Plurrrr

A lot has been written about metaclasses, and most of it is unintelligible. Suffice to say that metaclasses allow you to define methods for the class itself, instead of for its instance.

The folks at bit.io just published an excellent review of PostgreSQL security, with a startling conclusion: the vast majority of PostgreSQL connections that are happening over the public internet are insecure, due to a combination of server misconfigurations and most clients unfortunately defaulting to unsafe settings.

In short: most Postgres clients either don’t enforce TLS at all on the connections to servers, or enforce that a TLS handshake happens but don’t verify that the certificate is valid and matches the expected hostname. What this means in practice is that those connections can be trivially interposed by anyone sitting between the client and server - a classic Machine in the Middle (MitM) attack.

From time to time I find myself trying to move a batch of files that have a similar pattern in their names but doesn't quite match an easy to write glob pattern. In the past, I used to write quick and dirty scripts — usually in shell script, nothing fancy — to make it easier to move these files around. A few months ago I discovered zmv, a zsh function that is much better than plain old mv to move files around. Since an example is worth a thousand blog posts, let's jump right into it.