October 2020
75 posts: 7 entries, 16 links, 6 quotes, 46 beats
Oct. 11, 2020
Oct. 12, 2020
evernote-to-sqlite (via) The latest tool in my Dogsheep series of utilities for personal analytics: evernote-to-sqlite takes Evernote note exports en their ENEX XML format and loads them into a SQLite database. Embedded images are loaded into a BLOB column and the output of their cloud-based OCR system is added to a full-text search index. Notes have a latitude and longitude which means you can visualize your notes on a map using Datasette and datasette-cluster-map.
xml-analyser. In building evernote-to-sqlite I dusted off an ancient (2009) project I built that scans through an XML file and provides a summary of what elements are present in the document and how they relate to each other. I’ve now packaged it up as a CLI app and published it on PyPI.
Oct. 14, 2020
Oct. 16, 2020
Building an Evernote to SQLite exporter
I’ve been using Evernote for over a decade, and I’ve long wanted to export my data from it so I can do interesting things with it.
[... 1,879 words]Weeknotes: evernote-to-sqlite, Datasette Weekly, scrapers, csv-diff, sqlite-utils
This week I built evernote-to-sqlite (see Building an Evernote to SQLite exporter), launched the Datasette Weekly newsletter, worked on some scrapers and pushed out some small improvements to several other projects.
Oct. 17, 2020
Oct. 18, 2020
Oct. 19, 2020
The stampede of the affluent into grim-faced, highly competitive sports has been a tragicomedy of perverse incentives and social evolution in unequal times: a Darwinian parable of the mayhem that can ensue following the discovery of even a minor advantage. Like a peacock rendered nearly flightless by gaudy tail feathers, the overserved athlete is the product of a process that has become maladaptive, and is now harming the very blue-chip demographic it was supposed to help.
Dogsheep: Personal analytics with Datasette. The second edition of my new Datasette Weekly newsletter, talks about Dogsheep, Dogsheep Beta, Datasette 1.0 and features datasette-cluster-map as the plugin of the week.
This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine. (via) I love it.
Oct. 20, 2020
Oct. 21, 2020
Pikchr. Interesting new project from SQLite creator D. Richard Hipp. Pikchr is a new mini language for describing visual diagrams, designed to be embedded in Markdown documentation. It’s already enabled for the SQLite forum. Implementation is a no-dependencies C library and output is SVG.
Proof of concept: sqlite_utils magic for Jupyter (via) Tony Hirst has been experimenting with building a Jupyter “magic” that adds special syntax for using sqlite-utils to insert data and run queries. Query results come back as a Pandas DataFrame, which Jupyter then displays as a table.
Writing the code to sign data with a private key and verify it with a public key would have been easier to get correct than correctly invoking the JWT library. In fact, the iOS app (which gets this right) doesn’t use a JWT library at all, but manages to verify using a public key in fewer lines of code than the Android app takes to incorrectly use a JWT library!
Oct. 22, 2020
Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, and simpler messaging app (via) Facebook rewrote their iOS messaging app earlier this year, dropping it from 1.7m lines of code to 360,000 and reducing the binary size to a quarter of what it was. A key part of the new app’s architecture is much heavier reliance on SQLite to coordinate data between views, and to dynamically configure how different views are displayed. They even built their own custom system to add stored procedures to SQLite so they could execute portable business logic inside the database.