Links

j6b72ss article covers the precise reasons why I stayed away from Traefik thinking of it as a container-first proxy. The author, however, explores how Traefik is used in their environment with static binaries. Over the last few years Ive moved towards containerisation, so maybe Traefik might even be a better fit over using Nginx for everything regardless.

The HN comments have some interesting discussions on how this compares to Caddy for containers, most leaning towards Caddy.

One of the HN comments from johanbcn pointed out an interesting documentation framework called Diátaxis which I will take a look at.

The article tells the story of the underground cables that power the internet, as they follow the 50 crew members of KDDI Ocean Link, one of 22 repair and maintenance ships of the 77 cable ships in the world in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident.

On average, [cable breaks] happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks.

A clear and illustration example of the term frequency-inverse document frequency measure to determine the importance of words within a collection of documents. Taking this one step further Jana Vembunarayanan, the blogs author, uses cosine similarity to link a search query to return the most relevant documents.

While troubleshooting an RSS client recently, I needed an RSS feed with a steady stream of items. After some searching, I landed on Lorem RSS, an open-source tool built by Michael Bertolacci used to generate RSS items at varying frequencies through different feeds.

An overview of the design choices behind creating the JavaScript Registry (JSR) which is compatible with yarn, npm and others. One thing that stood out to be was that the website is rendered server-side, the post goes through their design to optimize for Time-To-First-Byte between their rendering and API server backed by a Postgres database.

The rest of the post is also a good read.

Atom differs from RSS in a few key ways and for the better. Chris Wellons' blog post outlines a few of these differences theyve encountered while working on Elfeed for emacs. One thatve I run into before and find really odd is the use of <channel> when only one channel is permitted in an RSS feed.

Having a channel tag suggests a single feed can have a number of different channels. Nope! Only one channel is allowed, meaning the channel tag serves absolutely no purpose.

Atom is a much cleaner specification, with much clearer intent, and without all the mistakes and ambiguities.

Stephen Wolfram, mathematician, computer scientists and CEO of Wolfram Research, describes all the incremental improvements made in different parts of his life in the pursuit of productivity. It's an article I've read and come back to three different times now, and with each I've taken some new bits and pieces that I could use myself.

The reasoning behind pull out shelves:

One of my theories of personal organization is that any flat surface represents a potential "stagnation point" that will tend to accumulate piles of stuff—and the best way to avoid such piles is just to avoid having permanent flat surfaces.

Collecting personal analytics of physical and digital text:

I have systems that keep all sorts of data, including every keystroke I type, every step I take and what my computer screen looks like every minute (sadly, the movie of this is very dull). I also have a whole variety of medical and environmental sensors, as well as data from devices and systems that I interact with.

Archival and searchability:

At the top of my personal homepage is a search box. Type in something like "rhinoceros elephant" and I'll immediately find every email I've sent or received in the past 30 years in which that's appeared, as well as every file on my machine, and every paper document in my archives

Having just shared the Eisenbahn-Planer, I have to post about the Treinposities rail agenda. This is a curated list of rail events in the Netherlands that gets updated regularly by the site administrators. The site has many more interesting pages, with details on rolling stock in the Netherlands and other countries, live map of trains in the Netherlands, details on train routes with expected rolling stock, and much more.

Eisenbahn-Planer tracks events with a focus on historical and/or heritage railways. There are quite a number of filters you can apply with multiple language options.

What if I told you that by tuning a few knobs, you can configure SQLite to reach ~8,300 writes / s and ~168,000 read / s concurrently, with 0 errors

Some interesting configurations that are possible with SQLite today making it much more versatile even though it isn't designed to be a client/server SQL database. Discovered via Simon Willison's weblog.

Paul Irish shares how to stablise video using FFmpeg using the defaults of VidStab. The article also provides a filter to compare the stablised and unstablised videos but simply running the stabilisation is enough for me.

xz, a widely used open source compression tool, introduced a backdoor with malicious code. This in turn has affected a number of applications and distributions, the most notable of which are Fedora, Debian (unstable, experimental) and HomeBrew. Evan Boehs has pieced together a timeline of events going as far back as 2021 which tells a story of how JiaT75 using social engineering became a trusted member for the open source project. Pressure (very harshly so) was applied to the Lasse Collin the sole active maintainer at the time to add another maintainer to xz from seemly multiple people. This coordinated attempt lasting two years is honestly quite shocking.

CSS Grids as simple as they are to design can get pretty complicated. Josh W Comeau's interactive guide to CSS contains sections that build on each other with examples and animations to visualise the concept.

Greg Wilson's guide to SQL for analysts and data scientists through a number of exercises that are run on a SQLite database file.

How fly.io manages WireGuard peers and loads them just-in-time into the kernel speeding up kernel operations.

I've always used aws ec2 describe-regions and was never aware of the aws account list-regions command as shared by Paweł Grzybek in his post. The account command has a few other operations including enabling or disabling a region and changing contact details linked to the AWS account.

Dan Luu writes about using simple architectures to build apps using Wave as an example. The post covers the initial technology choices made to be maintained by a small tem and the tradeoffs in the long run, along with the flexibility it provided to adapt to local markets.

Our architecture is so simple I’m not even going to bother with an architectural diagram. Instead, I’ll discuss a few boring things we do that help us keep things boring.

When requesting actions on AWS accounts or resources, AWS needs to verify if the principal (user, role, application, etc.) making the request is allowed to carry out the action. For single accounts with simple workloads, this can be done easily by setting an identity-based policy on the user. However, as needs grow and additional accounts are added, other factors come into play, such as resource-based policies, cross-account roles, service control policies, and more.

Whenever I encounter potential access-related problems, I refer to this flow chart for troubleshooting. Given the number of times I end up searching for this, I believe it might be helpful to share it.

SVG is an interesting and versatile text-based image format. Now I know it's not the Christmas season, but Hunor Márton Borbély has put together an advent calendar for SVG examples, and I've only now started working through them. It's very interactive and informative. I know I'll definitely be using these examples as references in the future.

Like GeoGuessr but instead of Google Streetview you're given an image which you have to locate on a map along with the year it was taken. It's quite fun trying to take clues from the image in an attempt to date it. The images selected in the game actually make it lightly easier than random locations on Google Streetview with GeoGuessr.

This is a great starting point to get familiar with or brush up on Unicode. It's clear, illustrative and well-written.

An informative @Reuters graphics article on the Houthi rebel attacks at the Bab al-Mandab straight with detailed plots on the attack types, context on the political situation, and how it affects the crew, shipping companies and global shipping.

Switzerland is often referenced when discussing good public transit systems, Jokteur does a good job describing of the country uses clock-face scheduling to reliably connected different locations together. A good read with clear examples illustrating the concept along with follow-up reading in case you’re interested in the subject.