Plurrrr

A Hungry Scorpion

In the afternoon I noticed that Adam's Heterometrus silenus was out and about. We keep this scorpion in a plastic container on my desk. As it was actively searching for food I decided to give it a mealworm.

It grabbed the mealworm and even the tweezers I used; it was quite hungry. When it had transferred the mealworm to its "mouth" it kept looking for food so I gave it another mealworm. This is the first time the scorpion is this active, maybe because of the high temperatures in my office (±28°C).

• scorpion

What does First Normal Form actually mean?

Despite being a fundamental concept in relational databases, First Normal Form (or 1NF) is often explained confusingly or downright incorrect. This post explains what 1NF actually means and is useful for, and debunk a number of the misunderstandings.

Source: What does First Normal Form actually mean?

• database

Comparison of Python HTTP clients

There are a huge number of HTTP clients available for Python - a quick search for “Python HTTP Clients” on Github returns over 1700 results(!) How do you make sense of all of them and find one which is right for your particular use case?

Do you have a single machine at your disposal, or a collection of them? Do you want to keep things simple or is raw performance more of a concern? A web application needing to make the odd request to a micro-service api is going to have quite different requirements to a script constantly scraping data. Additionally, there's the concern whether the library you choose will still be around 6 months down the line.

In this article we're going to cover five of the best HTTP clients currently available for Python and detail why each of them might be one for you to consider.

Source: Comparison of Python HTTP clients, an article by Ian Wootten.

• python

Running pdflatex Using the Alpine Pandoc LaTeX Image

In the evening I managed to create a relatively small pdflatex Docker image by using the Pandoc LaTeX image as a base. Read all about it in Running pdflatex Using the Alpine Pandoc LaTeX Image

• docker

Liocheles australasiae Eating

In the evening I noticed that another scorpion had become quite active; Liocheles australasiae. So I dropped a mealworm close to it. At first it was not interested but later I checked upon the small scorpion and it was enjoying its meal.

• scorpion