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Spent some time standing in some brambles to photograph a diverted bus – could have been much less time, if it wasn’t for various bunglings on my part, but it was a lovely sunny morning, and bucolic surroundings for listening to some podcasts and doing a life insurance medical interview (mostly saying “no” to each serious disease, extreme sport and war zone holiday destination listed) – which I actually did while bicycling along, which reminds me of inspirational time management exuberance Randy Pausch wearing a goofy headset to similarly multitask (in an era before AirPods Pro).
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Some work. A dreadful long outage, which I dealt with not very sensibly – to my credit, sleeping through such things is probably quite healthy, but I perish the thought of how many nines I’ve lost.
There was a poorly database server, which I did some stuff to try to fix. Then, while I was waiting for a backup that turned out to be incomplete to restore, I deleted the most recent and only complete backup. None of it makes any sense, but it shouldn’t happen again, and there are some upshots:
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Here’s a handy query for killing rogue long-running queries:
SELECT pg_cancel_backend(pid) FROM pg_stat_activity WHERE state = 'active' AND (now() - pg_stat_activity.query_start) > interval '1 minutes';I once heard of somewhere where they had a cron job running a query like that every so often. If you needed a query to run for longer, you could include a comment (like “do not kill” or something) that prevented it being killed. But “the Russians used a pencil”. Better to set per-user timeouts, like:
ALTER USER frontend SET statement_timeout = 5000;I’d been meaning to set this up for some time, but I was too lazy to look up the incantations for setting up users and granting them permissions. And look what happened.
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Upgraded to PostgreSQL 11. It’s probably faster.
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I’m now storing historic vehicle locations in Redis, rather than Postgres. It’s probably more suitable, isn’t it – old data will disappear automatically. And I know how to use Redis now.
Cool story.
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Started watching Happy Valley, which as you must know is not about a magical elf leaping merrily, but rather the police. It’s really emotionally gruelling.
Another week cometh. Big week for coin/transition period fans. I’ve some fun and different things to do, which I suppose will serve as a distraction, and was going to say how looking forward to them I am, but I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong end of the stick and think I’m a coin fan.