dragonne

If you consider this article lengthy you should read a few books to recalibrate your attention span.

FYI this site isn't paywalled, it just has an obnoxious popup.

I wouldn't call it over-engineered, but it certainly is an operational disaster. It's slow, memory hungry, and full of catastrophic bugs.

We are currently replacing it with PostgreSQL to improve performance and scalability.

> There's no reason you couldn't represent RFC5322 data with RDF as JSONLD. There's now a way to do streaming JSON-LD.

Is there a reason you'd want to? I clicked all your links but I still have no idea what Solid is.

I've endured Datomic for 4 years and I really wonder what the folks who enjoy it are doing, because for me it us utter misery.

- It's miserably slow (if you wish to contradict this statement, please provide numbers) - Consumes gobs of memory (export our data to JSON and it's orders of magnitude smaller) - Full text search will consume all your CPU cores for if you given it a short query (seriously, don't touch this feature, it is a basket full of footguns) - Resource leaks (the Cassandra backend used to leak full databases!)

I've been up to 3:00 a.m. dealing with bugs in Datomic. What use cases does it actually work for?

I've heard that this is also why American baguettes are so brutally hard (even when fresh). They're supposed to be closer to crispy, not a dental hazard.

Ah, I see what you meant. Thanks for clarifying!

I think most of your advice is solid, but I take issue with one point:

> - If your font colour is more thant #333 on white, you're being cruel, especially to those who suffer astigmatism.

A designer should think hard before reducing contrast. You may be improving the experience for one group at the expense of others:

- A low contrast page is difficult to read on a cell phone in daylight.

- A low contrast page is difficult to read at night on a dimmed display.

I don't meant to discount folks for whom high contrast is a problem, but don't they have a simple recourse? Reduce the brightness or contrast of the display. Most monitors and laptops have controls that allow this.

You may appreciate https://github.com/Andy753421/mkinit though it is written in mk (from Plan 9) rather than Make.

I guess I have no plans to buy another Nvidia card, then. Their current X11 drivers tear like crazy, and I have hope that Wayland will fix that.

This, a thousand times this.

Failing that, though, at least change the default rsyslog configuration such that:

* Timestamps are not ambiguous (the default includes no timezone offset)

* Timestamps are higher resolution (milliseconds at least, but preferably microseconds)

* The syslog severity/priority is not discarded (tools which display these files must use disgusting heuristics like searching for "err" to highlight errors)

* Rate limiting is disabled, as rsyslog sees all messages as coming from journald. This means that a misbehaving (chatty) application can cause critical messages from other apps to be dropped. journald does its own (per-source) rate limiting anyway.

* /var/log/syslog is rotated by size as well as time, so a misbehaving program can't easily fill up the partition which contains that file by accident. The current default is 1/day rotation, with no size limit.

Scylla's blog has some excellent technical content, though it's intermixed with lots release announcements. http://www.scylladb.com/2017/01/02/top-5-blog-posts-of-2016/ has some of the highlights.

The biggest gotcha is that namedtuples compare exactly like regular tuples. Thus, two namedtuple types with identical elements will compare equal even if the type and field names differ. Usually that isn't what you want.

I've taken to using attrs everywhere for exactly this reason: http://attrs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/why.html#namedtuples

I have a Z5 Compact as well. Nice little phone, and quite fast. However, I don't think that many developers test their apps on a sub-5" screen, because I've encountered issues with several apps where controls overlap. For example, in VLC's file list the context menu button overlaps with the invisible scroll bar track. It is easy to scroll accidentally. Amazon Music has exactly the same problem, too.

The Android ecosystem is difficult to recommend, and a small Android phone is even more difficult to recommend.

Another Rust terminal emulator project, notty[1], aims to do this. Downthread the author mentions that the projects are looking at collaborating.

[1]: https://github.com/withoutboats/notty

It seems worth noting that as web browsers have removed the ability to disable JavaScript they have added options to disable web fonts. I flipped this switch in Firefox for Android because it makes pages load noticeably faster and conserves data. Lots of sites seem to host web fonts on third-party CDNs which require a separate TCP connection: a big deal on high-latency mobile.

Blocking web fonts usually does not noticeably degrade a site's usability or functionality. Icon fonts are the exception. I've learned that a question mark in the upper-right corner is usually a site's menu, except when it's the search function. I don't think that this level of breakage is comparable to what happens when JavaScript is disabled, since many sites just break completely without scripting.

Anyone in particular, or anything open source? I could use this for a work project, but the closest I've been able to find is an old project which backed JGit to Cassandra and the Dulwich Swift backend[1].

[1]: https://www.dulwich.io/apidocs/dulwich.contrib.swift.html

What are the products better than Fitbit's which the article alludes to? I've generally been impressed with their products, and my experience with a competitor (Virgin Pulse) was terrible.

Firefox on Android has a switch for this. Menu -> Settings -> Advanced -> Show web fonts. The mobile web is remarkably faster to load with it off, even on wifi.

The SIL Open Font License restricts subsetting, so you do need to be careful when doing this (the license requires that you change the font name if you reduce the font's display quality). Google has gotten waivers to allow them to alter the fonts without changing their names.

The repository with the fonts and tools is here: https://github.com/google/fonts

CSS unicode-range has that covered: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/... Pretty good browser support, too.

What tools do you use to profile a Scala + Akka service? IME they are quite opaque to traditional Java tools like VisualVM. What am I missing?

We ship a microservices-based product on-premises. You can do it, but it's a heck of a lot of work. Plus you don't get any of the benefits microservices might bring in a CD scenario: you can't do CD over an airgap.

It is frustrating that Firefox makes it so easy to delete recent history, but difficult to remove old stuff. I really only want the last month or so; why do I have to clear it manually?

Maybe this is new, but the TECK has terrible build quality IME. I have been using two (home and work) and both have accrued keys that don't work properly---some don't respond reliably, or at all, and some double-press. These are both Cherry browns. Firmware tweaks haven't helped.

I use a Wacom for some tasks, but I find it even worse than a mouse if you are switching back and forth a lot. For drag and drop I recommend the Contour Design Rollermouse Red. The downside is it doesn't pair well with a deep keyboard, as it wants to replace any wrist rest.

No, Kodi uses SQLite internally (I've fixed garbage in its databases with the sqlite CLI tool before). It does also support external MySQL, though.

In a similar vein, there is https://shop.keyboard.io/ I pre-ordered one earlier today to replace a TECK.

I agree that most of the keyboards on this list are not ergonomic at all. Most are simply mechanical keyboards.

Thank you for posting this, and in particular for the pointer to Jolokia. Just what a Python shop needs to monitor Java infrastructure.