Thursday, 5th October 2017
Learning a language behind bars is a good way to meet foreign nationals and hear interesting stories about their lives back home and how they ended up doing porridge. I learnt a bit of Spanish with a 70 year-old Columbian grandfather who’d hit hard times and tried to bring a suitcase full of cocaine through Heathrow. He didn’t speak a word of English before jail and had learnt it all from the Cockney geezers on the wing. As a result he didn’t understand basic outside world vocabulary such as ‘traffic cone’ or ‘coat hanger’, but he did talk about ‘avin a bubble with his china plates’
Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL
I’ve added a faceted search engine to this blog, powered by PostgreSQL. It supports regular text search (proper search, not just SQL“like” queries), filter by tag, filter by date, filter by content type (entries vs blogmarks vs quotation) and any combination of the above. Some example searches:
[... 3,103 words]PostgreSQL 10 Released. Highlights include major improvements to parallelized queries, quorum commit for synchronous replication (sounds reminiscent of Cassandra) and logical replication, which allows modifications to specific tables to be replicated to different clusters. They’re also changing their versioning scheme to Major.Minor, so the next minor release will be 10.1 and the next major release will be 11.
Building a statistical profiler in python. Generating flame graphs of production Python code is surprisingly straight-forward. Brian Pitts built a statistical flame graph profiler into our tikibar debugging tool at Eventbrite and it’s proved extremely useful.
PyPy v5.9 Released, Now Supports Pandas, NumPy. NumPy and Pandas now work on PyPy2.7. “Many other modules based on C-API extensions work on PyPy as well.”