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   EdBoatConnoisseur (edboatconnoisseur@poa.st)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:32:46 JST EdBoatConnoisseur

   • skylar :confederateflag:??? :z:
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   • pistolero

   i'm not surprised at all that it can be done but i guess that looking at a practical example is nice, i kinda want to build something using plain text files as databases but adding headers to the files so that instead of "blindly" using the column numbers being able to do get stuff from a column by the name it has on the header.

   @karna @p @theorytoe @skylar @skylar

   https://www.howtogeek.com/build-a-database-with-powerful-linux-built-in-tools/

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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:32:45 JST pistolero

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     @EdBoatConnoisseur @karna @theorytoe @skylar It's good stuff but almost all of it goes back to v7, not just Linux stuff. Maybe worth noting, he keeps typing '{print $1":"$2":"$3":"$4}' and you can just '{OFS=":"; print $1, $2, $3, $4}' and it comes out a little more readable, and most of what he uses head/tail for you can just use sed to do, so his `head -n 20 | tail -n 10` to get lines 11-20 would just be `sed -n 11,20p`. I think it's interesting that people keep getting surprised by this stuff, you know? Like, this was the point of Unix: you could do this kind of thing ad hoc.
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     karna :flipflop: :buffsuki: (karna@poa.st)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:33:24 JST karna :flipflop: :buffsuki:

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     @EdBoatConnoisseur @p @theorytoe @skylar for a second I thought this was gonna about something more complicated than flat files based off the headline, but you can do a lot with just that too. While reading, a thought occurred to me though.. Depending on your use case, you may want to "transpose" the file so that each line represents a column (sort of like how columnar formats like parquet store data column-wise instead of row-wise) if you have a lot of columns and you dont always need to work with every column. Some of the commands would have to change but I wonder how each approach would scale

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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:33:24 JST pistolero

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     @karna @EdBoatConnoisseur @theorytoe @skylar If you're careful about how you do it, regular Unix utilities sometimes scale better than the tools that are designed to scale: https://livefreeordichotomize.com/posts/2019-06-04-using-awk-and-r-to-parse-25tb/ .
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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:33:47 JST pistolero

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     @karna @EdBoatConnoisseur @skylar @theorytoe
     
     > Also did you see the recent-ish guadec talk about all the edge cases that happen in developing a calendar. Was pretty funny what with the strange timezones that exist.
     
     I wrote a thing to allow lawyers to sell time; a client provided services to lawyers and they wanted to make it easy to do something like sell a monthly subscription, where they'd do document review and then you could get some number of 15-minute consultations per month. So the lawyers would set up a time, they'd describe their schedule like they would do Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
     
     Here's something: the reason every startup in San Francisco has "a Delaware Limited Liability Corporation" on their "Legal" page is that they are all incorporated in Delaware, because VCs insist on it. Delaware is one of two states that doesn't require a corporation to disclose its owners and VCs won't invest if they can't lie about what they own and how much of it they own. Delaware, consequently, has a large industry of lawyers that just maintain P.O. boxes and act as the registered agent for a thousand shitty LLCs.
     
     So the situation you have to handle is a lawyer drags out "2 p.m. to 5 p.m." on the "Tuesday" and "Thursday" slots in a calendar, they're in one timezone, and a client in another timezone (possibly with different DST rules) wants to schedule a call, and you need to present them with five boxes to click on that have available time slots. This is a nightmare to actually build.
     global-DST.jpg
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     karna :flipflop: :buffsuki: (karna@poa.st)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:33:48 JST karna :flipflop: :buffsuki:

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     @EdBoatConnoisseur @p @skylar @theorytoe That sounds pretty nice. Caldav is comfy too. Also did you see the recent-ish guadec talk about all the edge cases that happen in developing a calendar. Was pretty funny what with the strange timezones that exist. inb4 gnome..

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     karna :flipflop: :buffsuki: (karna@poa.st)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:33:49 JST karna :flipflop: :buffsuki:

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     @EdBoatConnoisseur @p @theorytoe @skylar that sounds about right
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     EdBoatConnoisseur (edboatconnoisseur@poa.st)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:33:49 JST EdBoatConnoisseur

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     @karna @p @skylar @theorytoe now i'm thinking of perhaps rolling out my own calendar thing, inspired by calcurse, storing the appointments in plain text, with a daemon to be able to sync with cloud calendar shit like google calendar and any caldav provider, then some frontends terminal and gtk frontends, buuuuuuut that would not be something i'd do this month.

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     EdBoatConnoisseur (edboatconnoisseur@poa.st)'s status on Thursday, 07-Nov-2024 13:33:50 JST EdBoatConnoisseur

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     @karna @p @theorytoe @skylar i think awk can still handle that without much issue but yeh you'd have to search by the first column to get the data, dunno why but i feel that "classic" row wise ordered data may be more efficient for the core utils as that is what they were usually designed around.

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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 04:27:23 JST pistolero

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     @EdBoatConnoisseur @theorytoe @karna @skylar Ha, I can't remember; I think :bwk: said something like that in his talk but I never went looking.
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     EdBoatConnoisseur (edboatconnoisseur@poa.st)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 04:27:24 JST EdBoatConnoisseur

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     @p @theorytoe @karna @skylar well, most of the unix tools were made to specifically process data, what was the story that aho started what would became awk because he needed to automate student grading and sed wasn't a thing yet right?

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     Berk Berkman (berkberkman@shitposter.world)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 04:29:46 JST Berk Berkman

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     @p @theorytoe @EdBoatConnoisseur @karna @skylar Not the first time awk was used in a similar way. No wonder the Suckless website had this related link under Philosophy:
     https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
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     pistolero (p@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 06:23:04 JST pistolero

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     @laurel @EdBoatConnoisseur @karna @skylar @theorytoe
     
     > I thought that maybe you could use unix time for everything. Then the problem becomes only a matter of presentation. Hours charged and scheduling will always be correct,
     
     Nope. How do you apply DST to Unix time? So what I did was to keep the original representation around, calculate the times per day because a page never had to display more than thirty days. You can actually lean on Postgres for this but the queries come out extremely long so it was easier to grab a month, calculate when the slots would be. Not the most beautiful solution, but zero bugs and the more edge cases we started testing, the more skeptical I got that there could be a beautiful solution.
     
     > you'll just have to remind the user
     
     Lawyers are no good at this.
     
     > having one hour charged while the local clock would go forward by two
     
     Oh, if we're calculating the difference between two times, absolutely you just use Unix time, but this is different, this is basically drawing a calendar widget and letting a lawyer say when they are willing to block off time to talk to people on the phone, then presenting available slots to their clients to schedule a 15-minute call. Nothing to do with billing on that end, but the clients would pay, whatever, $100-200 per month flat and then they'd have a lawyer to call.
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     laurel (laurel@fsebugoutzone.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Nov-2024 06:23:05 JST laurel

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     @p @karna @EdBoatConnoisseur @skylar @theorytoe
     
     How did you solve it?
     I thought that maybe you could use unix time for everything. Then the problem becomes only a matter of presentation. Hours charged and scheduling will always be correct, you'll just have to remind the user for the various quirks, like having one hour charged while the local clock would go forward by two. But you don't have to program any logic for this.