Category Archives: Software

ExceLint is working again

I do a lot of work with spreadsheets. Some are pretty simple, and I can inspect them by hand. Some are enormously complicated – hundreds of rows, dozens of columns, etc. It’s not practical to inspect/test them manually. Enter ExceLint. It’s an add-in to Microsoft Excel that “lints” a spreadsheet. (A “linter” is a program

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PRQL Dockerfile works again

The PRQL project provides a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement. To make it easier to share the development environment, there is a Dev Container that bundles the dozens of components into a single container. This makes it easier for new person to start using the project: they don’t have to collect the proper (sometimes conflicting)

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All the “reasons” that bufferbloat isn’t a problem

As we take a shot at opening people’s eyes to bufferbloat, we should know some of the “objections” we’ll run up against. Even though there’s terrific technical data to back up our research, people seem especially resistant to thinking that bufferbloat might affect their network, even when they’re seeing problems that sound exactly like bufferbloat

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GPT & Klavier.ai

I was playing with ChatGPT and Klavier.ai the other day. It purports to import documentation so that you can ask questions about it. I let it read in the PRQL Language Book, and you can see the rest of my experimentation at the PRQL site.

Format pretty reports in PRQL

I can no longer bring myself to write bare SQL – PRQL makes building queries so easy. I have become enamored with PRQL – Pipelined Relational Query Language, pronounced “Prequel”. It’s a simple, powerful, pipelined SQL replacement. From the PRQL Github page: Like SQL, it’s readable, explicit and declarative. Unlike SQL, it forms a logical

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Docker vs. Ansible

I recently gave a talk to the local Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group describing some similarities between Docker and Ansible. Both give you a repeatable configuration by executing some sort of script of actions. Here is a link to the slides I used for the talk. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1W_vEPSZ-rhareK5q56pd10m2Y7JT2mc-LxrHAE6yaSI/edit#slide=id.g14247b9f80b_2_75 Update: March 2023 – I recently learned about

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More Fun with Docker Tooling

I continue to enjoy using Docker to encapsulate developer tooling so that it doesn’t pollute my laptop with varying versions of software I don’t use regularly. (See Jonathan Bergknoff’s Run More Stuff in Docker and Andrew Welch’s Docker for all the things for further justification.) In addition to using Andrew Welch’s vitejs-docker-dev project for Javascript

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