Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.
Rowan is mainly a writer. This blog here is a dumping ground for miscellaneous stuff that he just needs to get out of his head. He is way more passionate about the subjects he writes about on Sapiens Habitat: the connections between humans, each other, and to nature, including their human nature.
If you are dreaming of a holiday in the forests of Drenthe (the Netherlands), look no further than “De Schuilplaats”: a beautiful vacation home, around which Rowan maintains a magnificent ecological garden and a private heather field, brimming with biological diversity.
FlashMQ is a business that offers managed MQTT hosting and other services that Rowan co-founded with Jeroen and Wiebe.
Since my initial announcement here of pg_safer_settings, my extensions for safe (through per-column GRANTs), fast (through IMMUTABLE, auto-(re)generated accessor functions) settings has matured quite a bit, and is now at version 0.8.12.
Soon, later this month, still in the first quarter of 2024, I expect to release the first officially stable 1.0 version…
I just released pg_text_semver version 1.0.0 on PGXN. As usual, it’s also available for your forking pleasure.
Upgrading from 0.1.5 to 1.0.0 should be seamless. As usual, upgrade scripts are provided, though I didn’t need to according to the Semantic Versioning for pre-1.0 releases. 😉
Since my initial release, I’ve learned that, besides the pre-existing semver extension that I tried before developing pg_text_semver, there also existed a PG_SEMVER extension that I did not test and compare with my own solution. It might certainly be faster than my version, given that both these other extensions have their crucial parts written in C. (Performance was really not an issue for my use case – much less so in any case than completeness, correctness and ease of use.) See the Alternative to pg_text_semver section of the README for more details.
Somehow, while working on the ranking of “De Schuilplaats” in the shittified 2023 Google Search, between writing and peddling guest blog posts to spammy website with reasonable PageRank, I overlooked the fact that I could add a profile for a holiday home for free to a website operated by the province of Drenthe to promote tourism in the region. So here is our new profile on the Drenthe.nl website, that has an OpenPageRank of … 5/10:
https://www.drenthe.nl/verblijven-overnachten/vakantiehuisjes/3958391244/de-schuilplaats
The following is a copy of an guest post of mine that was published on Hoogsensitief.NL on June 19, 2023: Overgevoelig voor programmeren?
Programmeren lijkt bij uitstek een activiteit die geschikt is voor gevoelige mensen. Zolang je computer in een omgeving staat met prettige verlichting (het liefste daglicht) en zonder rumoerige collega’s of (veel erger!) achtergrondmuziek, zit je vaak in een bubbel waarin je zelf de controle hebt over binnenkomende prikkels. Klinkt ideaal toch?
Early during the development of the PostgreSQL backend for FlashMQ.com—that is our amazing managed MQTT hosting service!—, I decided on using UUIDs rather than auto-incrementing integers wherever I needed or wanted surrogate keys. I am one of those people who prefers the use of natural keys where their use is … natural, but I certainly have nothing _against_ surrogate keys, only to their overuse, which usually results from an over-reliance on ORMs (which I do have something against). There are a couple of advantages to using UUIDs over auto-incrementing integers (available in PostgreSQL via sequences):
I needed to compare semantic versions within Postgres. I tried the existing semver extension, but when I found that it was a bit problematic to adjust to be fully compliant with the semantic versioning spec, I decided to write a simple domain-based alternative myself: pg_text_semver.
(Version parsing was part of my effort for more robust pg_restore of FlashMQ extension data. I might write more about that in the future.)
My newest PostgreSQL extension—pg_extra_time—contains the date-time functions, operators and casts that I was surprised to not find in the standard library. Maybe one day…
Again, this extension is a shoot-off from the PostgreSQL work I’m doing for the backend of the high-performant FlashMQ.com MQTT hosting service, that is due to launch later this quarter.
Like most of the FlashMQ.com PostgreSQL extensions, pg_extra_time is also available via PGXN—The PostgreSQL Extension Network: https://github.com/bigsmoke/pg_extra_time
Yesterday, I released a tiny PostgreSQL extension that I use to validate email address in the backend of FlashMQ.com: pg_html5_email_address validates email addresses in the same way that modern web browsers do for <input type="email"> elements.
The advantage of having email validation in your data backend to be in sync with the HTML5 spec is twofold:
pg_html5_email_address is available on PGXN: https://pgxn.org/dist/pg_html5_email_address/1.1.0/
And now there is pg_xenophile too, the seventh spin-off extension of the robust, efficient PostgreSQL backend for our scalable MQTT hosting platform: FlashMQ.
pg_xenophile is also available via PGXN: https://pgxn.org/dist/pg_xenophile/
Yet another PostgreSQL extension that emerged from the FlashMQ PostgreSQL backend is: pg_safer_settings. pg_safer_settings offers some functions and a mechanisms to make working with settings in PostgreSQL a bit safer. Its defining features are:
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