Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 02, 2024

• Avinash Sajjanshetty ☛ Building a distributed log using S3 (under 150 lines of Go)

  I will show how we can implement a durable, distributed, and highly available log using S3. This post is the third part in the series: [...]

• The Washington Post ☛ Engineers improve coily hair animation for Black film characters

  Kim explained that most hair simulations rely on the physics of straight rods, limiting the kind of hair textures that can be achieved. Instead, the authors model hair strands as tight helices — shapes with three-dimensional spirals. In doing so, they were able to re-create three kinds of coiled-hair phenomena: phase locking, switchbacks and period skipping.

• Nolan Lawson ☛ Avoiding unnecessary cleanup work in disconnectedCallback

  In a previous post, I said that a web component’s connectedCallback and disconnectedCallback should be mirror images of each other: one for setup, the other for cleanup.

• Drew Breunig ☛ Turning Your Root URL Into a DuckDB Remote Database | Drew Breunig

  But I wondered: what is the body of the request DuckDB is sending? It would be cool if someone could use the root Overture URL as a starting point, rather than having to remember a subdomain.

  I spun up a quick Rails app and started ATTACH-ing to localhost and interrogating the request. DuckDB fires a standard GET HTTP request; there’s nothing special about it. However, it does use a fairly unique user agent: “cpp-httplib/0.14.3”. This is the C++ library used by DuckDB. We can check a request’s user agent and respond with a static database file if it matches “cpp-httplib”.

  Here’s what a Rails controller might look like: [...]

• Rlang ☛ Predicting Best Picture at the 2025 Academy Awards

  December 1st, 2024With polling the election in my rearview, I am pivoting to: awards season! I am running back my Best Picture model that I began working on last year.