Sometimes, you have these .pkg installer files on macOS. Today, I needed to extract them to see what's inside. Here's how you can do it: 1xar -xf MyInstaller.pkg If there is a file called Payload in there, you need to unpack it again: 1cat Payload | gunzip -dc | cpio -i Inspira … | Continue reading

You can uninstall the Panda Adaptive Defense or Endpoint Protection software manually from the operating system?s control panel, or remotely from the Computers area or from the Computer protection status and Licenses lists. ⚠️ This post links to an external website. ⚠️ | Continue reading

I wanted to demonstrate the relationship between the logical model and a physical model. We're going to design a commonly seen use case: many yes/no attributes of a single anchor (in our case, Restaurant). Then we'll discuss how the physical tables would be designed. We'll see th … | Continue reading

To import CSV files into SQLite, you can do this in your terminal: 1sqlite3 mydatabase.db 2SQLite version 3.43.2 2023-10-10 13:08:14 3Enter ".help" for usage hints. 4sqlite> .import --csv mydata.csv table_name If the table already exists and the field names don't match the heade … | Continue reading

When we first got the personal computer, we didn't worry much about how things worked. We were, frankly, stunned that we even had such a thing. You had to learn some arcane lingo to type into a DOS prompt. That the computer might be difficult or awkward to use didn't occur to us. … | Continue reading

Most people think that we format Go code with gofmt to make code look nicer or to end debates among team members about program layout. But the most important reason for gofmt is that if an algorithm defines how Go source code is formatted, then programs, like goimports or gorenam … | Continue reading

In this database design tutorial (~9000 words) I'm going to show how to design the database tables for a real-world project of substantial complexity. We'll design a clone of Google Calendar. We will model as much as possible of the functionality that is directly related to the c … | Continue reading

Many LLM applications involve retrieving information from external data sources using a Retriever. A retriever is responsible for retrieving a list of relevant Documents to a given user query. The retrieved documents are often formatted into prompts that are fed into an LLM, allo … | Continue reading

At work, I recently had the need to use the Laravel migrations for multiple databases. Long story short, our main database is MySQL but we also use PostgreSQL as an AI vector store. I wanted to use the Laravel migrations to create the tables in both databases. It turns out to be … | Continue reading

Today, I learned how to purge the binlogs from MySQL: 1PURGE BINARY LOGS BEFORE now(); You can read more about it in the MySQL documentation: 1PURGE { BINARY | MASTER } LOGS { 2 TO 'log_name' 3 | BEFORE datetime_expr 4} The binary log is a set of files that contain informat … | Continue reading

If you want to stream a HTTP download to a file when using the Laravel HTTP client, you can do this: 1$resource = \GuzzleHttp\Psr7\Utils::tryFopen('/path/to/file', 'w'); 2 3Http::withOptions(['sink' => $resource])->get('url'); You can read more about the sink option in the Guzzl … | Continue reading

To quickly import a CSV file into a PostgreSQL table: 1SET DateStyle = 'ISO, DMY'; -- Set the correct date format 2copy mytable (column1, column2) from 'local-file.csv' delimiter ',' csv header; -- Import the files If you want, you can also stream from stdin: 1SET DateStyle = 'I … | Continue reading

I'm quite a fan of using PHP first class callables, but combining them with Laravel collections can be a bit tricky. Imagine you have a collection with header names you want to convert to snake case. 1$headers = collect(["First Name", "Last Name", "Zip Code", "City"]); With firs … | Continue reading

The docs for the Black Python code formatter say that the formatter "is not configurable". This is largely true, but if you have Black set up > to work in VSCode, you can configure the line length. In VSCode, go 'Code -> Preferences -> Settings' and search for "python formatting … | Continue reading

Today, I was writing a test for a Laravel application that uses MySQL full-text search. I was testing a search query that uses the MATCH and AGAINST operators. The test was failing as no results were returned from the search. Running the same code outside the context of the test … | Continue reading

Laravel often returns an HTML response or redirect response on API routes, mostly if the response is an error one. However, it is quite easy to force Laravel to return JSON response in those cases. ⚠️ This post links to an external website. ⚠️ | Continue reading

Technical due diligence (TDD) helps investors and companies uncover the tech strengths and weaknesses of startups. TDD plays a crucial role in revealing risks and opportunities tied to technology, allowing for a thorough assessment that aids in making better business decisions. ⚠ … | Continue reading

While building tempest/highlight, I came across an interesting design problem. One of its core components is a concept called "patterns"; these are classes that match a very specific part of code-to-be-highlighted using regex. Part of my test suite's responsibility is to test eac … | Continue reading

If you work on anything worthwhile, sooner or later people will care about it and will want you to send progress updates. These could be quarterly investor updates, weekly updates to your boss, emails to adjacent teams, etc. Here are tips on how to do this well. ⚠️ This post link … | Continue reading

I worked with a client in the early days of my career building social media sentiment analysis platform when Twitter was still called Twitter. We were a team of seven and I was a junior-level developer back then. We were young and enthusiastic and full of ourselves. "We're agile, … | Continue reading

Generative AI is attracting attention as the technology has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent years, offering fresh ways to solve user problems. Since it's a relatively new area in terms of its practical application, figuring out how to start building with LLMs (large lang … | Continue reading

OpenStreetMaps (OSM) is known for being an open source project that allows people to browse the world map and to plan routes. However it is more than that. Among others it provides a read-only API that allows users to query for very diverse map data: Overpass API ⚠️ This post lin … | Continue reading

Every so often, I need to chase down some aspect of email validation. This involves a number of DNS records and queries, but I may forget just which ones. So here's a quick cheatsheet for future me to pull up the next time I don't remember which records are used to validate SPF, … | Continue reading

Call it age. Call it apathy, if you must. I call it contentment. Much of my twenties were spent endlessly experimenting and searching for the perfect editor and workflow. As I read these words back to myself, I'm somewhat embarrassed. "Really? That's what you spent your twenties … | Continue reading