DBF5E112DC3A005C06C:5
FB064758EB0BC12238ACC06280DA6D46259:1
... more

The output is a list of hash strings that matches the first 5 character of our hashed password. This is due to the security measurement taken by haveibeenpwned so that they don’t know the exact password hash you tried to check against their API.

Now, the output has the following format {password hash without prefix:instances of password have been pwned}. We can use bash string substring built-in to extract the information we need from the curl output.

PW=${RES%:*} # capture everything before ':'
COUNT=${RES#*:} # capture everything after ':'

Now all is left is to find which password belongs to ours. We can simply loop through the list and check against our hashed password without the first 5 character suffix.

while read -r RES; do

  PW=${RES%:*}
  COUNT=${RES#*:}

  if [[ $SUFFIX = $PW ]]; then
    printf "password has been found %d times(s)\n" "$COUNT" 2>/dev/null
    exit
  fi

done <<< "$RANGE_PASSW"

echo "password has been found 0 time(s)"

The complete script is given below:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

read RAW

PASSWORD="$(echo -n "$RAW" | sha1sum | awk '{print $1}' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]')"
PREFIX="${PASSWORD:0:5}"
SUFFIX="${PASSWORD:5}"

RANGE_PASSW=$(curl -Ss "https://api.pwnedpasswords.com/range/$PREFIX")

while read -r RES; do

	PW=${RES%:*}
	COUNT=${RES#*:}

	if [[ $SUFFIX = $PW ]]; then
		printf "password has been found %d times(s)\n" "$COUNT" 2>/dev/null
		exit
	fi

done <<< "$RANGE_PASSW"

echo "password has been found 0 time(s)"

To use the script, you can either pipe your password into the script or type the password after running it.

Battery Low Warn Script

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 20:42:57 +0800

If you are using window manager for example i3 or xmonad. You might miss a feature from DE that you used before that is battery low warning. If you use pc, that’s fine but if you are a laptop user like me, this script may become handy.

Running $ upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1 will output info about your laptop’s battery.

  native-path:          BAT1
  vendor:               Hewlett-Packard
  model:                PABAS0241231
  serial:               41167
  power supply:         yes
  updated:              Tue 17 Aug 2021 09:24:13 PM (41 seconds ago)
  has history:          yes
  has statistics:       yes
  battery
    present:             yes
    rechargeable:        yes
    state:               fully-charged
    warning-level:       none
    energy:              20.1779 Wh
    energy-empty:        0 Wh
    energy-full:         20.4435 Wh
    energy-full-design:  41.7533 Wh
    energy-rate:         0.0781538 W
    voltage:             12.724 V
    percentage:          100%
    capacity:            45.9198%
    technology:          lithium-ion
    icon-name:          'battery-full-charged-symbolic'

You can find out the battery percentage under battery > percentage. Using this info, we can capture the battery level of our laptop by using awk. The output of the info can be piped into

awk '/percentage/ {gsub(/%/, ""); print $2}'.

Running the following command

$ upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1 | awk '/percentage/ {gsub(/%/, ""); print $2}'

Will output 100 showing my laptop battery percentage. Now we have to make a script to run every 30 seconds to check if battery has reached low percentage i.e. 20%.

The following script will simply do that but it raises a problem that it will continuously warn the user battery low every 30 seconds.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

BATT_THRESHOLD=20 # change here

while :;do

	BAT_PERCENTAGE=$(upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1 \
		| awk '/percentage/ {gsub(/%/, ""); print $2}')

	if [[ $BAT_PERCENTAGE -le $BATT_THRESHOLD ]]; then
		notify-send -u "critical" "Battery Low Warning"
	fi

	sleep 30

done

To prevent that from happening, we can set a variable to true if the user has been warned about battery low and set it back to false when the battery has been charged up and surpasses the battery low threshold (20%). Bash technically has no boolean data type so we set it as string named ‘true’ and ‘false’.

The final script will look like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

HASBEENWARNED=false
BATT_THRESHOLD=20 # change here

while :;do

	BAT_PERCENTAGE=$(upower -i /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT1 \
		| awk '/percentage/ {gsub(/%/, ""); print $2}')

	if [[ $BAT_PERCENTAGE -le $BATT_THRESHOLD ]] && [[ $HASBEENWARNED = false ]]; then
		notify-send -u "critical" "Battery Low Warning"
		HASBEENWARNED=true
	elif [[ $BAT_PERCENTAGE -gt $BAT_PERCENTAGE ]] && [[ $HASBEENWARNED = true ]]; then
		HASBEENWARNED=false
	fi

	sleep 30

done

Hopefully this will fix the missing feature from WM world :)

Kill Process Using Fzf

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 17:48:24 +0800

I wrote a helper script to find processes and kill them using fzf. By default it uses sigterm 15 to kill the process. If you want to change the sigterm code for example, 9 you can just pass it as argument like so kp 9. To exit without killing any process, press esc key.

Copy and paste this to a file and rename it as kp. After that, change the file’s permission to executable chmod +x kp. Move the file to be in one of the $PATH directory so that you can freely use command kp anywhere in your system.

#!/bin/bash

# default to sigterm -15
SIGCODE=-${1:-15}

pid=$(ps -ef \
	| sed 1d \
	| eval "fzf ${FZF_DEFAULT_OPTS} -m --header='[kill:process:$SIGCODE]'" \
	| awk '{print $2}')

if [[ -n $pid ]]; then
  echo $pid | xargs kill $SIGCODE
  $0
fi

journal of issadarkthing

Changing Domain Name Tanks My Seo

LLM fine-tuning

Introduction

Get started

References

Maybank Bank Statement Converter

Regex magic

Creating the site

Conclusion

Polishing React

User Interface

Backend

Deployment

Thinking bigger

Product

References

My Programming Language (Part 1)

Language features

Function hoisting for defn and defmacro

Function apply in clojure is equivalent to <> in spirit

All functions that acts on Seq returns the same concrete type Seq.

Keyword is used instead of String as key when parsing JSON object.

Object Oriented system

Introduction to ipfs

Gomu Terminal Music Player

Password Checker

Battery Low Warn Script

Kill Process Using Fzf

Function hoisting for `defn` and `defmacro`