Weeknotes 160

Queueing – An interactive study of queueing strategies.

Queues are everywhere. We queue at bars, in restaurants, and at the bank. When you loaded this web page, the request to fetch it interacted with dozens of different queues on its way from your machine to the server this page is hosted on. Queues are fundamental.

I saw this a while ago, but it was nice to refresh my memory.

HTML Tags Memory Test

How many HTML tags can you remember? 114 to recall…

I got 63…

“Many Small Queries Are Efficient In SQLite”

SQLite is not client/server, however. The SQLite database runs in the same process address space as the application. Queries do not involve message round-trips, only a function call. The latency of a single SQL query is far less in SQLite. Hence, using a large number of queries with SQLite is not the problem.

When you understand that SQLite is your program this makes a lot of sense.

UUIDv7: The Time-Sortable Identifier for Modern Databases – another UUID type!

TIL about the Fossil source control system.

In addition to doing distributed version control like Git and Mercurial, Fossil also supports bug tracking, wiki, forum, email alerts, chat, and technotes.

Find when a file was introduced in git

git log --follow -- path/to/file

You’re always doing something wrong

You have to keep going. Being occasionally wrong is a small price to pay. Your alternative is to watch your life tick by as you’re perfecting one last thing.

I bought High Performance SQLite video course to learn more about SQLite. It’s very well made and I’ve learnt a lot so far. I’m looking forward to delving into the more advanced topics.

Since I poured coffee into my computer I decided that maybe I should be taking backups a bit more seriously than I have been.

I already have cloud-based backups, but getting up-and-running from those would take too long. In the past I had both a TimeMachine backup and a full disk clone but I stopped doing that for reasons I can’t remember.

Well, Amazon Prime Day came along, and with the help of Camel Camel Camel I decided to buy an external NVMe SSD (Samsung 980 PRO) and external Thunderbolt 4 enclosure (ACASIS 40Gbps M.2 NVMe) to go along with it so I could start cloning the disk again each night, but blimey.

I performed a manual test clone (using SuperDuper!) and it completed without incident (I will schedule it later). However the enclosure got extremely hot. From what I’ve read I think that’s fairly normal, and hopefully shouldn’t an issue as I will stick it to the underside of my desk.

Super-interesting interview with Chris Lattner creator of many things.

Marco Arment has been re-building his popular Overcast podcast app over the past few years to modernise it and make it easier to work on. On ATP 596 he mentioned how much the process had made him question his whole identity as a programmer. It can be extremely comforting to hear someone so successful feeling this way as I do this often (I even feel weird calling myself a programmer).

It’s finally been a good and proper Summer this week, which is great because it gives me the opportunity to complain about how hot it has been.