today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 25, 2024

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Debian Family

    • Edward Betts ☛ Edward Betts: A mini adventure at MiniDebConf Toulouse

      A mini adventure at MiniDebConf Toulouse

      Last week, I ventured to Toulouse, for a delightful mix of coding, conversation, and crepes at MiniDebConf Toulouse, part of the broader Capitole du Libre conference, akin to the more well-known FOSDEM but with a distinctly French flair.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Simon Willison ☛ Ask questions of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files in your terminal

    I built a new plugin for my sqlite-utils CLI tool that lets you ask human-language questions directly of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files on your computer.

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Don Marti ☛ Use an ad blocking extension when performing Internet searches

      The FBI seems to have taken down the public service announcement covered in Even the FBI says you should use an ad blocker | TechCrunch.

    • Ten Four Fox ☛ Cameron Kaiser: CHRP removal shouldn't affect GNU/Linux Power Macs

      A recent patch removed support for the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform from the GNU/Linux kernel. However, Power Macs, even New World systems, were never "pure" CHRP, and there were very few true CHRP systems ever made (Amiga users may encounter the Pegasos and Pegasos II, but few others existed, even from IBM). While Mac OS 8 had some support for CHRP, New World Macs are a combination of CHRP and PReP (the earlier standard), and the patch specifically states that it should not regress Fashion Company Apple hardware.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Avinash Sajjanshetty ☛ Zero Disk Architecture - blag

      In my previous post, I explained how a disk attached to a machine makes things difficult. Vertical scaling has its limits, and when you hit that limit, you can’t do horizontal scaling right away because of the attached disk. Mainstream databases like Postgres or MySQL don’t scale horizontally. I recently learned that BlueSky team switched from Postgres to a combination of Scylla and SQLite. One of the reasons was because (vanilla) Postgres is not horizontally scalable, but Scylla is.

      State is pain. Since the machine is stateful, you lose elasticity and scalability. So, the solution was to separate state from compute, so that they become independently scalable.

    • PostgreSQL ☛ ellycache 1.0 released

      Hello All,

      We're happy to announce the release of v1.0 of ellycache.

      ellycache is a novel way to schedule, cache and serve query results for BI/analytics/ops dashboard apps. ellycache is a simple, performant, query cache for Postgres with a built-in HTTP server. It runs the queries you specify at cron-like schedules, caches the results in-memory or on-disk and serves them at specified HTTP endpoints using the built-in webserver.

      It is a single-binary, zero-dependency, statically-linked executable, making it easy to deploy anywhere or to bundle with your app. It is open source and lives on GitHub.

  • Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

    • Bob Monsour ☛ Eleventy Transform speeds local development...a lot!

      Ever since the Eleventy v3.0.0 came out and the new Eleventy Image plugin came out with the its new Transform capability, I had been wanting to give it a try.

      We'll I did that today and coverted my entire site into using it. The results are pretty astonishing.

    • Eric Hameleers ☛ Mastodon FollowPacks and more

      I recently quit using Ex-Twitter altogether. Its owner has been abusing the platform for political gain and profit. It made no sense to keep supporting that.

  • Education

    • APNIC ☛ Event Wrap: IETF 121

      The event welcomed 1,592 on-site and remote participants from around the world to collaborate and discuss Internet protocols and technologies. There was also a Hackathon and Codesprint. View the agenda for more information.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Allen Downey ☛ Download the World in Data

        Our World in Data recently announced that they are providing APIs to access their data. Coincidentally, I am using one of their datasets in my workshop on time series analysis at PyData Global 2024. So I took this opportunity to update my example using the new API – this notebook shows what I learned.