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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.

A few days ago, I was browsing my Twitter feed when a suggestion from my friend @flaper87 caught my attention: On my “comfortably old” MacBook Pro1, Spotify has been an absolute hog. The simple act of opening it will require three hundred MBs. That’s a remarkable amount of memory for staying idle and doing nothing useful. Let it play for a few hours, and have fun glancing at CPU and RAM usage ramping up like there’s no tomorrow. Just for the record, here’s Spotify memory usage at launch: ...

This week the “Sunday Morning Reading Award” goes to Lisa Whittington-Hill, for her The Women Who Built Grunge on Longreads: Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects. Thirty years later, it’s time to reassess their legacy. More here.

Robin Rendle quoting Neil Gaiman, who is quoting G.K. Chesterton: Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated. I read somewhere that he based the Gilbert character from The Sandman on Chesterton, so it’s no surprise to find Gaiman quoting Chesterton in Smoke and Mirrors. Wanting to find the work in which the quote first appeared, I did a little research only to discover that G.K. Chesterton never actually wrote it. According to E.M. Goldsmith1, Gaiman’s is a rework of the following original quote: ...

As part of his captivating Hidden Heroes series, Steven Johnson publishes an account of the mother of all demos. More than 50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart gave the “mother of all demos” that transformed software forever. The computer world has been catching up with his vision ever since. More here

Open Culture shared a “jaw-dropping visualization of John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ solo.” Indeed, it is stunning, beautiful and valuable. A visualization like this makes music much more accessible. Quoting Open Culture: Coltrane’s complexity is daunting for the most accomplished musicians. How much more so for non-musicians? It can seem like “you need a doctorate of music to go anywhere near his recordings,” Nicholson writes. But “nothing could be further from the truth.” With its dancing lines and circles, Brother’s visualization gives us another way to appreciate the “sheer joy of music making and the power and energy of his playing” that inspires students, serious fans, and newcomers alike through “universal values that still speak to us now.” ...

Bret Devereaux has long been my go-to source for all things ancient and military history. One thing I somehow missed reading from his incredibly resourceful website is the This Isn’t Sparta series. He recently published a three-year-anniversary series retrospective which promptly surfaced on my RSS feed, giving me a chance to catch up over the holidays. The whole thing is a very long read, with some installments more engaging than others but overall very enjoyable, eye-opening, and information dense. In the just-published retrospective, Bret writes: ...

Adelphi1 prints in book form two unpublished speeches by Milan Kundera, one from 1967 and the other from 1983, in which the great Czech writer reflects on the fate of the small nations in central Europe and the cultural drift of (western) Europe as a whole. As we read along, thanks to Kundera’s acumen and depth of analysis, we find many surprising ante-litteram references to today’s critical situation (Russian-Ukrainian war). ...

As a Shirley Jackson fan, I couldn’t pass on this new collection of unpublished short stories. A good chunk of these was unheard of for thirty years until someone unearthed some cardboard boxes in a Vermont barn and then sent them to her heirs. Unlike The Lottery, where all tales followed a distinct theme, Just an Ordinary Day has little to unite the stories. Several genres are represented: classic family stories, supernatural, horror, and unsettling accounts of day-to-day life in the fifties all make up the list. Not all stories are of the same level. While most are mature for prime time, a few could have used some more tinkering, yet they were worth publishing as a precious testimony of an (infinitely talented) writer’s creative process. At one point, two versions of the same tale are put side by side, thus allowing a look into how Shirley Jackson revised her stories and perfected them over time. I think my Italian (Adelphi) edition includes a selection of the original collection of more than fifty, which is probably a good thing (I read somewhere that a second book with the missing pieces is planned). ...