Stringing Together Some SML 2026-07-25 I had fun poking around SML so I thought I'd keep it up. I thought it might be revealing to try some rudimentary parsing over strings to get a sense of what the language makes easy or not so easy. Let's Parse Some HTTP I know that the ML family of languages is supposed to be great for writing compilers and interpreters but I'm not so ambitious that I plan on…
Poking Around SML 2026-07-18 I was reading how the grocery store H-E-B actually uses Haskell of all things in production systems and it sent me looking through my bookshelves to dust off my copy of Elements of ML Programming . Haskell still seems a little too exotic in its syntax (too reminiscent of the type craziness I remember in old Scala 2) and the on-ramp to getting started always seems a…
Consolidating Repositories 2026-05-16 After the recent update to this server and a bit of retrospective on those services I both use and get value from I have been consolidating some old repositories to simply host them on this server rather than one of the numerous code forges. Here's a few notes on the mechanics of that. A Target I've mentioned that I've found fossil pretty painless to self-host…
Imagining a Device Provisioning Process 2026-03-07 This is a kind of follow up to a prior post about integrating hardware devices in a robust, repeatable way. Here I'm looking into ways of provisioning devices (computers) that are sometimes referred to as "industrial PCs", "IoT gateways", or just "on-site computers". I've been irked by how convoluted and messy the process can become when it feels…
Integrating Hardware with systemd and udev 2026-02-28 Documenting a simple system for process management in the context of integrating hardware into a linux environment in the face of multiple devices and hot-plugging. This whole exercise is prompted by a low grade annoyance I've had for years with how to manage a kind of internet of things configuration of devices on edge computers. I'll skip all…
SQLite Stress Test 2026-02-25 I saw a " 100-million-row challenge in PHP " posted today and it reminded me of the last time I saw something like this. While I don't know PHP I thought I might treat it as an exercise for using SQLite to keep me in practice with a few different SQLite functions. It turns out there is definitely a point where SQLite may not be a good fit! The challenge is pretty…
PostgreSQL Row Level Security 2026-02-21 I've recently been interested in whether PostgreSQL's row security policies could be a good fit for a few different projects. Before committing too strongly to using them someplace important I figured I'd try them out to understand the potential implications to query performance and ergonomics. Row level security is a mechanism to gate access to data based…
A Toy Spring Boot Application 2026-02-16 I wrote the other day about a series of design choices that I aim for when starting a new project. In so doing I lured myself into testing out a thought that has been rolling around my head for a while: what is the smallest spring boot application that can fit such an architecture? Why Spring Boot? I tend to use Python in my own prototypes because it is…
Notes on Provisioning a New Project 2026-02-14 Some incomplete notes on provisioning web stuff in a way that allows for fast feedback without leaving me hamstrung with technical debt at the level of project infrastructure. While I've written in bits and pieces about how to configure a networking swiss army knife for mostly abstract pieces of separable, scalable pieces and documented how I like…
Debian 13 2026-02-13 Unsurprisingly, I've been lax in maintaining things around here. Debian 13 was released quite a while ago and it has been a couple of years since I did any big updates on the server. My previous experience was good so I didn't spend long planning for this one. notes on the non-event that was the update The release notes call out a few things of note for the upgrade from 12 but…