Ian Wagner
Unzip, UTF-8, Docker, and C Locales
Today's episode of "things that make you go 'wat'" is sponsored by unzip. Yes, the venerable utility ubiquitous on UNIX-like systems. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? This morning I was minding my own business sipping a coffee, when su ... read more →
Rootless GitLab CI Container Builds with BuildKit
Forgive me in advance, but this post will probably be a bit rant-y. If you're looking for a way to do container builds in GitLab CI without a lot of fuss, this article is for you. RIP Kaniko I'm writing this post because Google recently canned yet an ... read more →
Optimizing Rust Builds with Target Flags
Recently I've been doing some work using Apache DataFusion for some high-throughput data pipelines. One of the interesting things I noticed on the user guide was the suggestion to set RUSTFLAGS='-C target-cpu=native'. This is actually a pretty common ... read more →
Ownership Benefits Beyond Memory Safety
Rust's ownership system is well-known for the ways it enforces memory safety guaranteees. For example, you can't use some value after it's been freed. Further, it also ensures that mutability is explicit, and it enforces some extra rules that make mo ... read more →
Unicode Normalization
Today I ran into an amusingly named place, thanks to some sharp eyes on the OpenStreetMap US Slack. The name of this restaurant is listed as "πππππ ππππ ππππππ". That isn't some font trickery; it's a bunch of Unicode math symbols cleverly u ... read more →
EDNS Client-Subnet and Geographic DNS
DNS is a complex beast, so it's little surprise when I learn something new. Today I learned a bit more about the internals of how DNS works at various privacy-centric providers. It all started a few weeks ago when someone I follow on Mastodon (I'm ve ... read more →
Date Insanity with JavaScript
Earlier today, a friend sent me a joke about boycotting <some big evil tech company> for three days: Feb 29, 30, and 31. I thought this was pretty funny. But then, darker thoughts started to form. I've recently had the misfortune of doing far t ... read more →
Reverse Engineering Better MapKit Tile Overlays
Despite nearly 15 years of developing iOS apps on a daily basis, itβs occasionally jarring to go back to some of the older APIs. Today's blog is about MapKit, which isn't quite as old as CoreGraphics, but dates back to iOS 3.0! It was a bit slimmer b ... read more →
The rust-toolchain.toml file
This isn't so much a TIL as a quick PSA. If you're a Rust developer and need to ensure specific things about your toolchain, the rust-toolchain.toml file is a real gem! I don't quite remember how, but I accidentally discovered this file a year or two ... read more →
Databases as an Alternative to Application Logging
In my work, I've been doing a lot of ETL pipeline design recently for our geocoding system. The system processes on the order of a billion records per job, and failures are part of the process. We want to log these. Most applications start by dumping ... read more →