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Idle Cycles

A collection of thoughts and experiments that at one point occupied my time, some still do. These are the things happening in my idle cycles.

A Database Indexing Pitfall

2024-10-27

Here's an interesting thing I found this week. In different relational databases you might find that despite indexing a column a sequential scan is still required for querying. Here's a hint for PostgreSQL and SQLite.

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Test Driving Fossil

2024-07-28

I recently enabled my own ability to host CGI applications on this site. Thinking on the sorts of capabilities this enables for myself I have spent some time investigating new tools, the most interesting of which is probably Fossil.

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An XML Deserializer

2024-05-26

Rouding out my last entry with one final thought. How simple can you make the deserialization of XML into Python objects? How clunky is it in practice?

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Goofing Around with XML and Type Hints

2024-05-25

I was thinking again about data serialization in Python after reading an interesting post that suggests using functools.singledispatch as a way of encapsulating JSON encoding per datatype and it got me thinking again about XML.

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Debugging a Weird Python Slowdown

2024-04-13

I noticed some latency in a unit test on a single machine. It turned into a bit of a rabbit hole that took some time to get to the bottom of. I think I at least understand some libraries and tools better as a result though!

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CGI Programming in Go

2024-03-12

While perusing the documentation I found an enticing reference to CGI programming. Go is of course a reasonably modern language compared to TCL but the fact that they've included support for CGI is novel given the state of Python which has deprecated its CGI module.

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Minor Python Annoyances

2024-03-09

There have been a few instances lately in which I've found myself lamenting the number of libraries available to aid in testing Python. I'm getting the feeling again that not only is your test framework making things worse but also the ease of installing libraries exacerbates issues of quality in the design of projects.

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Client Certificate Authentication with HAProxy

2024-03-03

After configuring HAProxy on this server I've been trying out a few things that have been in the back of my mind for some time. Here I document configuring a client certificate to mutually authenticate a web browser to a subdomain and limit access based on its presence.

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Simple Automatic Site Generation

2024-02-25

How complicated could it really be to deploy this site? Some brief documentation and a test to ensure I have things working with a new "deployment" strategy to replace my old rsync workflow.

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State of the Server

2024-02-18

It has been a few years and I've finally got around to revamping a few things on the server. Mostly these are notes in case I forget when I change something else in a couple years.

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