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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.

Integration Testing in Python

2023-03-18

A minimal setup for an endlessly configurable HTTP server for integration testing in Python. Also, opinions on integration testing.

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Who has ever heard of the track element?

2023-02-19

I learned about a new-to-me HTML element today and realized it might prove useful in the future for the kinds of bug report videos I tend to capture.

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Accounting for Traffic

2023-02-11

For reasons I no longer remember, I was checking out pg_netstat, a Postgres extension for monitoring network traffic. Reading about it I couldn't help but think this was almost exactly the case for IP accounting in systemd. Admittedly, it is still a cool project! I thought I might try out IP accounting while I tried a few other things, documented here.

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A Neat Workflow for Testing Changes

2023-01-10

I found myself on a bit of a yak shaving exercise trying to get a C library linked during the build process of a Hare program. These are a few notes on testing out potentially breaking changes with little interuption to my development machine.

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SQLite full-text search (and TCL)

2023-01-07

Another neat trick or two built into SQLite. I previously worked up a few different ways of building a reverse index in the service of searching a corpus like this site. I later worked out a better way of doing full-text search using a stemming algorithm. SQLite can do all of that out of the box, which aligns nicely with another experiment I did rewriting my site generator in TCL.

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Diagramming

2022-11-01

I previously looked at groff for typesetting and started down a path of the different options for creating diagrams from text files. While I had thought I might get along with pic I have instead found ways to avoid learning any new tools.

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Zero Downtime Upgrades

2022-09-03

I upgraded one of my machines to the development version of Fedora Linux and thought it may prove fruitful to try out some of the experimental features. While I haven't entirely grasped how to use sysupdate I did learn a few neat tricks.

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Test Driving Groff

2022-08-07

In a funny bit of coincidence I read a few different pages discussing Groff in the last week or two. While my previous experience has been limited to coercing man pages into shape I thought I might take the time to dig a little deeper and see how it compares to LaTeX (or what little LaTeX I have used).

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First Thoughts on Hare

2022-07-30

I've been poking around with Hare to kick the tires and see how the language is shaping up while it is still in heavy development. Here I note a few things I have found surprisingly pleasant.

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SQLite Pagination

2022-07-23

A few notes on how basic pagination should work. Never mind the fact that it rarely does!

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