Simon Willison’s Weblog

Homebrew Python Is Not For You. If you’ve been running into frustrations with your Homebrew Python environments breaking over the past few months (the dreaded “Reason: image not found” error) Justin Mayer has a good explanation. Python in a Homebrew is designed to work as a dependency for their other packages, and recent policy changes that they made to support smoother upgrades have had catastrophic problems effects on those of us who try to use it for development environments.

# 3:14 pm / homebrew, python

Why all my servers have an 8GB empty file (via) This is such a good idea: keep a 8GB empty spacer.img file on any servers you operate, purely so that if the server runs out of space you can delete the file and get some breathing room for getting everything else working again. I’ve had servers run out of space in the past and it’s an absolute pain to sort out—this trick would have really helped.

# 8:35 pm / sysadmin

sqlite-plus (via) Anton Zhiyanov bundled together a bunch of useful SQLite C extensions for things like statistical functions, unicode string normalization and handling CSV files as virtual tables. The GitHub Actions workflow here is a particularly useful example of compiling SQLite extensions for three different platforms.

# 9:13 pm / sqlite, github-actions, anton-zhiyanov

Hello, HPy (via) HPy provides a new way to write C extensions for Python in a way that is compatible with multiple Python implementations at once, including PyPy.

# 2:40 pm / pypy, python

ifconfig.co (via) I really like this: “curl ifconfig.co” gives you your IP address as plain text, “curl ifconfig.co/city” tells you your city according to MaxMind GeoLite2, “curl ifconfig.co/json” gives you all sorts of useful extra data. Suggested rate limit is one per minute, but the code is open source Go that you can run yourself.

# 7:53 pm / curl, ip, networking