Early in the afternoon Esme, some friends, and I went to see the Westland Boat Parade. The boats are decorated with flowers, fruits, and vegetables.
Later, when I got up, Esme spotted a tiny rodent. It ran towards her, she was still sitting, and nestled itself against her upper leg. Carefully I picked up the little animal and Esme took a few photos. I guess it's a common vole, Microtus arvalis. I moved the tiny animal to a safe spot in the shadow of a tree.
I decided to build a remote SQLite management GUI that does not require running any service in the remote VM and only needs an SSH connection between you and the remote machine.
Source: Building a remote SQLite explorer, an article by Ricardo Ander-Egg Aguilar.
So I decided to finally give GitHub Copilot a spin. Let's see how our new robot overlords are doing in terms of programming!
Source: Try Copilot in Vim in Docker, an article by Marek Gibney.
This guide is about security, not privacy.
Additionally, security measures that heavily compromise usability were not included.
This guide aims to produce above-average secure systems, without giving up features.
Source: Hardening macOS, an article by Ricard Bejarano.
From visionary director Robert Eggers comes The Northman, an action-filled epic that follows a young Viking prince on his quest to avenge his father's murder.
In the evening I watched The Northman. I liked the movie and give it a 7 out of 10.
Hurl is a command line tool that runs HTTP requests defined in a simple plain text format.
It can perform requests, capture values and evaluate queries on headers and body response. Hurl is very versatile: it can be used for both fetching data and testing HTTP sessions.
Source: Hurl - Run and Test HTTP Requests.
In this post, I want to share a small little pattern that I’ve found to have a surprisingly high quality-of-life improvement, and I call it the list of monoids pattern.
The idea is that whenever we have a monoidal value - a type that is an instance of the
Monoidtype class - we can sometimes produce a more ergonomic API if we change our functions to instead to a list of these monoidal values.
Source: The list of monoids pattern, an article by Ollie Charles.
This book is for anyone who is interested in computing, and wants to learn more about the exciting, but sometimes daunting world of The Shell. The shell is simple interface for working with computers and programs and learning some of its features can enormously increase your productivity as any computer user - whether a home user or hobbyist, programmer, data scientist, writer, administrator or other professional.
Source: Effective Shell an online book by Dave Kerr.
The
someandanykeywords are not new in Swift. Thesomekeyword was introduced in Swift 5.1 whereas theanykeyword was introduced in Swift 5.6. In Swift 5.7, Apple makes another great improvement on both of these keywords. We can now use both of these keywords in the function’s parameter position!
Source: Understanding the "some" and "any" keywords in Swift 5.7, an article by Lee Kah Seng.
I start a lot of projects. A lot! Django is my go-to framework for spinning up a quick personal project, and while it's a fantastic framework, a big part of the reason I love Django is that it feels familiar.
I have a lot of muscle memory for starting a new project. Here are six things that I do after I run
django-admin startproject.
Source: Six things I do every time I start a Django project, an article by Brenton Cleeland.
Go’s paradox is that error handling is core to the language yet the language doesn’t prescribe how to handle errors. Community efforts have been made to improve and standardize error handling but many miss the centrality of errors within our application’s domain. That is, your errors are as important as your
CustomerandOrdertypes.
Source: Failure is your Domain, an article by Ben Johnson.
One of the promises of Docker is reproducibility: you can build an image on a different machine, and assuming you’ve done the appropriate setup, get the same result. So it can be a little confusing when you try to build your Python-based
Dockerfileon a new Mac, and everything starts failing. What used to work before—on an older Mac, or on a Linux machine—fails in completely unexpected ways.
Source: Why new Macs break your Docker build, and how to fix it, an article by Itamar Turner-Trauring.
Simon Willison wrote a One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite. The solution uses an in-memory database.
I’ve been writing more and more Haskell lately, as part of a side project involving GraphQL. As part of working with the language, I’ve had to work with its compile errors. The Haskell compiler gives you errors that are extremely informative—if you know the language. If you don’t know the language very well, the compiler errors can occasionally be opaque and unhelpful.
I’ve very much enjoyed using Haskell, and I figure the best way for me to give back to the community is to make this situation a little better. In order to do this, we’re going to take a fun dive into Haskell errors, why they’re confusing, and how they might be improved.
This article is an introduction to QUIC and its potential for censorship resistance, as well as a survey of current QUIC blocking in various countries. The presented findings reveal QUIC censorship in China, India, Russia and Uganda.
Source: A Quick Look at QUIC Censorship, an article by Kathrin Elmenhorst.
This post is an informal walk through bootstrap setup of nixpkgs. It’s quite long and has many facets we look at here. If you don’t understand some bits of it don’t worry: it’s both a complicated topic and I did a bad job at explaining it.
Source: nixpkgs bootstrap intro.
The mobile-first design methodology is great—it focuses on what really matters to the user, it’s well-practiced, and it’s been a common design pattern for years. So developing your CSS mobile-first should also be great, too…right?
Source: Mobile-First CSS: Is It Time for a Rethink?, an article by Patrick Clancey.
HTTP/3 builds on User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and is already being used by prominent internet companies such as Google and Facebook. If you’re using Chrome and connecting to a Google service, you’re probably already using QUIC.
Source: What Is HTTP/3 - Lowdown on the Fast New UDP-Based Protocol, an article by Tonino Jankov.
Akamai security researchers discovered Panchan, a new peer-to-peer botnet and SSH worm that emerged in March 2022 and has been actively breaching Linux servers since.
Source: Panchan’s Mining Rig: New Golang Peer-to-Peer Botnet Says “Hi!”, an article by Stiv Kupchik.
Web scraping describes the various techniques employed in extracting data from websites. More often than not, this is done programmatically using tiny programs called spiders. However, web scraping offers insidious challenges and obstacles that might not be immediately obvious. One of them is issues with data validity.
The Original Sin of Rust async programming is making it multi-threaded by default. If premature optimization is the root of all evil, this is the mother of all premature optimizations, and it curses all your code with the unholy
Send + 'static, or worse yetSend + Sync + 'static, which just kills all the joy of actually writing Rust.
Source: Local Async Executors and Why They Should be the Default, an article by Maciej Hirsz.
git snapcreates a commit that includes most local changes on a user- and machine-specific snapshots branch. It doesn't ask for a commit message. It also doesn't touch the working tree, saves and restores the index, and switches back to the branch that was checked out before runninggit snap. In other words, everything looks the same as before after runninggit snap, but your changes are safely stored by Git and can be pushed to a remote for redundancy or sharing. This is in contrast to stashes.
Source: git-snap: Create snapshot commits on a not checked-out branch without touching the working tree or losing staged changes, an article by Lukas Waymann.
Rust does not provide the execution context required to execute Futures and Streams. This execution context is called a runtime. You can't run an async Rust program without a runtime.
Source: Async Rust: What is a runtime? Here is how tokio works under the hood, an article by Sylvain Kerkour.
Jack Sparrow and Barbossa embark on a quest to find the elusive fountain of youth, only to discover that Blackbeard and his daughter are after it too.
In the evening Alice, Adam, and I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. I liked the movie and give it a 7 out of 10.
A new iteration of HTTP, the protocol that powers the World Wide Web, is now with us. Designated HTTP/3, it’s been in development since 2018 and is currently in the Internet Draft stage of the Standards Track.
Source: HTTP/3 Deep Dive, an article by Jerry Bartlett.
I’ve always found Go’s standard library very approachable to read. Parts of the standard library include concepts that are self-contained and do not require too much prior context to dive into. When I read that the sorting algorithm for Go has changed¹ to something called “pdqsort”, I thought it would be nice to go take a look and learn about it.
Source: Go’s new sorting algorithm: pdqsort.
Salvatore Testa shows 4 macOS Screenshot Tricks To Impress Your Co-Workers.
Here's yet another note-to-self on using jq, this time to transform a flat list of order totals and dates into a summary of total order values by year.
Source: Summing and grouping values with jq, an article by DJ Adams.
Our engineering team focuses on getting the maximum amount of information from the network while sending as little traffic as possible. This lean approach to network discovery is driven by our goal of being fast and safe for all networks. The more we can learn about a system from a single measurement, the less traffic we create and the quicker things run. In this post, I want to share how Rumble uses one of the most common network protocols to obtain a wealth of information about network-attached devices.
Source: One ping to find them: lean network discovery, an article by HD Moore.
Today I’m going to show you how to use Cuelang, which is both an extension of YAML and command-line tool, to validate your YAML.
Source: Validate Your YAML (with CUE), an article by Adam Gordon Bell.
I have seen a lot of programmers over the years express concerns; what if something accidentally conforms to an interface and causes some horrible bug? What if I have an interface for
Shoot()for a video game and some object wanders in thatShoot()s a real gun by accident? Isn't it safer to formally declare conformance?
Source: Why Duck Typing Is Safe, an article by Jeremy Bowers.
As I’ve journeyed deeper into the world of
NixOSI have realized that there were some major issues with the way I managed machine configurations. What I’m presenting here is the outcome of that cleanup work.
Source: NixOS: Confederation, an article by Martin Myrseth.
I was recently reading the first few chapters of Software Design for Flexibility (SDF). Doing so reminded of the duality between closures in Functional Programming (FP) and object instances in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). When I'd heard it previously this connection had seemed tenuous at best and irrelevant at worst. However when I considered this duality this last time, I was able to internalize its significance.
Source: Illustrating the duality of closures and objects, an article by Jonathan E. Magen.
The good news is that Apple has done most of the heavy lifting here by having built a pluggable authentication module (PAM) for Touch ID; all you need to do is essentially turn it on, which takes just a few simple steps.
Source: Quick Tip: Enable Touch ID for sudo, an article by Dan Moren.
In this post, we’ll cover the details of garbage collection in Python. First, we’ll review the basics about memory management and why we need garbage collection. Then we’ll look at how Python implements garbage collection. Finally, we’ll take a practical look at how you should think about garbage collection when writing your Python applications.
Source: Python Garbage Collection: What It Is and How It Works, an article by Alex DeBrie.
With pandas it is easy to read Excel files and convert the data into a DataFrame. Unfortunately Excel files in the real world are often poorly constructed. In those cases where the data is scattered across the worksheet, you may need to customize the way you read the data. This article will discuss how to use pandas and openpyxl to read these types of Excel files and cleanly convert the data to a DataFrame suitable for further analysis.
Source: Reading Poorly Structured Excel Files with Pandas, an article by Chris Moffitt.
Five members of the Missing Persons Task Force investigate the mysterious disappearance of 17-year-old Evi. While unraveling the girl's troubled relationship with her parents, which leaves her father as one of the prime suspects, they discover that her life had recently taken a bizarre turn, with the teenager seen at several sex parties, receiving expensive gifts from a shadowy new friend. Was Evi the victim of a pimp, or did her father discover his daughter's double life and lose control?
In the evening Esme and I watched Vermist on Netflix (Missing Persons Unit). I liked the movie and give it a 7 out of 10.
Apple’s M1 chips have an “unpatchable” hardware vulnerability that could allow attackers to break through its last line of security defenses, MIT researchers have discovered.
Source: MIT researchers uncover ‘unpatchable’ flaw in Apple M1 chips, an article by Carly Page.
We mock PostgreSQL tables using Docker and pytest-postgresql, allowing unit testing for application code queries without a remote database. This allows our tests to cover both the SQL logic and the Python code at the same time, all without hitting network resources.
Source: How to Mock PostgreSQL with Pytest and pytest-postgresql, an article by Ryan Duve.
I've now been using NixOS for one year. I use it to manage both my private PC and my laptop at work. Overall, it has been a great experience. I really appreciate the scale and control it brings to my digital life.
In May 2022, I stepped it up a notch by adding a third device running NixOS, namely a custom-built router! After a month of interspersed work I had successfully replaced my home network router.
In this blog post I'll go through why I embarked on this journey, how I did it, and lessons learned.
Source: Building a router with NixOS, an article by Johan Andersson.
In web development, Hydration is a technique to add interactivity to server-rendered HTML. It’s a technique in which client-side JavaScript converts a static HTML web page into a dynamic web page by attaching event handlers to the HTML elements.
However, attaching event handlers to the Document Object Model (DOM) is not the most challenging or expensive part of hydration.
In this article, I’ll explain why I believe hydration is overhead. It’s not the solution; it’s a hack that consumes memory and slows down startup, especially on mobile. For the sake of this article, let’s define overhead as work that can be avoided and still leads to the same end result.
Source: JavaScript Hydration Is a Workaround, Not a Solution, an article by Miško Hevery.
This began as a reply to another article by Lucas F. Costa; it lists practices to improve user-experience (UX) of command-line interfaces (CLIs). It comes from a good place, and has some good advice: I particularly like its advice on input-validation and understandable errors. Unfortunately, a number of its suggestions are problematic, particularly from an accessibility perspective.
Source: Best practices for inclusive CLIs, an article by Rohan Kumar.
The previous post discussed the subtle arts of naming things and not repeating yourself--and now I want to extend its observations beyond functions.
Source: the hard problem: naming functions and other gizmos.
dns.toys is a DNS server that takes creative liberties with the DNS protocol to offer handy utilities and services that are easily accessible via the command line.
In the early evening I played a bit with DNS Toys.