I've ended the week with a whole lot of tabs open. And I mean a lot.
So here's a bunch of the "This is interesting, I want to read this later" stuff I've accumulated. In no particular order and with no relevance between them:
The Black National Anthem
Lift Every Voice and Sing has existed for more than 100 years and is often called the Black National Anthem.
Empty BEGIN/COMMIT transactions in Rails
First reported in 2014, I noticed this in a development Rails console session:
[2021-02-05 18:20:44 -0500] (1.3ms) BEGIN
[2021-02-05 18:20:44 -0500] (2.0ms) COMMIT
[2021-02-05 18:20:44 -0500] (2.5ms) BEGIN
[2021-02-05 18:20:44 -0500] (3.1ms) COMMITDid Rails just spend almost 10ms on transactions with absolutely nothing in them? Yes, yes it did. (As for why it takes Postgres several milliseconds to perform an empty transaction, see the opening graphic showing that I'm using 9GB of swap.)
Chaos reigns! Finding DNS server versions.
I spent a good ten minutes trying to remember this with the help of Google.
In a convention apparently starting with bind, most DNS servers will tell you their hostname and what DNS server they're using based on the not-obscure-at-all CH class.
% dig -4 -c CH -t TXT @f.root-servers.net version.bind +short
"cloudflare-f-root-20190930"The BIND documentation outlines four zones it knows about:
- version.bind (or version.server as implemented by some others)
- hostname.bind
- authors.bind
- id.server
(It also turns out that "bind" is properly styled as BIND, per the ISC site.)
Zoom has a /19 and it's on AWS
This was interesting to me. Looking at connections while on a Zoom call, beyond some connections to amazonaws.com hostnames, there was an IP in the 134.224.0.0/19 netblock. It's allocated to Zoom, but announced by AWS.
I thought it was interesting, at least.
Pretty Good Lake House
I've mentioned a few times my interest in custom-building a house. Maybe it's just Google giving extra weight to more local results, but it seems like a disproportionate number of people who have done similar things also live in New England. The latest of them is A Pretty Good Lake House:
It's got a bunch of stuff interesting to me, including a link to a post called The Pretty Good House, "Finding the right balance between construction cost and energy performance."
But I actually found it while reading about heat pump dryers, which seem somewhat niche right now, but use less energy and are ventless, at the possible expense of taking longer.
Wood Stoves
I think I want to do a separate break-out post on these later, but I'm in love with both of these:
