Recent content on BonesMoses.org
I’ve been “busy” fiddling around with agentic coding using the Pi agent. This time around, it’s to see what the real limits of a local agent and model truly are. Why? I ran out of Claude tokens on an unrelated project, and that made me wonder just how far I could get without using it in a pinch. As it turns out… local models are pretty limited, but functional with…
Last week I started working on a project, and this time I wanted to see what would happen if I did what all the “cool kids” are doing and “vibe coded” most of it. Let me just say it was an absolute disaster. I ended up with about 18k lines of iffy spaghetti code that only kind of does what I asked, is chock full of bugs, and isn’t anything I would ever willingly…
Back when I was a Sophomore in High School, my incredibly astute power of observation noticed a couple friends playing a card game after finishing some work in our Russian class. They asked if I wanted to try it, and I shrugged and assented, because hey, why not? A Short History I had no idea what I was doing. After the draw phase, I ended up with various cards and a Royal Assassin, which you can…
I turned 48 last week, and it was almost as uneventful as I’d hoped. I preemptively took the week off so I spent most of the time relaxing, eating out occasionally, or otherwise doing absolutely nothing constructive. I really needed that. The only problem is that I started coming down with some kind of cold on the 10th. It progressed into an insanely sore throat that resembled gargling rusty…
Well I’ve never prayed, but tonight I’m on my knees, yeah I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah – The Verve The primary event in the news since September 10th is the assassination of Charlie Kirk. When I first heard that he’d been shot, my first instinct was simply to exclaim, “No way. What?!” It’s always a surreal feeling to know…
Last week I’d mentioned I was taking part in a 5-day fast. That went from Monday the 25th to Friday the 29th of August. I never really explained why I would do such a thing, but it really just boils down to “I wanted to see if I could do it.” I did a 3-day fast back in 2022, and figured I could extend it a bit to five days since I felt basically OK on the beginning of day four.
Boy have I not posted in a while. As excuses go, I actually have a pretty good one for once: I’ve been swamped in being ridiculously productive. The best part about it is that it’s been so fun I don’t even mind. And to think it all started when I finished a video game. Beginning the Expedition I think this deserves a bit of backstory. I completed a game called Expedition 33 back…
I may finally have some respite from my hectic schedule full of flying all over the continental United States. On the other hand, I’m typing this very post from the airport, so perhaps not? The yearly EdgeFest company event was the last item on my itinerary after several conferences, and let’s just say the return trip is an ongoing dumpster fire. EdgeFest itself was long, because the…
I’ve finally gotten tired of maintaining my own mail server. I’ve been maintaining it since 1999 in one way or another, and I think it’s just time to take it behind the shed and put it out of my misery. As to how I reached this decision and what I intend to do about it, well… that’s a story.
This year has gotten off to an utterly ridiculous start. Now that I’m working with pgEdge, they’re encouraging me to submit to every possible conference that will have me. So I have. In addition to that, there are a few company events which require travel, so I’m globe-trotting for those too. All in all, this is what my schedule looks like this year so far: Feb 3-7 - Spock…
I’ve been somewhat tight-lipped about my job hunt, but not through any particular desire to obfuscate. No, I’ve just been laying low because I caught Covid right before Christmas and spent the last couple weeks recuperating. Just my luck, getting sick again so soon after whatever got me following Thanksgiving, and effectively missing the holidays as a consequence. Still, I had an…
There’s a phrase that’s now become ubiquitous on various parts of the internet, and it goes like this: The purpose of a system is what it does. At first glance it’s a meaningless non sequitur , a sort of self-referencing zen koan seeking to make something simple seem profound. Obviously systems work as they’re designed, right? It’s tempting to discount it out of hand…
Postgres Conference Seattle 2024 partnered up with PASS this year to present a united database front. They accepted my “ Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star ” talk, which I graciously gave on the last day of the conference. The next talk in that room wasn’t for another hour, so I had plenty of time to talk shop with attendees, about the future of Postgres, high…
Postgres Conference Seattle 2024 partnered up with PASS this year to present a united database front. They accepted my “What’s our Vector, Victor?” talk, which I graciously gave on the first day of the conference. If you weren’t there and missed out on the fun, this is your chance to catch up and maybe get a bit more information that was cut for length. Let me tell you why…
About two months ago while browsing X, one of the people I follow posted a video recorded in 1985. It struck me in a way things of that era often do, and I sought a word that would adequately describe the feeling. I was only 8 when this video was recorded, but I still feel it down to my bones. I need a word that's a mix of melancholy, nostalgia, wistfulness, and poignancy, because it's all of…
Things always start in an unassuming way, don’t they? Having recently returned from a short paternity leave, the Tembo CTO wanted a short meeting last Friday morning, and I assumed it was so he could catch up with our projects. Instead, he informed me that the company was changing direction, and my services would no longer be necessary. I knew the company was beginning a sharp pivot, but was…
Last week I attended Postgres Conference Seattle 2024 as a speaker for two sessions. The first, titled “What’s our Vector, Victor?” discussed the merits of the pg_vectorize extension for Postgres. The second, titled “Kubernetes Killed the High Availability Star” served an advocacy piece for the ultimate deprecation of Postgres High Availability tooling in general. On…
There seems to be a lot of debate on both sides of the political aisle, and I’m far from a disinterested observer. While I strive to remain objectively detached in most circumstances, I’ve found that this particular election cycle makes that impossible. Being the polarizing figure that he is, the fundamental reason for this is obviously Donald J. Trump. This isn’t click-bait;…
I never got around to it, and I was going to write about how my birthday went last week, but I just experienced a kind of “Eureka” moment. It was a nice day where Jen and I went to brunch at Original Pancake House, did a bit of shopping for pants and other necessities, and then had dinner at Baxter’s Grille. I had a ribeye (of course) and I indulged myself with their flourless…
I woke up from a dream this morning where someone from my past was being incredibly unfair to me. At some point, I exploded in rage and started to yell about said injustice, and referenced being autistic. This being a dream, the person felt really bad about how they were treating me, and that’s about all I can remember. It’s very common for my dreams to “prime” me for the…
This is a verbatim conversation I had with an older LLaMa 3 model hosted on my PC via Ollama a few days ago. It started because I wanted a translation for the name of an X account named gatos fazendo gatices, and it just kind of spiraled from there. The topic eventually touched on how AI could be improved, the effects on society, and the nature of cognition itself. It’s clear the LLM has a…
Postgres and Rust go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or ice-cream and root beer, or Batman and Robin, or mice and cheese, or sand on a beach, or crabs and elephants! Err, maybe scratch that last one. Hmmmmm… Well regardless, there’s a whole lot of Rust going on in the Postgres world these days, especially thanks to contributions from the PGRX project . As a relative novice…
Last week was a very odd conjunction of coincidence I’m still trying to understand. The aftermath of which left a reverberating melancholy and nostalgia, difficult to dispel, and all too tempting to embrace. It was one of those times where I question the entropy of the universe itself, as pure serendipity would be an impossible convergence. And yet.. An Expert Opinion I drove to Chicago on…
Though there is unpacking yet to do, we’re settling in rather well. It’s just a matter of time now, as all things usually become. I no longer become hopelessly lost driving around without navigation. Jen is making progress on her office. Fun times all around! What’s important is the core of the house is essentially done, and we can work from there. Nice, eh? The sideboard /…
Not every database-backed application needs to be locked down like Fort Knox. Sometimes there are even roles that leverage blanket access to large swathes of available data, if not every table, simply for auditing or monitoring purposes. Normally this would require quite a bit of preparation or ongoing privilege management, but Postgres came up with a unique solution starting with version 14:…
The dust has mostly settled and we’re finally unpacking in the new house. Since it’s Memorial Day, I’m taking some time to rest and gather my thoughts to chronicle this whole affair. There’s still a lot to do, but hopefully the most grueling elements have passed. In Closing Our closing date for the house was May 17th, meaning we could take possession later that day. It…
Sometimes when we have an existing database and schema full of tables, there comes a time when we need to perform a migration. Maybe it’s because we want to move to or from a cloud service. Perhaps we have a small database and want to do a quick version upgrade via dump / restore. Whatever the reason, we may decide to clean up some technical debt while we’re making the transition. Many…
Remember this guy? Robo-Postgres returns! AI is all anyone talks about these days, isn’t it? Even when it comes to databases like Postgres, devs are finding new and innovative ways to leverage LLMs in everyday use cases. Can you really blame them though? This is an exciting new technology that will transform how we work and potentially society as a whole once it finally matures. We even…
It’s no secret that Jen and I have been thinking of moving out of Macomb for a while now. The change in jobs has given me a much-needed kick in the pants to reorganize my life in general. Those interest rates aren’t going any lower until at least 2025, so there’s no time like the present. So we’ve been on the hunt. But where to go? I want to abscond from Illinois on pure…
Have you ever wanted to use a non-superuser role in a Postgres database to perform actions that are normally restricted? Even something as simple as reading from the pg_stat_activity view requires special permissions to view the query column because it could contain sensitive information.
The last few PG Phriday articles have been somewhat dense content, so how about something a bit more irreverent? Rather than wax on about AI, HA architectures, or conceptual advancements to Postgres clusters, why not write a game instead? To keep things simple, let’s just build a no-frills Tamagotchi virtual pet for bored database professionals. There’s a lot of SQL in this article, so…
Has it really come to this? AI is everywhere these days Postgres and AI go together like elephants and chocolate. At first glance, it seems like a silly combination. Postgres is an RDBMS for storing data with ACID compliance, functions, views, and maybe some extensions or foreign data wrappers. Where is room for AI in that? It may be trendy to take something, rub some AI on it, and then declare it…
One of the job prospects I was interviewing with presented me with a question last week: “We’d like to schedule a final culture interview with you, but before we do, we were wondering if you would entertain a contractor role?” Given I don’t know what’s actually involved with that, I went with an honest answer of “I don’t have the necessary background to…
Last Phriday we explored just where Postgres could end up in the future. One possible question which may have occurred to a reader was probably something along the lines of “That doesn’t even really sound like Postgres anymore. Why not just write another database?” Let’s just be outright about it: Postgres is the best RDBMS engine currently available. It’s certainly…
With my newfound “free time”, I’ve spent a lot of time catching up on my writing. Two PG Phridays in a row, and I have ideas for many more to come. I finally decided to “Open Source” my homelab setup, and since that’s a work-in-progress, it should see many commits in the future. And I finally started earnestly working on the ol’ home lab. Definitely…
What is High Availability to Postgres? I’ve staked my career on the answer to that question since I first presented an HA stack to Postgres Open in 2012, and I still don’t feel like there’s an acceptable answer. No matter how the HA techniques have advanced since then, there’s always been a nagging suspicion in my mind that something is missing. But I’m here to say…
When it comes to reordering the items in a list, databases have long had a kind of Faustian Bargain to accomplish the task. Nobody really liked any of the more common solutions, least of all the poor database tasked with serving up the inevitable resulting hack. Postgres is no different in this regard. Consider a list_item table like this, demonstrating five items in a to-do list:
Potential layoffs are a persistent fixture in some industries, like some kind of Sword of Damocles looming over them in perpetuity. With the recent advances in AI and the weak economy battering industries of all description, the rate is only accelerating. Perhaps anecdotally, Tech is one of the worst affected in the current climate, with nearly 50k laid off already in 2024 alone, and over 250k in…
I’ve had something of a “busy” week thus far. My sleep has suffered unfortunately thanks to it, but it’ll settle down eventually. See, when I get an idea in my head, it essentially consumes me. I go to bed yearning to work on it, and if I wake up at night to use the restroom, it’s all I can do to go back to sleep. Sometimes, I simply can’t. It was that kind of…
Well, I’ve finally reformatted my Dell R730 project system and replaced TrueNAS SCALE with Proxmox VE once again. Now that I want to go deeper into virtualizing so I can do more Kubernetes experimentation, using a NAS device as the Hypervisor only serves to complicate the process. There wasn’t anything critical on the system, so that made it convenient to reformat, and just start from…
Sea of Stars has been the subject of a vast amount of hype. Whether it’s sincere or astroturfed, I can’t say. However, after watching a couple reviews from respected members of the JRPG community, I decided to give it a shot. I’m glad I did, but there’s a caveat I need to apply: I effectively had to force myself to finish the game and I have no desire to complete all of the…
Geez, play a few games and then I just fall off of the Earth! Has it really been nearly three months since my last update? Dear lord, I need to summarize quickly! Leisure Activity Which games? In order of completion or last play time according to my Steam Library: Armored Core 6 - I managed to defeat this despite the challenging difficulty. I even got all three endings! It’s great and I…
Over the weekend, Hamas stormed Israel and committed what can only be described as a series of atrocities. Thanks to the specter of Social Media, they gleefully posted a series of videos as the invasion commenced, so proud were they of the massacre. These videos demonstrated a lack of humanity so profound, I’m at a loss to comprehend how someone becomes so twisted. A mostly naked woman with…
So my 46th birthday has come and gone. As per usual, I took the week off and played video games. The primary focus of this time was spent on Armored Core 6, a mech-focused game by FromSoftware of Dark Souls fame. It’s an excellent pastime, and even though I suck at it, I’m having a blast (pun intended) blowing stuff up with mechs. Unfortunately during my second playthrough in pursuit…
So I already noted in my previous post that my Macular Degeneration had returned. I hated to admit it at the time, but it meant finally doing what I’d been putting off since this whole adventure began. I had to prepare myself for potentially slowly going blind. My existing desk situation was going to have to change. Goodbye old friend Getting Carded Given that I work with computers all day,…
Looks like I’ve fallen a bit behind in my updates. The tl;dr of it is that June was all about travel, and July wasn’t. I traveled to London for a few work meetings from July 4-8, and then literally a few days later, Jen and I went to Florida from the 12th to the 18th. Then we went to her parents’ to celebrate Jim’s birthday. At that point, it felt like we’d be in some…
Given all of my work on my basement project server, it occurred to me that I would eventually need to override my router’s DNS settings if I wanted general availability through the house. I can modify the DNS settings of my desktop or laptop, but that doesn’t really scale to every cellphone, TV, media device, or other janky tech strewn around our domicile. There’s just one…
Following up on Project R730 - Part 1, it’s time to expand the tale. It took a while, but the few remaining parts I still needed to finish the R730 finally arrived. I installed, upgraded, or otherwise swapped several components, and I got the server up and running with TrueNAS SCALE. It wasn’t just a job, it was (and still is, really) an adventure! Tripwires The first complication I…
Since her adoption, Ursula has spent two weeks with free reign around the house, yet she primarily constrains herself to my office. Perched atop the cat tree, she surveys and judges, and growls should any other feline dare to darken her domain. Or at least that’s how I imagine her view of the world. Because Ursula has also finally attended her official veterinary checkup, and the findings…
Warning: this post contains copious amounts of impenetrable technobabble; read at your own risk. It’s been a while since I’ve started a project, so of course that means it’s time. As it stands, my r720 is getting a bit long in the tooth and R730s are now the same price I paid for that system. So to Lab Gopher I went in search of a great deal. For anyone who is looking for a…