tail -f /dev/dim

Two blogs

You're offered two blogs here, tailing the tales of an Emacs user whose job evolves around PostgreSQL. By choice and passion.

PostgreSQL Ideas

Each conference I get to refines some ideas I have about PostgreSQL evolution possibilities, and pop some new ones in my head. This time I decided to write them down.

pg_staging

This tool allow you to leaverage your production backups in order to manage your staging environments (dev, pre-live, snapshots, you name it). Presentation slides included!

prefix indexing

A PostgreSQL extension to speed up prefix routing based lookups. Think telecom routing table, cost computing, etc. Indexing supports for equality lookups, containment and overlapping.

pgloader

The PostgreSQL parallel ETL, writen in python, allows loading plain text files and continue doing so in the presence of errors. Easily extensible to support any input transformation.

Skytools

PostgreSQL master slave asynchronous replication made easy. And I mean it.

Emacs ClusterSSH

Control all your remote hosts interactively from within Emacs. Stop waiting for the windows where to host the terms to be ready...

Emacs Muse blog

Yes, it happens that you find a blog talking about Emacs, made with Emacs, and which tries at looking modern

Dim's place on the internet

I used to use many different tools to publish a web site. This introduction about my current website is more a rant than anything else, really. You certainly should skip it entirely and go check either the blog or the more static resources, often tied to projects.

Projects

Check out the Projects page, where you'll find some information about pgloader, how to do prefix lookup indexing for PostgreSQL and some more.

There's even a GNU Emacs project presented, ClusterSSH.

Don't miss the miscellanea page, with a lot of different little things.

/dim/blog

At long last! And with a standard compliant feed! Yeah. Check it out!

A rant about internet publishing softwares

So it's already 2008, and very soon it'll be 2009. In fact, we've never been this near to be in year 2009. One could think that publishing material on the internet has came easy now. Well, it depends a lot on what you call easy.

When what you call easy is the following, you're in trouble:

• editing plain text with your usual $EDITOR
• publishing static web pages, the though is that there will be more reads than writes, or you wouldn't be publishing whatever it is you are publishing, so please let be generate static content
• having a nice but rich syntax, where simple things are simple and complex ones possible.

What I've been using so far to achieve previous goals where, well, hand written software in dynamic php (fail) then in python, both using the same very personal syntax and menu system; then a docutils based solution named rest2web, and now that I'm back to trying to use GNU Emacs for more than plain editing, I'm trying the Emacs Muse publication system.

The python docutils toolset seems nice at the beginning, but I kept hitting errors I was left unable to fix, even though I'm somewhat used to hack my way around free software. Problems tied to encodings, where even using --debug options did not give any clue. I'd prefer to forget about it.

What is this rant about already? Oh well, I can't believe how hard it is today to find a good and simple web publishing solution for $EDITOR kind of users, the ones building the internet in some ways. I really hope Emacs Muse to be this one.

The usual problem with publishing tools is the early success. It seems so easy, albeit admitidly demanding technical-fu (which means, as a geek, you like it). Then the site online, you made the nice CSS for it, all is good. Then you forget about it, work on some real projects instead, and some weeks or months later you want to publish some content about those projects you've been working on. And you just can not figure out how to achieve this simple step.

Or the tool suite is falling on you without any useful error messages.

I've been pointed to Ikiwiki, but as much as I like palyndroms, Emacs Muse seemed much more attractive a project. Having all working from my editor of choice is a nice idea, and I'm getting fond of Emacs Lisp. More as a programming environment (in this highly dynamic editor) than as a language, maybe. Not sure yet. It's just so fun to hack ones way into emacs with this tool!

So, Internet is not ready for geeks to easily publish their rants, or they have to sacrifice to the dynamic web hosting facilities mode. No Thanks.