Ayo @ayo@niu.moe

Finished Eden by Stanislaw Lem. What an... odd book. It suffers from consisting largely of abstract and hard-to-visualize descriptions of an alien planet, and the conclusion is typical of Lem: Humans are too biased to make sense of aliens. Not his best work, but still an excellent and wildly imaginative trip. #amreading

I found something of historical significance while going through some old boxes.

I thought I had finally devised a good method to dynamically construct SQL queries in #Perl, but it turns out I can make a horrible mess of everything.

I installed PostgreSQL on top of Linux.

Review key scammers are pretty active again. And they're still as bad as ever at figuring out that I don't own these games. 😞

I've just released #ncdu 1.14. This release adds mtime display & sorting, a limited form of --follow-symlinks, can display larger file counts in the file browser and fixes a few bugs you weren't likely to trigger anyway.

Get it from
https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

I could not resist buying this super cute stuffed animal from the #PostgreSQL stand at #FOSDEM. It stands stable on its 4 legs, I expected no less from the Postgres project.

I-it's about to start!
(spent 5 minutes uploading that image, WiFi is having a hard time here)

It's trendy to post a picture of snowy train tracks with hashtag #FOSDEM. Let me join.

Signal strength: 100%.

So... it hasn't expired?

...some more.

I turned into a snowman while taking these pictures.

Finished The Net Delusion by Evgeny Morozov. I'm not sure what to think. On the one hand, the topic is very interesting: A rational discussion on the impact of the internet on global politics, how it has been used to both aid and harm authoritarian governments, filled to the brim with relevant and scary anecdotes. On the other hand, it's overly repetitive and spent too much time ranting on incompetent politicians. It was a good read, but not an easy one. #amreading

I didn't expect much complexity in writing a simple job queue for the ChiFS Hub implementation, but it turns out to not be very trivial after all.

My initial approach was to keep a log of finished jobs and run some SQL on that log to extract a queue of jobs to run next. But the queries ended up somewhat complex, inflexible and hard to optimize.

So now I try to schedule the next jobs as soon as one job finishes. Here's my initial buggy and untested attempt to do so as a PostgreSQL trigger.

I wrote an abomination and I'm proud of it.

And behold said "horrible Rust hack".

#Rust: "You can only safely construct a DST by coercing struct with a size known at compile time"
Me: "Behold my copy-paste power!"

It goes on for 1000 lines. I really ought to be expelled from the programming community for this abomination.

Yearly backups running at full speed!
(This'll take a day or two because I'm an idiot who uses xz -9)

Just finished the book. The story was excellent, everything else was... okayish. The jokes and writing style got a tad tiresome after a while, and this book had nothing to offer in the way of interesting new insights or social commentary (which is what makes most SciFi extra enjoyable for me). It would have been a whole lot more interesting if humanity on earth got extinct while saving one man on Mars, but nothing so drastic happened. It still works fine as entertainment, though. #amreading

Just finished the book. That was absolutely brilliant. Fun writing style, realistic physics, intriguing characters, actually alien aliens and an epic (back)story spanning millions of years.

Quite in the same style as Cixin Liu's novels, but a bit less over-the-top. Similar to some of Stanislaw Lem's novels, too, but slightly less grim. I'm definitely going to read more from Alastair Reynolds. #amreading