Databases, Quick Tips

Monitoring Running Queries in Postgres

Jason / January 31, 2021

Another one for the Quick Tips category – have you ever needed to see what queries are running against your Postgres database? Perhaps a nightly process hasn’t finished yet and you’re curious if it’s deadlocked? Or maybe the database server is using 100% CPU and you’re not sure why? These, along with many others, are all reasons I have needed to peek under the hood of Postgres. read more

Internet, Quick Tips

Simple HTML5 Video Player

Jason / October 21, 2020
Camera on side of building
A watchful eye

As an avid technologist I maintain my own home security cameras. These camera stream H.264 encoded 1080P video across my gigabit LAN to my home server, recording 24/7 footage for future reference. These clips are not only stored on my home server, they’re also processed via a custom Python script for motion, the results of which are logged to a file. I can easily see which video clips contain motion, and make it easier to locate something of interest. read more

Objective-C, Quick Tips

Constructing an NSArray with NSString Copies

The scenario might sound specific, but I am confident you’ve encountered something similar before. You need to construct an array, with a known number of duplicates of a string. Perhaps you’re constructing a template, and need a fixed number of placeholder elements, or you’re parameterizing a query and need a dynamic number of placeholders. In either case, you were probably left writing a rather ugly bit of logic in the middle of a routine that was otherwise focused on the task at hand. read more