Dev in a Jail

I work a lot on FreeBSD and have made increasing use of jails over time. The bastille and rocinante tools from Christer Edwards make this …

TIL vs TIW

An oddity of producing TIL blog entries is that they rarely match the TIL claim. At least it’s that way for me, and I suspect most who …

Search Path and Extensions

Using search_path to implement polymorphism is one of those conveniences in PostgreSQL that can bite hard. Relying on it to select the …

Man Page in Plain Text

Here is a command to print a man page in plain text:

man -P cat page | col -b

This uses cat as the pager, and strips backspace characters …

OCR via LLM

My stepfather has a box of newspaper clippings from long ago and wants to create digital copies. I asked him to send me a scan. It was an …

A Useful Shell Pattern

If you work at the unix command line you probably execute pipelines of programs to test ideas. It’s part of the unix way. Sometimes …

Split for Embedding

Different embedding models have different limits on input tokens. When you want to create embeddings for a large corpus, one major annoyance …

Checking Make Vars

If your make target recipes use make variables you may want to test that they are set before using them. This would look something like …

Sqitch Templates

Sqitch has a template mechanism that follows the same design pattern as its migration files. This makes it easy to manage templates with …

Variables in Sqitch

Sqitch supports variables in the config file like this:

[target "foo"]
    engine = pg
    uri = your-connection-string-here …