indexpost archiveatom feed syndication feed icon

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.

The Drunken Bishop Algorithm

2025-08-20

I was reading about the drunken bishop algorithm for fingerprint visualization in openssh. I thought it might be a lark to implement it in emacs lisp.

read more...

systemd mounts

2025-08-17

Just a quick note on configuring an automatic network mounted file system.

read more...

An Interesting Architecture

2025-07-27

A few notes on an interesting software design I've been noodling on. I'm still trying to untangle how to foster organic growth in software systems.

read more...

Exploring Schemas and Performance

2025-06-28

Lately I've been thinking about database design and the implications for query performance. I have found myself repeatedly arguing against architectural complexity in favor of "just let the database do that" and I thought it was probably a good idea to further develop an intuition for performance against some hard numbers.

read more...

SQLite and JSON Documents

2024-12-28

I've been munging configuration data for a bunch of hardware devices and it has me thinking on ways to improve some of that workflow. These are just a few notes on what has proven useful or interesting as I continue to explore my options.

read more...

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.

read more...

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.

read more...

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?

read more...

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.

read more...

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!

read more...

Older Posts...