Weeknotes 132

Christmas is over, thank fuck for that. Back to work; sort of. I caught a cold towards the end of the week, stress induced (more on that another time), so I took Friday off.

After ten years, it’s time to stop making videos – Tom Scott has decided to end his video-a-week streak. Who can blame him for wanting to take a bit of a break? I’m glad he’s not giving up completely though.

The Most Consequential Act of Sabotage In Modern Times

The destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline curtailed Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. But who was responsible?

This is a fascinating read.

The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story

I was going to write up a “2023 in review” post as I’ve seen lots of people doing. And, in fact, I wrote the majority of it, but it just felt like moaning so I’ve decided not to publish it.

I saw this tip on speeding up your Rails test suite by “unlogged tables” in Postgres.

PostgreSQL allows the creation of “unlogged” tables, which do not record data in the PostgreSQL Write-Ahead Log. This can make the tables faster, but significantly increases the risk of data loss if the database crashes.

I tried this out at work but it didn’t have much affect. I think that’s because we use fixtures, which tend to be loaded all at once. If you use factories you might find it has more benefit for you.

Crunchy Data have a good overview of “unlogged” tables.

how many keys do you have left? – in a similar vein, you should probably stop reading this drivel.

How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web – worth remembering that you don’t always need a “cloud” provider.

We went to see One Life on New Year’s Day and enjoyed it. There’s nothing particularly stand-out about it, just a well told real story. From 20 minutes in I had tears in my eyes and by at the end I was making involuntary blubbing noises.

Carol & The End of The World is a delightful new find. I’m two episodes in.