Today we went to a forest close to where we live: Staelduinse Bos. On
our way we saw a mute swan couple with young so I stopped my bike and took
a photo.
Female mute swan, Cygnus olor, with young.
Before we entered the forest we had a short break in "De Bosrand"
(Literally: Edge of the forest), a restaurant.
Adam drawing a mushroom.
Adam had taken his sketchbook with him and he and his sister drew
mushrooms. Adam was looking forward to find actual mushrooms to
sketch.
A large snail resting on a tree. Photo taken by Adam.
Once in the forest we spotted large snails resting on trees. Alice and
Adam like snails a lot. Alice even keeps a pet snail.
Adam and Alice exploring.
While the children kept looking for mushrooms I kept looking for
butterflies, hoping to take a few nice photos of those insects.
A large snail on Adam's hand.
After some walking we reached the visitor's center which has a nice
garden. We walked the tracks keeping our eyes peeled for butterflies,
mushrooms etc. I did spot a large dragonfly but it was too skittish.
Ferns in the garden of the visitor's center.
After some more relaxing in the garden we walked back to our bikes. We
had a reservation for 4pm at the restaurant "De Bosrand" and got there
just a bit late. It was a great day with fantastic weather.
Believe it or not, Twitter can be a very useful source of
information and news. Or, it can waste your time and make you
sad. It’s all in how you use it. Here I’ll show you how to make
Twitter work for you, instead of against you.
Around a third of the
population
have trouble sleeping, including difficulties maintaining sleep
throughout the night.
While nighttime awakenings are distressing for most sufferers, there
is some evidence from our recent past that suggests this period of
wakefulness occurring between two separate sleep periods was the
norm.
AES, or “Advanced Encryption Standard”, is an encryption
specification that uses the Rijndael cipher as its symmetric key
ciphering algorithm. AES encrypts a message with a private key, and
no one but the key holder can decrypt the message. A great example
of a good use-case for AES-256 is encrypting all the data on the
hard drive of a computer when it’s not in use.
In Rust, there are several ways to turn a value into a string. In
this article, we will explore a few different ways and discuss what
are the most idiomatic approaches depending on the context you are
currently working on.
In the evening I finished most of the tag support in the Perl version
of tumblelog. The tags page uses the same
logarithmic scaling method as I used in Google Search
Cloud. However, I
decided to order the tags alphabetically.
I hope to be able to release this new version, 5.0.0, within a week or
two.
EXPLAIN ANALYZE is the key to optimizing SQL statements in
PostgreSQL. This article does not attempt to explain everything
there is to it. Rather, I want to give you a brief introduction,
explain what to look for and show you some helpful tools to
visualize the output.
Do you use Docker images to run your software? Does running or
building your image involve a password or other credential that you
really (don’t) want to share with hackers?
Well, you’re in luck, because Docker makes it really easy to share
your passwords, cloud credentials, and SSH private keys with the
world. Whether it’s runtime secrets, build secrets, or just some
random unrelated credentials you had lying around in the wrong
place, Docker’s got you covered when it comes to secret leaks.
In this article we’ll cover:
Some evidence this actually happens.
Leaking build time secrets.
Accidental leaks with COPY.
Leaking runtime secrets.
Some (partially?) missing tooling that would help fix the problem.
WWDC21 being less than two weeks away means the first Swift 5.5 beta
is almost here, and it comes with a massive set of improvements –
async/await, actors, throwing properties, and many more. For the
first time it’s probably easier to ask “what isn’t new in Swift 5.5”
because so much is changing.
In this article I’m going to walk through each of the changes with
code samples, so you can see how each of them work in practice.
Last Monday I ordered a Liocheles australasiae online with
Geleedpotigen.com located in
Belgium. The Dwarf Wood Scorpion was shipped on Tuesday and arrived
today just before noon.
Liocheles australasiae in a vial.
The scorpion came well packed: in a vial stored in a Styrofoam box
with heatpack and paper to prevent it from bouncing around. The
Styrofoam box itself was packed inside a carton box. Also included was
a nice card which thanked me for the order. I paid €25,00 for the
scorpion and €9,99 for shipping.
Liocheles australasiae on 5mm grid paper.
The vial had a message which told me that this species loves to play
dead (thanatosis). However, this specimen was moving normally when I
got it out of the vial onto a piece of 5mm grid paper. After taking
photos I put the scorpion in a small cup with the moist paper it came
in.
Later I prepared a small terrarium. First, I made very dry coconut
coir moist by putting it in a Ziplock bag and adding water. Next I
mixed the water and the coir by kneading carefully. I had to keep
adding water several times until the coir was quite moist.
Liocheles australasiae in its terrarium.
I put the coconut coir in a plastic container with small holes drilled
in the sides and the lid for ventilation. I placed a piece of cork
bark for a hide, and some plastic plants for decoration. When done I
added the small scorpion. I also added a small pre-killed mealworm
which it might eat in the night.
As this species is well know for being parthenogenetic, i.e. females
can give birth without having been in contact with a male. In this
case the offspring are all females. I expect a brood somewhere in the
summer since all species in the hobby seem to be females.
Functional programming is an increasing popular programming paradigm
with many languages building or already supporting it. Go already
supports some of these features such as first-class and higher order
functions and enabling functional programming.
One key feature that’s been missing from Go is generics. Without
this feature, functional Go libraries and applications are forced
down one of two paths: type safe + use-case specific or
type-unsafe + use-case agnostic. With the upcoming release of Go
1.18 in early 2022, generics are expected to be added to the
language which will
enable new sorts of functional programming solutions in Go.
After years of overly-acrimonious online discussion, Go is
continuing down the chute towards getting generics. I'm already
seeing the inevitable "functional" libraries (plural) coming
out. I'm going to explain why none of these libraries are going to
materially impact what the community considers good style.
They may see some use. I may even use some of them myself on small
scales. Some iconoclasts will program with them extensively, and
their code will work, in the sense that it will do what it was
designed to do regardless of how the code reads. But they are not
going to change what generally-good style is considered to be.
If you hover over the above title or any other article title on this
blog you might notice an octothorp, also known as hash sign or pound
sign, appearing after the title. This is to signal that clicking on
the title leads to the permanent link for the blog page with
articles. As a blog page can have multiple articles a fragment is used
to jump directly to the right article.
I used the following Sass code to achieve the hash sign after the text:
The first rule overrides the color of an anchor element inside an
element having an id attribute that's a direct descendant of the
article element. The second rule puts a hash sign after this element
on hover with some additional padding and shows the hash sign using
the link color.
To summarise: clicking on a heading makes the title scroll up (if
there is space) and sets the address bar contents to the permalink for
the clicked article including a fragment.
This all in preparation for the upcoming version 5.0.0 of tumblelog
which is going to support tags per article and hence requires this
type of linking with fragments.
“Tree-shaking” is a must-have performance optimization when bundling
JavaScript. In this article, we dive deeper on how exactly it works
and how specs and practice intertwine to make bundles leaner and
more performant. Plus, you’ll get a tree-shaking checklist to use
for your projects.
Now when I started to think about this post I was worried it was
going to be rather long and arduous to research (although I believe
class is going to ultimately win that crown 😜), but then I
remembered I had written a blog post about how async and await
worked in Python
3.5. As
part of that post I went through the history of how Python got to
that point of asynchronous programming, which meant I had already
dived into the details of how Python evolved earlier syntax to what
it has today! Thus this post is going to draw heavily from my
async history
post
to save myself some time, so if you feel I skimmed over details then
chances are it's because I covered it in my other post.
Magit is a text-based Git user interface that puts an unmatched
focus on streamlining workflows. Commands are invoked using short
mnemonic key sequences that take the cursor’s position in the highly
actionable interface into account to provide context-sensitive
behavior.
With Magit you can do nearly everything that you can do when using
Git on the command-line, but at greater speed and while taking
advantage of advanced features that previously seemed too daunting
to use on a daily basis. Many users will find that by using Magit
they can become more effective Git user.
The aliens arrive in a
starship. Surely,
one might think, to have all that technology they must have the idea
of numbers. Or maybe one finds an uncontacted tribe deep in the
jungle. Surely they too must have the idea of numbers. To us numbers
seem so natural—and “obvious”—that it’s hard to imagine everyone
wouldn’t have them. But if one digs a little deeper, it’s not so
clear.
Web fonts are often terrible for web performance and none of the
font loading strategies are particularly effective to address
that. Upcoming font options may finally deliver on the promise of
making it easier to align fallback fonts to the final fonts.
Arrays in Rust are fixed size, and Rust requires that every element
in an array is initialized to a valid value when the array is
initialized. The result of these requirements is array
initialization in Rust is a much deeper topic than it would seem.
While learning how to write multithreaded code in Java or C++ can
make computer science students reconsider their career choices,
calling a function asynchronously in Go is just a matter of
prefixing a function call with the go keyword. However, writing
concurrent Go code can also be risky, as vicious concurrency bugs
can slowly sneak into your application. Before you know it, there
could be thousands of hanging goroutines slowing down your
application, ultimately causing it to crash. This blog post provides
a Semgrep rule that can be used in a bug-hunting quest and includes
a link to a repository of specialized Semgrep rules that we use in
our audits. It also explains how to use one of those rules to find a
particularly pesky type of bug in Go: goroutine leaks.
