Thunderbird, Element, SQL, GPT, GNSS, Bwrap, FOSDEM

1. It's time to make some FOSS donations again, this time Mozilla Thunderbird (@ thunderbird.net) received my donation.

2. There are many things I don't like about Element (Matrix Client), but one thing I do like. Is it's nohello policy. Where new chat is only created when message is posted to new chat. It's pointless to notify recipients about new chat, unless there's nothing to see them for and that's great! - Actually the next day I wrote this. I got invite to a new chat, which should at that point contain the opening. And it did. "Hey" - Expressionless face.

3. Refreshed my memory about SQL blog (@ sqlblog.org) and it's bad habits (@ sqlblog.org) section. This is just pure love! So much good stuff. And of course the giving sound reasoning behind WHY it's a bad habit.

4. SQL Server ODBC (@ Wikipedia) and multiple cursors, age old question. And the answer is cnxn.getinfo(pyodbc.SQL_MAX_CONCURRENT_ACTIVITIES) - Thanks! Ref: @mkleehammer/pyodbc/Cursors (@ GitHub). Conclusion is that you can't trust to have always multiple cursors, so it's better to write code so that you'll only use one, and that's it. The drawback is larger memory consumption and potentially unnecessary data transfer when data which isn't actually required might get read into memory from database and then discarded if some rules aren't getting filled. Obviously if you can do that filtering on the query, it's best to do there, but always you can't.

5. Interestingly one disk had MBR and GPT partition tables. It was clearly partitioned by some major n00b. Anyway, we fixed that. Before removing the GPT data from disk, we backed up first and last 17 kilobytes of the disk just in case we would need to restore the partition to disk after deleting it. But it turned out that everything was good, after wiping the excess GPT data. Annoying. I did read stories about this kind of mishaps, but I don't know why would anyone actually do such silly setup.

6. Galileo (@ Wikipedia) launched High Accuracy Service (HAS) is a global open Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technology which allows global 20 cm positional accuracy. That's awesome! kw: GNSS, location service, satellite navigation

7. Lot of discussion about EXIF data cleanup. There are many ways to do it. Just make sure you do it, in situations where it matters.

8. Helped a few friends to get their bubblewrap (bwrap) to work correctly. As mentioned, the mounts are quite complex and annoying to get working and it's highly frustrating process especially in situations where it just fails and you don't have any kind of sane clue why. I've done that with bwrap a few times, and now I've saved my self basic layout in shell script, which sets most of the basic building blocks correctly so I don't need to spend few hours getting sweaty and angry before it works, or I give up. Many seem to just skip that agonizing step and use firejail, Qubes OS or Docker instead.

9. Watched Matrix 2.0 FOSDEM 2023 presentation. I hope the sync issues get fixed. I'm almost daily getting angry about how broken the sync it. Well, at least it works if you shutdown the app and restart it. Then the lost events will appear. Duh! 

10. Read about Space-BACN optical satellite network. Interesting. It remains to be seen if and when that gets deployed and how it works out.

11. Windows 11 telemetry and secret user surveillance, joy.

12. Core War (@ Wikipedia) - One of oldest programming games? I really liked it back in the day. And found it again. Yet I've got no time to play it. But it's still very fascination game for devs.

13. Found annoying problems in Akkoma ActivityPub server. Home timeline just keeps failing with empty body. After doing lots of different test, I figured out really silly thing. It seems that it works if I limit the response to 15 entries. If I allow 16 entries it fails. This limit also holds, when I insert new items on the timeline. Which basically means that it's not the 15th / 16th post itself triggering this issue. Some other limit is being hit, but what? FloatingGhost told me to update to 3.6.0 from 3.5.0 version. And as expected (?), it didn't change anything. Why, why, why? Why I'm always finding broken systems on non-stop amok-run loop? ref: /api/v1/timelines/home?with_muted=true&limit=15 - Luckily the problems have been fixed since.

14. Firefox Fission Site Isolation (@ hacks.mozilla.com), nice document describing how web-content is being isolated by Firefox when user is browsing multiple sites. And then people keep wondering why browsers use so much memory, well this is one of the reasons.

2024-02-11