The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement. The full story is available here (via).

The New Yorker, in The Man Who Explains Italy: The Italian podcaster Francesco Costa thinks that the foreign press’s fixation on creeping Fascism in the country is overblown and unhelpful. If the center-right coalition wins, “Will Italy be a police state? No,” he said. “Will it be very badly run? Yes.” Full article is available here. I’ve been following Francesco Costa for a few years. He’s talented, conscientious, brilliant, and gifted with good humor. He deserves to be featured in The New Yorker. ...

Eve 2.0.2 was just released today. It fixes a problem introduced with v2.0 in which ETag generation failed if uuidRepresentation was not set in MONGO_OPTIONS. See issue #1486 for details. Many thanks @tgm for reporting and then contributing the fix.

In my early morning stroll, I sometimes listen to audiobooks. This was the case with The Count of Monte Cristo. Rai Radio 3, the third channel of the national broadcasting service, has been airing Ad Alta Voce (Aloud) for many years. In the program, top-tier actors read old and new literary classics. The quality of these productions is astounding. Audio editions are often edited, which was the case with The Count, as the unabridged edition surpasses the 1200-page count (a little-known fact is that most printed editions are also edited for brevity). Despite the edits, the audiobook, splendidly performed by Andrea Giordana, comprises thirty-five installments, each about thirty minutes long. That makes for a lot of strolling. ...

Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s hot take on software quality: Software quality is more the result of a system designed to produce quality, and not so much the result of individual performance. That is: a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals. This leads to the insightful conclusion: Instead of spending tons of time and effort on hiring because you believe that you can “only hire the best”, direct some of that effort towards building a system that produces great results out of a wider spectrum of individual performance. ...

Last weekend I went on a motorcycle trip with my club. Our goal was to visit the beautiful Dolomites in the Italian Alps1. We had twenty motorcycles on the road, evenly split between modern classics (Bonnevillles in all their variations) and adventure bikes (Tigers new and old). A great turnout considering that the weather forecast for the weekend wasn’t exactly great. Of all the TOMCC members who registered, only two were missing because they tested positive for COVID. ...

My perception of zoos has always been of prisons—places of suffering where animals are held captive for human entertainment. Smiling Bears offered a new perspective. Some (hopefully most) zoos provide a safe harbor to abused and rescued animals who could never return to their natural habitats. Zookeepers like Else Poulsen care for these creatures, accompanying them in their rehabilitation process. I imagine not all zoos and zookeepers meet these standards, but it is reassuring to know these things happen. ...

Today I released v3.4 of FatturaElettronica, a .NET open source project that allows validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices adhering to the standard defined by the Italian “Agenzia delle Entrate”. It’s doing very well for such a niche project, with downloads now well beyond the one hundred thousand mark. Be aware that this release anticipates support for v1.7.1 of the specification going into effect on October 1, 2022. For more information, see the appropriate ticket and the changelog. ...

I added a new tool to my amateurish DevOps toolbox. Developed in the open by Tom Williams, the Docker Event Monitor is a “tiny container that monitors the local Docker event system in real-time and sends notifications to various integrations for event types that match the configuration. For example, you can trigger an alert when a container is stopped, killed, runs out of memory or health status change.” At its core sits a simple python script that monitors the docker.sock file for noticeable changes. The code is straightforward and looks safe to me. It only took a few minutes to set DEM up so that our alerts channel on Slack gets notified of any health status changes. Some handy options are included; my favorite is silence to set a time window during which alerts are not fired. It avoids unnecessary spam when routine maintenance goes off on your stack. ...

Today I released Eve 2.0.1, which contains an essential fix if you’re using MONGO_URI to connect to your MongoDB instance. See the relevant ticket for details. I’ve also pinned Flask dependency to v2.1, as v2.2 brings some breaking changes that, you guessed it, break our CI runs. If you think you can help wiht that, please do so. The complete changelog is available here.