September 2019
32 posts: 4 entries, 5 links, 4 quotes, 19 beats
Sept. 3, 2019
sqlite-utils 1.11. Amjith Ramanujam contributed an excellent new feature to sqlite-utils, which I’ve now released as part of version 1.11. Previously you could enable SQLite full-text-search on a table using the .enable_fts() method (or the “sqlite-utils enable-fts” CLI command) but it wouldn’t reflect future changes to the table—you had to use populate_fts() any time you inserted new records. Thanks to Amjith you can now pass create_triggers=True (or --create-triggers) to cause sqlite-utils to automatically add triggers that keeps the FTS index up-to-date any time a row is inserted, updated or deleted from the table.
Sept. 4, 2019
Sept. 9, 2019
Sept. 10, 2019
Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links (via) Slightly confusing announcement from Google: they’re introducing rel=ugc and rel=sponsored in addition to rel=nofollow, and will be treating all three values as “hints” for their indexing system. They’re very unclear as to what the concrete effects of these hints will be, presumably because they will become part of the secret sauce of their ranking algorithm.
My JSK Fellowship: Building an open source ecosystem of tools for data journalism
I started a new chapter of my career last week: I began a year long fellowship with the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program at Stanford.
[... 876 words]Sept. 11, 2019
Sept. 13, 2019
Weeknotes: ONA19, twitter-to-sqlite, datasette-rure
I’ve decided to start writing weeknotes for the duration of my JSK fellowship. Here goes!
[... 919 words]Sept. 14, 2019
Sept. 17, 2019
Sept. 19, 2019
genome-to-sqlite. I just found out 23andMe let you export your genome as a zipped TSV file, so I wrote a little Python command-line tool to import it into a SQLite database.
Anyone with solid knowledge of both SQL and genetic engineering want to write me an UPDATE query to turn me into a dinosaur?
— @simonw
Sept. 20, 2019
Weeknotes: Design thinking for journalists, genome-to-sqlite, datasette-atom
I haven’t had much time for code this week: we’ve had a full five day workshop at JSK with Tran Ha (a JSK alumni) learning how to apply Design Thinking to our fellowship projects and generally to challenges facing journalism.
[... 870 words]Sept. 23, 2019
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (via) Research from 2016: “Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks”
People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystem are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?
Sept. 25, 2019
Looking back at the Snowden revelations (via) Six years on from the Snowden revelations, crypto researcher Matthew Green reviews their impact and reminds us what we learned. Really interesting.
Sept. 26, 2019
If you're a little shy at conferences, speaking is The Best way to break the ice. Nobody talks to you before the talk. Everybody want's to talk to you afterwards, largely because they have a way in. As such, public speaking is bizarrely good for introverts.