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I happened across this book by pure chance. After having ice cream in our favourite place in Milano Marittima, my wife and I visited a small street market with all kinds of booths. Of course, there was a used book stand toward which I immediately gravitated. A quick scan revealed nothing of interest, so I moved along. But Serena, who arrived at the booth moments after I left, knew more. A simple, no-frills, cardboard-covered book which carried a giant PROUD 2BEA FLYER title on the spine caught her attention....

Another day, another lesson learned: modern .NET does not support the Windows-1252 encoding out of the box. Today my colleague was happily porting a legacy NET4+ app to NET6. As usual, the port was super-easy; it would compile and run just fine, so he was surprised when the app crashed reading a few specific XML files. That’s when I was called in. A closer inspection revealed a pattern: all those crashing files were Windows 1252-encoded (the rest, a vast majority, were UTF-8....

Today I learned how to restore a single Postgres database from a global dump generated with pg_dumpall. Now, pg_dumpall is handy when you want to back up an entire Postgres cluster. It will dump all databases and global objects in a single text file. In contrast, pg_dump, the go-to tool for Postgres backups, offers more control but only works with a single database and doesn’t dump global objects, such as the roles/users linked to the database....

I stumbled upon a personal growth article this weekend, and that’s odd because I tend to stay clear from such things. Yet I found it quite relevant, so much that I thought I would share it (the delivery is also amusing, which is something new for this kind of content). It’s just another day… and you’re just doing what you need to do. You’re getting things done, and the day moves forward in this continuous sequence of checklists, actions, and respites....

Some call them homeless. The new nomads refer to themselves as ‘houseless’. Many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the Great Recession. To keep their gas tanks and bellies full, they work long hours at hard, physical jobs. In a time of flat wages and rising housing costs, they have unshackled themselves from rent and mortgages as a way to get by. They are surviving America....

In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. The reason: The country applies the “Housing First” concept. Those affected by homelessness receive a small apartment and counselling – without any preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected thus make their way back into a stable life. And: All this is cheaper than accepting homelessness. Finland’s take on the homelessness problem is remarkable and gives hope. I live in a small town where the problem is not as apparent as in, say, San Francisco....

Today I learned how to remove a file from a git repository while also cleaning it from the history. When you delete it with git rm or git rm --cached, tracks remain in the commit history (the reflog). That might not be a big deal, but if the file has sensitive contents that you want to disappear from version control entirely, then you also want it cleaned from the reflog. That’s when git filter-branch comes to the rescue....

Like everyone else on the planet, I’ve been following GitHub Copilot since its launch. It is an impressive achievement and a remarkable milestone for the deep learning industry, that’s for sure. We are obviously at the early stages in deep learning applied to software development, and it is somewhat unsettling to ponder what the future might hold in this field. Like many others, however, I worry about code quality issues and the risk of license infringements1....

Volker Ullrich’s Eight Days in May describes the period from April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s suicide, to May 8, the day of signing the German capitulation, with significant jumps backwards in time and some hops in the future. We’re covering only eight days, and the dictator dies on day one. What essential events might ever have happened in such a short period? Well, many pivotal ones, as this well-researched work shows us....

Terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain, on The Atlantic, on link rot and digital preservation. I love how well documented and informative it is. Yet, it remains perfectly approachable for both the non-knowledgeable reader and the technically savvy. Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. We need more content like this.