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Romantic Comedy review – our love affair with the romcom

Elizabeth Sankey’s engaging documentary reclaims the genre from snooty cinephiles – and proudly pronounces When Harry Met Sally a masterpiece

With affection and brio, Elizabeth Sankey reclaims the genre of romantic comedy in this watchable documentary; that is, she reclaims it from the gendered snobbery of white, male, middle-aged reviewers who fall over themselves to praise horror movies or thrillers or superhero films but turn their noses up at romcom. (If La La Land had been marketed as a romcom, wonders Sankey, would it have got the same Oscars and saucer-eyed critical praise?)

Now, I’m putting my hands up here, although I still can’t handle Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday (2006), and I still worry that romcom tends to be all rom and no com, a conservative genre that often dislikes the subversion of comedy. I absolutely agreed with Sankey’s masterpiece rating for When Harry Met Sally … (1989) – what person of taste and judgment wouldn’t? – and I enjoyed her praise for While You Were Sleeping (1995), which she discreetly juxtaposes with the comparably themed The Big Sick (2017). But could it be that there is a kind of dual response going on here – straightforward reverence for a small number of romcom greats and a kind of guilty-pleasure celebration for the stratum of standard-issue romcom product below that, which maybe isn’t all that great but nonetheless foregrounds women’s experiences in the way no other genre does?

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Kehlani: It Was Good Until It Wasn't review – talent shines in pansexual soap opera

(Atlantic)
The singer whose personal life has become a public spectacle drowns out the noise with these bold yet subtle R&B tracks

By anyone’s standards, Kehlani Parrish has experienced a pretty tumultuous rise to fame. She pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of emerging from a TV talent show with her musical credibility intact. While still a teenager, her cover band PopLyfe reached the final of America’s Got Talent – on YouTube you can still see her belting out We Will Rock You for the edification of Piers Morgan – but when they failed to win, she quit the band, declined an offer from the show’s host Nick Cannon to join a rap group he was assembling and rescued herself from a life of penury by releasing her own mixtape.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.

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Beethoven, Brahms review - Sokolov finds radical Beethoven

Grigory Sokolov
(Deutsche Grammophon, 2 CDs, 1 DVD)
He last gave a concert in the UK in 2007, so any opportunity to hear one of the world’s finest pianists is welcome, though this is uneven

For over a decade now, the British government’s stringent visa requirements for visiting musicians from outside the EU have ensured that Grigory Sokolov has not played in Britain. The Russian gave his last recitals here in 2007, and as he no longer performs concertos, and shuns studio recordings, opportunities to hear a pianist who many regard as one of the finest alive today get fewer by the year. This compilation at least brings us more or less up to date, with performances taken from recitals that Sokolov gave in 2019 in Zaragoza, Wuppertal and in the Tyrolean village of Rabbi, where the great Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli had a house, and where a festival is now held in his memory.

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Brassic series two review – lewd, crude ... and totally brilliant

Vinnie and the gang decide to rob a circus, as Joseph Gilgun’s hit comedy – part-Shameless, part-Ocean’s Eleven – returns for a second run

At first glance, Brassic (Sky One) looks as if it might have been the first quarantine comedy. The second series begins with Vinnie (Joseph Gilgun) skulking around the fictional Lancashire town of Hawley in full DIY hazmat get-up, with his hood up over a hat, a scarf pulled over his face, and sunglasses, despite the weather being a near-permanent state of grey drizzle. It even goes a bit Tiger King, when a robbery takes an unexpected feline turn.

But Brassic is only accidentally of the moment: there’s far too much non-social-distancing going on, for a start. It was filmed last year, while the first series was airing, and it became Sky’s biggest original comedy in years. That’s no surprise. It had an easy appeal and a raucous sense of humour, with real heart behind the madcap antics.

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Blake Mills: Mutable Set review – an ethereal journey into pop's avant garde

(New Deal)
With his fourth solo album the acclaimed producer faces down the confusion of modern life with intoxicating calm

Blake Mills has picked up Grammy nominations for his production work on Laura Marling’s Semper Femina, John Legend’s Darkness and Light and Perfume Genius’s No Shape. However, the fourth solo album by the 33-year old Californian former touring guitarist should turn the spotlight towards his own work. Mutable Set is intended as a “soundtrack to the emotional dissonance of modern life”. Themes range from precious people and experiences to disappointment and isolation, though this isn’t conventional singer-songwriter fare.

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Place: Ecuador review – a wild night in Quito

(Air Texture)
Shuffling Mestizo melodies meet eerie techno in this stellar compilation taken from Ecuador’s pulsating club scene

While most would name Colombia as the home of South America’s forward-thinking club scene, neighbouring Ecuador has quietly been carving out its own dancefloor identity in recent years. The country has produced breakout talents such as DJ Nicola Cruz and home-grown labels like ZZK and Wonderwheel Recordings, operating under the social restrictions of a largely Catholic state and in the midst of devastating austerity measures. Most of its key players reside in Quito, and bring together a community at the capital’s inclusive nights, including Cruz’s La Sagraria.

Often marked by downtempo, undulating house rhythms and samples of Andean pan flutes and instruments such as the lute-like charango, their output is organic-sounding. Yet Place: Ecuador, a new charity compilation, showcases a grittier and more kinetic side to the scene. It’s the fourth release in New York label Air Texture’s location-specific charity series (previous editions have covered Georgia, Colombia and the Netherlands), benefiting the indigenous Waorani people’s legal battles against the Ecuadorian government’s sale of their land for mineral rights.

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Dickie Felton interviewed on Talksport about his love of Morrissey and The Smiths







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Exclusive Interview: industry expert shares forecast on global 3PL sector

Cathy Morrow Roberson, Founder & Head Analyst for Logistics Trends & Insights LLC – a boutique market research firm that specializes in global supply chains – recently shared her observations on the current state of the global and domestic Third-Party Logistics (3PL) industry in this exclusive interview.




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Week in Review: Women on the front lines of Covid-19, lifting France's lockdown and homemade homages to art

FRANCE 24 takes a three-part look at the women on the front lines of the Covid-19 fight in France and examines the details of the government plan to start lifting lockdown on May 11. We also spoke with Iceland's prime minister about her country's response to the pandemic and examined how art lovers, barred from museum visits, are recreating famous paintings in their homes. 




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Week in Review: Covid-19 prisoner releases, how a pandemic affects film and the Rance Valley

This week we took a look at Iran's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the troubles that lie ahead for prisoners on early release due to the coronavirus and China's "mask diplomacy". We also investigate how Covid-19 is affecting the French cinema industry and the role of US forces in the Sahel region's war on terror. 




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Interview with Rani Baker game designer, music genius, queen of nightmares

Interview with Rani Baker, Goon Lurker and Internet Hero.




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MamaSezz Plant-Based Meals: A Review

A few weeks ago, I received an email from MamaSezz, a plant-based meal delivery service, offering me an opportunity to help promote their business in exchange for a commission.  As a blogger, I get a lot of offers like this, from companies selling everything from supplements to olive oil to keto meals (yikes!) I delete 99.9%...

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The post MamaSezz Plant-Based Meals: A Review appeared first on FatFree Vegan Kitchen.




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Review: John Bargh’s “Before You Know It”

I have a review of John Bargh’s new book “Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do” in this month’s Psychologist magazine. You can read the review in print (or online here) but the magazine could only fit in 250 words, and I originally wrote closer to 700. I’ll put the … Continue reading "Review: John Bargh’s “Before You Know It”"




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Tales from the Interview: A Sterling Interview

Marissa's not-for-profit organization sought a college graduate with the ability to code and create basic software solutions. Given their organization's financial limitations, they...



  • Tales from the Interview

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Today on Toothpaste For Dinner: google meat view


I NEED YOUR HELP: Please chip in $1 or more on Patreon and I can keep Toothpaste For Dinner updating daily, PLUS you'll get to see bonus comics & writing!









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Vanity Radio: Why You Should Think Twice Before Paying For an Interview


Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

In a super-crowded, hyper-competitive marketplace, one of the main challenges for book authors is to stand out. And where there's a need, there are always unscrupulous operators waiting to take advantage. The internet is awash in worthless schemes and outright scams designed to profit from authors' hunger for publicity and exposure.

I've written about a number of these--Hollywood book-to-screen packages, the hugely marked-up PR options offered by Author Solutions, the plague of marketing scams originating in the Philippines. Others to watch out for include book fair display packages (publishing industry expert Jane Friedman has a good article on why these are not worth your money), pay-to-play book review services, and what I'm going to talk about in this post: vanity radio.

What's vanity radio? In the "writer beware" context, it's radio air time that you, the program guest, have to pay for. Such schemes have been around forever in various forms, aimed at experts and creatives of all kinds, from services that explicitly sell pay-to-play interviews, to show hosts that charge interview fees to defray the fees they themselves have to pay their platforms.

The main selling point is the promise that your interview will be heard by a large and eager audience, giving wide exposure to you and your book (see the pitches that I've pasted in below). But vanity radio is primarily online radio, delivered via platforms like Blog Talk Radio and Spreaker, and streaming services like iTunes, iHeart Radio, and SoundCloud. Online radio listenership is steadily rising, but unless there are subscriber lists (as on YouTube, for instance), there's usually no way to determine the audience for any given host or show--or to authenticate any listenership claims the show may make. Lots of people may be tuning in...or no one at all.

As a result, the only verifiable benefit authors may receive for their money is an audio or audio-and-video clip that they can post to their websites and social media accounts. Whether that's worth it when it costs $99 or $150 or $200 is debatable enough. But when the price tag is four figures?

As always in the realm of junk marketing aimed at writers, Author Solutions has been both the pioneer and the primary practitioner. All its imprints sell vanity radio in some form: here's AuthorHouse's offering, for instance (just $1,099!). iUniverse's is identical. Xlibris and Trafford currently sell teasers rather than interviews (for significantly more money), but through 2017 they too hawked interviews.

Recently, however, AS's leadership in the realm of predatory marketing services has been challenged by a flood of scammy imitators. These copycat ripoff factories have adopted vanity radio in a big way, and they aggressively hawk it to authors, both on its own and as part of costly publishing and marketing packages. Here, for instance, is an offer from Book Vine Press (cost: $1,500):

From Author Reputation Press (cost: £1,500):


From Parchment Global Publishing (cost: $1,499):


The copycats re-sell the services of a number of show hosts (there's a list below), but the three personalities noted above--Kate Delaney with America Tonight Radio, Ric Bratton with This Week in America, and Al Cole with People of Distinction--make the most frequent appearances on the copycats' websites and in their email solicitations. Delaney and Bratton have substantial, legit resumes in TV and radio; Cole is a bit harder to research, but he too seems to have a sizeable track record as a talk show host.

What, if anything, do they know of the reputation and tactics of the copycats that are re-selling their services? I contacted all three for comment last week. Cole's assistant responded in email that "Al Cole knew nothing about this....Our office will certainly look into this." As of this writing, I haven't heard back from Delaney or Bratton.

Given that the copycats routinely charge an enormous markup on products they re-sell (see, for instance, this warning from the Combined Book Exhibit, whose book fair exhibit packages many of the copycats re-sell for hugely inflated prices; the copycats also seriously jack up the fees for paid book reviews such as Kirkus Indie and BlueInk Reviews), it seems a fair bet that the interviews' hefty price tags are substantially inflated as well.

Apart from the question of such interviews' value for book promotion, that seems like reason enough to avoid them.

******

Author Solutions copycats that sell interviews from the individuals mentioned above:

BookVenture, ReadersMagnet, Maple Leaf Publishing, Parchment Global Publishing, Rustic Haws, Branding Nemo, Creative Titles Media, Paradigm Print, Stampa Global, Books Scribe, Matchstick Literary, PageTurner Press, EC Publishing, WestPoint Print and Media: Ric Bratton

LitFire Publishing, Author Reputation Press, ReadersMagnet, BookTrail Agency, Book-Art Press, Box Office Media Creatives, IdeoPage Press, Book Agency Plus: Kate Delaney


ReadersMagnetAuthor Reputation Press, Rustik Haws, URLink Print & Media, Workbook PressParchment Global Publishing, BookWhip: Al Cole


BookTrail Agency: David Serero

BookTrail Agency, Book Agency Plus: Angela Chester


UPDATE 1/9/19: Parchment Global has added the disclaimer in red to its solicitations for Al Cole interviews (it might want to do some proofreading):


I don't know if this was at Mr. Cole's behest (remember, he's the only vanity radio host who responded--if not very expansively--to my request for comment) or is just CYA by Parchment Global itself, but hey--it lets me know that the scammers are still reading my blog.

Do I believe Parchment Global has stopped taking a cut? What do you think?




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Writer Beware: 2019 in Review

Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware®

Happy New Year! It's that time again--time for a look back at the schemes, scams, and issues Writer Beware covered in 2019.

PUBLISHER TROUBLES

Sadly, there's never a shortage of stories like these.

Scandal Engulfs Independent Publisher ChiZine PublicationsArguably the biggest small press story of the year, the spectacular collapse of Canadian indie ChiZine Publications--amid allegations of non-payment, financial mismanagement, and a horrifically toxic work culture rife with bullying, sexual harassment, racism, and more--posed thorny questions for the small press community about cultures of silence, the treatment of whistleblowers, and the tacit enabling of unprofessional behavior.

Authors' Concern Grows Over Late Royalty Payments At Dreamspinner Press: Multiple author complaints of nonpayment and other problems, for which Dreamspinner has provided confusing and conflicting explanations. (Dreamspinner has become part of the implosion of Romance Writers of America, with RWA accused of failing to assist Dreamspinner authors who requested help.)

Fireside Press Cancels Multiple Contracts: Mass contract cancellations don't generally bode well for publisher health.

Complaints At Month9Books, Nonstandard Business Practices at Black Rose Writing: Long-standing issues, including late payments and bullying, appear to be ongoing at Month9. As for Black Rose, it presents as a "traditional" publisher but, vanity publisher-style, sells a large menu of marketing services to its authors.

Trouble at Dog Ear Publishing: Multiple, long-standing author complaints of nonpayment by this assisted self-publishing company (this publishing model is in trouble generally).

AWARDS TO AVOID

If you've been reading here for a while, you'll know that I'm no fan of contests and awards--not just because they often involve big entry fees (even the legit ones), but because they so often have author-unfriendly rules and guidelines. Here are a few I encountered in 2019.

Can We Get a Do-Over? What do you do when you get caught with predatory language in your contest guidelines? You hastily switch it out, of course. That's what Harper's Bazaar did when the copyright grab in its annual short story competition was outed on Twitter.

Rights Grabs by the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award: Another prestigious (and rich: the winner gets £30,000) contest with a predatory rights grab.

The Pressfuls Short Story Contest: Why not to enter a contest that doesn't post rules and guidelines: you may discover, as writers who entered this contest did, that your work has been published without your permission.

SAVE YOUR CASH

The shady underbelly of the publishing world is chock-a-block with those who scheme to take authors' money, by fair means or foul. Here are some especially foul examples.

Seven Prolific Vanity Publishers: A look at the vanity publishers about which I get the most questions, including Austin Macauley, Page Publishing, and Christian Faith Publishing.

Anatomy of a Book-To-Screen Scam: One of the most unlikely outcomes of publishing a book is selling film rights. Book-to-screen scammers--who purport to turn your book into a screenplay, shop it to Hollywood, and more--don't want you to know that.

Vanity Radio: Why You Should Think Twice: Should you ever pay for a radio interview? Like paid book reviews, this is an iffy proposition--even if you're not being solicited by a scammer.

A Pack of Scammer Lies: Dissecting the highly deceptive pitch by one especially egregious publishing and marketing ripoff.

ADVICE YOU CAN USE

When a Publisher Claims Copyright on Edits: This predatory practice is a big publishing contract red flag.

How Predatory Companies Are Trying to Hijack Your Publisher Search: Among other sneaky techniques: fake publisher matching sites that purport to guide you to appropriate publishers but steer you to vanities and self-publishing companies; deceptive use of Google ads to do the same thing; fake facts and statistics about traditional publishing designed to make the vanity model seem preferable.

Awards Profiteers: How Writers Can Recognize Them and Why They Should be Avoided: Profiteering awards programs have a secret agenda: making money for the sponsor with huge entry fees. They're not about honoring writers.

GENERAL BEWARES

Be careful out there!

From the Philippines, Not With Love: A Plague of Publishing and Marketing Scams: This is one of the biggest new scam trends threatening self-pubbed and small press authors. Some background on how the scams came to be, plus a list of the nearly 70 scammers I've discovered so far.

Issues at Audible's ACX: Including attempted rights fraud and inexplicably withdrawn promo codes.

Caution: Turkish Publisher Mavifil Publishing (Mavifil Yayinlari): Old scammers never die; they just change their names. A non-paying publisher that stalked writers in 2011 returns to stalk them in 2019.

AMS Literary Agency: Approach With Caution: Old scammers never die; they just change their names. Whoops, didn't I just say that? The owner of one of the most notorious vanity publisher scams ever returns in the guise of a literary agent.

Beware: Wid Bastian aka Widtsoe T. Bastian/Genius Media Inc./Kairos Phoenix Company: A convicted felon, an ebook promo and box set scheme. What could go wrong?

Publishizer: Do Authors Really Need a Crowdfunding Literary Agency? Yet another of those reinvent-the-wheel attempts that are so common in publishing: a crowdfunding site for writers that claims to represent manuscripts to publishers, but is mostly used by vanities and other fee-chargers (some of them seriously questionable).




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The Looming Effect And The Parallax View

Fiona Apple “Ladies” The big frustrating thing about loving Fiona Apple’s music is that she takes so long between records, but the immediately apparent thing about her new album Fetch the Bolt Cutters is that these particular songs simply couldn’t exist as they do without all that time for reflection and emotional processing. Whereas most […]




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Hayley Williams: Petals for Armor review – one of the year's biggest revelations

(Atlantic)
This solo debut from the frontwoman of pop-punk stadium stars Paramore is a riot of lust, funk and femininity

Maturity is an often derided concept in a youth-facing art form. But when Simmer, a song about repressed feminist rage buoyed by creepy electronics – the lead track from Hayley Williams’s debut solo album – was released in January, it signalled an intriguing sea change in an artist previously known as a bouncy, flame-haired emo cheerleader.

The story of how Hayley Williams, now 31, went from leading angsty emo shoutalongs in the Tennessee pop-punk band Paramore to releasing these startling songs about rage, femininity and suicidal thoughts is one of the knottier yarns in contemporary American guitar music. Her trio-of-EPs album is now complete, with the final EP – and a physical album uniting all three – released last Friday.

Continue reading...




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Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition Switch Game's Trailer Previews Story, Gameplay, New Epilogue

Remake of Monolith Software's Wii game launches on May 29





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Telling Lies review: A twisting mystery for the age of video calls

Telling Lies is a game where you sift through video calls to solve a mystery. Half the time you don't know what you should be doing, but that's part of the fun, says Jacob Aron





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James Clapper Said He ‘Never Saw Direct Empirical Evidence’ of Trump-Russia Collusion in FBI Interview

Former director of national intelligence James Clapper in 2018 said that he hadn't seen evidence that the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 general election.Clapper was responding to a query from then-representative Tom Rooney, a Florida Republican, during an interview before the House Intelligence Committee. The transcript of the interview was released on Thursday."I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting [or] conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election," Clapper said."That's not to say that there weren't concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence…[redacted]," Clapper added. "But I do not recall any instance when I had direct evidence of the content of these meetings. It's just the frequency and prevalence of them was of concern."Rooney then asked Clapper, "At what time is collusion collusion, and at what time is it just people that may have an affiliation with the campaign meeting or talking with… the Russian ambassador or somebody that's of Russian origin, and when should that be taken as something that rises to the level of an Intelligence Community concern?""I really can't answer it other than the sort of visceral reaction to why all these meetings with the Russians," Clapper responded. Clapper admitted that it would be "legitimate" for incoming Trump administration officials to meet with representatives of Russia, "but I think there is a line…between that and violating the principle that in this country we traditionally have one President and one administration at a time."The interview was part of a set of 53 transcripts of interviews held by the House Intelligence Committee as part of the Russia investigation. Current committee chairman Adam Schiff had called for the release of the transcripts in 2018.However, after 43 transcripts had been reviewed and redacted by intelligence agencies as of June 2019, Schiff refused to relase the completed transcripts to the public. Current acting DNI head Richard Grenell informed Schiff on Wednesday that all the transcripts were ready for publication.





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The one where we interviewed Luca Ferrari

#352 — April 22, 2020

Read on the Web

???? We've got a neat bonus for you this week at the bottom of the issue ????

Postgres Weekly

Postgres Explain Visualizer 2: A Vue.js Component to Show Execution Plans — Less a standalone tool and something you’d use when building your own Postgres tooling. There is, however, a demo here. The output is really nifty.

Dalibo

Insert-Only Tables To Be Autovacuumed in Postgres 13 (But Why?) — Autovacuuming clears up dead tuples that are often left when updating or deleting data from tables, so why is autovacuuming for append-only tables a big deal in Postgres 13? Laurenz explains.

Laurenz Albe

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Full Text Search in Milliseconds with Rails and Postgres — If you’ve never played with full text search with Postgres and Rails, this is a fine place to start. It covers LIKE/ILIKE, trigrams, and ‘proper’ full text searching. We also get to see how Leigh took a query from taking 130ms down to 7ms.

Leigh Halliday

An Easy Postgres 12 and pgAdmin 4 Setup with Docker — Docker provides an easy and loosely coupled way to get things set up in a development environment.

Jonathan S. Katz

Is There a Limit on Number of Partitions Handled by Postgres? — Sort of, but you’d really have to be going at it to stretch Postgres 12’s capabilities in this area.

Denish Patel

Where Do My Postgres Settings Come From? — A nice visual look at how parameters and settings cascade or override each other.

My DBA Notebook

Identify Slow-Running PostgreSQL Queries Quickly in Datadog — Improve PostgreSQL performance by visualizing and identifying errors fast using granular, out-of-the-box dashboards in Datadog.

Datadog sponsor

Replicate Multiple Postgres Servers to a Single MongoDB Server using Logical Decoding Output Plugin

David Zhang

An Overview of the JOIN Methods in Postgres

Kumar Rajeev Rastogi

???? A Q&A with…
Luca Ferrari
Postgres community organizer, author, adjunct professor, and open source advocate.

Luca Ferrari has had a huge impact on the Postgres community in Italy, having been president of the Italian PostgreSQL Users Group in the past and having helped to organize the popular PGDay.it events. He also blogs frequently about Postgres and wrote PostgreSQL 11 Server Side Programming Quick Start Guide for Packt.

Note: A more complete version of this interview is on the Web.

We caught up with him to ask about server side Postgres use cases in particular:

For those who use Postgres as a simple database and haven't touched the deeper elements, where do you think they should start?

There's no single answer to this question, since Postgres is such a huge project with so many features and a rich community. I never found a project where it cannot fit in. Postgres is somehow like Unix: you cannot touch it as "just a database", you need to commit to its culture to benefit the most out of it.

In my classes, I can see that people usually get fascinated by the capabilities of doing server side programming, and that is why I decided to write my book about this topic. Often, people do not expect to be able to embed their Perl, Java, or Python libraries directly into PostgreSQL without having to rewrite their business logic in an SQL-like language.

Another great feature nowdays is the support to JSON within the database, thanks to which PostgreSQL can be used as both a relational database and a 'NoSQL' storage engine, providing a lot of flexibility in your infrastructure.

One suggestion I always gave is to join the mailing lists: there are several that differ by topic and amount of traffic. Most are very active and have high quality contributors that take care in providing accuate replies to users' questions, that spend time in reproducing errors and edge-cases, and who will help you. That's a mandatory place where you have to start, in my opinion, to better learn about the project, its features and its culture.

Where should the line be drawn between doing things in an external programming language versus within Postgres?

Often the right choice is to place business logic near the data it refers to, that is within the database itself. However, there are several things to take into account including the developer's experience and the expressiveness of SQL-derived languages like pl/PgSQL.

There's a habit of letting ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) do most of the database interaction nowadays, reducing the database to a "simple storage". Of course, databases can do a lot more, and PostgreSQL in particular can help you migrate and embed your own business logic into the database itself.

I have helped a few companies embed their own Java libraries into Postgres resulting in a more robust and coherent way to access the data (the real value) without any regard of the application they were using. Because once you start having data, you will soon find that such data is required by multiple applications in different technologies and on different platforms, so that implementing the same business logic rules over and over becomes a huge effort; on the other hand, moving such logic within the database simplifies and keep uniform the way your data is manipulated.

What one thing do you think people should learn?

Stored procedures. They serve as a common base for triggers and are very similar to routines, therefore allowing you to build more complex pieces into your own cluster. Once you have learnt the common way of defining functions, you can go deeper and write your own native functions using other languages (e.g. C). This is more complex, but thanks to the extensibility of Postgres is not an impossible task and can help you migrating more and more code into the database. Once you have created a new feature, please do contribute it back so that other people can use it!

...

Last, allow me to announce that I'm working on another book right now: me and a friend of mine are writing a more general book on Postgres that will try to answer your question by leading the reader through the main features that make Postgres unique and great.

Be sure to check out Luca's book PostgreSQL 11 Server Side Programming Quick Start Guide to learn more about the topics covered in this interview. You can also find the code from the book in this GitHub repo.

If you enjoyed this interview, Luca actually gave some more detailed answers in the full interview which you can read here.




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An interview with Ruby ETL expert Thibaut Barrère

#499 — April 30, 2020

Read on the Web

???? Occasionally we run interviews in Ruby Weekly and we're back with another one.. with long time Rubyist and Kiba maintainer, Thibaut Barrère. Be sure to check out the bottom of this issue to read it, especially if you ever run ETL jobs with Ruby! ????

Ruby Weekly

▶  Let's Build a Twitter Clone in 10 Minutes with Rails, CableReady, and StimulusReflex — You know that cloning Twitter in 10 minutes is impossible, but what about the core mechanism of the idea? After a slow first minute, this video does a pretty good job of showing off some techniques you might not have used before.

Nate Hopkins

discuss.rubyonrails: The Rails Project Discussion Forum — Basically a Web version of the Rails mailing lists and a worthwhile place to head if you want to suggest features, ask questions, etc.

Ruby on Rails Discussions

Easy Rails Deployments — Deploy your Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, and Rack application to any cloud or server. Cloud 66 offers a scalable Heroku alternative that doesn't lock you in. Try it free and get extra $66 free credits with the code: 'Ruby-Weekly'.

Cloud 66 sponsor

sequel-activerecord-adapter: Allows Sequel to Reuse an ActiveRecord Connection — If you want to use more Sequel or migrate in that direction, this makes it easy.

Janko Marohnić

Ruby Adds Experimental Support for 'End-Less' Method Definitions — We’ve touched on this in a previous issue, but if you fancy a proper blog post with examples, this is more accessible than digging through feature tracker discussions. I’m not a fan of this syntax myself yet, but Prateek does a good job of selling it.

Prateek Choudhary

CableReady: Trigger Client-Side DOM Changes from Server-Side Ruby — If you skipped the video above because it’s a video (and I know many of you do ????) CableReady is still worth checking out. It aims to “complete the ActionCable story” by providing a way to directly interact with clients over ActionCable WebSockets. The docs will help you get the idea.

Hopsoft

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

Security Engineer (Remote) — Are you an engineer with experience in Rails and/or Go? Join our team and help secure our apps and cloud infrastructure.

Shogun

ℹ️ Interested in running a job listing in Ruby Weekly? There's more info here.

???? Articles & Tutorials

A Practical Use for PStorePStore is one of the older parts of Ruby’s stdlib and lets you persist (and restore) a Ruby hash to disk. I haven’t seen it in Ruby code for years but Arkency have found a neat, modern use case.

Paweł Pacana

▶  Drag and Drop Sortable Lists with Rails and Stimulus JS — How to wire up drag and drop lists with a Rails app using Sortable, Stimulus and acts_as_list.

Go Rails

Setting Up Multi-Factor Authentication for RubyGems.org — If you’re a registered user of the official Ruby Gems repository, you should have had an email this week about securing your account using 2FA. This is just my own reminder that this is a good idea especially if you publicly publish widely used gems! :-)

Rubygems.org

Let’s Explore Big-O Notation With Ruby ???? — Learn to use Big-O to look at an algorithm and easily discern its efficiency, without having to run a profiling tool.

Honeybadger sponsor

▶  Discussing Docker and Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower — A worthwhile show to listen to if Kubernetes and Docker intimidate you but you want to know a little more. Kelsey is good at breaking these things down into understandable pieces.

Rails with Jason Podcast podcast

Rails System Tests in Docker — We’re seeing an uptick in articles about system tests in Rails. Here’s how to integrate them into your development Docker setup.

Hint.io

The Difference Between System Specs and Feature Specs — If you’ve felt the difference between RSpec’s “feature specs” and “system specs” is quite subtle, this explanation will help.

Jason Swett

Why Rubyists Should Consider Learning Go — If you want compilation and a type system, Crystal is probably a better fit for Rubyists, but Go is undoubtedly a neat language and ecosystem (and if you do end up in the Go world, check out our Go weekly! ????)

Ayooluwa Isaiah

Building a Ruby CLI with Thor

Daniel Gómez

???? Code and Tools

git curate: Peruse and Delete git Branches Ergonomically — Got a repo cluttered with branches here and there? git curate aims to cure the pains of getting those branches back under control.

Matt Harvey

MessageBus: A Reliable and Robust Messaging Bus for Ruby and Rack

Sam Saffron

Are You Spending Too Much on Heroku?

Rails Autoscale sponsor

bootstrap_form: A Rails Form Builder for Bootstrap v4-Style Forms

Bootstrap Ruby

ActiveModelAttributes: The Active Record Attributes API, but for Active Model — Brings some of the goodies of the Rails 5 Active Record attributes API to ActiveModel too. 1.6.0 just dropped.

Karol Galanciak

???? A Q&A with…
Thibaut Barrère
Creator of Kiba ETL

Thibaut Barrère is a long-time Rubyist and data engineer who built and maintains the popular Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) framework Kiba. We asked him some questions about his work:

What inspired you to create Kiba?

A lot of my work since ~2005 has been focused on data integration (making systems speak together), data aggregation etc. I sometimes used GUI-based tools like Microsoft SSIS which, while powerful, are quite far from the coding experience.

I was already using Ruby at that time, and was happy to discover activewarehouse-etl (maintained by Anthony Eden, who runs DNSimple now) providing a Ruby DSL to declare data pipelines. I used it for a while with very good success to implement data extractions and business intelligence ETL, and ultimately took over the maintenance.

In the long run, though (as I explained in a recent Paris.rb talk), the balance between the the cost of OSS maintenance and the usability for my billable and non-billable use-cases proved to be not good enough, which made me decide to stop the maintenance, sadly.

I still wanted to use Ruby to write data pipelines, but I needed to cover more use-cases and reduce the OSS maintenance burden at the same time. This ultimately led me to write and share (in 2015) Kiba ETL, a focused DSL for declarative processing, matching those criterias.

Do you find yourself adding more features while in quarantine?

Before the quarantine, I directed my Kiba bandwith and focus on finalizing Kiba v3 and rewriting the documentation from scratch, to properly encourage best practices I’ve been discovering. I also created experimental branches for Ruby 2.7/2.8 keywords.

During the quarantine, I've reduced client work and OSS work too, to focus on shipping Kiba Pro v2 (which I’ll announce shortly officially). I’ve extracted and generalized (from real-life projects) very useful components, such as a “batch SQL lookup” (useful when replacing relationships keys during data migrations and datawarehouses sync code, in batch rather than row by row), a “file lock” to ensure a single job runs at once, and a “parallel transform” to achieve easy concurrency for things like HTTP queries.

What's the wildest ETL that you've encountered?

Getting the data out of a system which is actively not acting in that direction is always a bit wild.. One can see all types of fancy stuff on the field. For instance, it is not uncommon to have an ETL process start a headless browser, jump through pages, just to get to the CSV/PDF/Excel file that you will then use as your data source!

You can also end up having to figure out ways to read or write very old file formats at times. Recently I wrote a Kiba component to generate a COBOL delimited file, for instance. In large companies, a very widely used I/O is good old SFTP, far away from modern APIs and formats.

Can you tell us how to say your last name? ????

I had to deploy a page to my blog to answer that question properly ????. You’ll find out how to say my name here.

Merci Thibaut!

You can read some of Thibaut's posts on his blog and find out more about Kiba ETL here.




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An insightful interview with Go's Rob Pike

#310 — May 1, 2020

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Golang Weekly

An Interview with Go's Rob Pike — Go’s co-creator answers some big picture questions about Go’s status, history, and future. “Go has indeed become the language of cloud infrastructure,” says Rob.

Evrone

???? What's Coming in Go 1.15 — This presentation covers all the major sections: tooling, performance, API changes, and the Big Ones, like the aforementioned smaller binaries. Fingers crossed for a final release in August.

Daniel Martí slidedeck

Troubleshoot Golang App Issues with End-To-End Distributed Tracing — Trace requests across service boundaries to optimize bottlenecks by drilling into individual traces end-to-end with flame graphs. Correlate Golang traces with related logs and metrics for fast troubleshooting. Enhance performance with a free Datadog APM trial.

Datadog APM sponsor

Debugging Go Programs using Delve — The recent Go community survey showed that most Go developers use text-based logging (e.g. with fmt.Print()) to debug, but if you want to step things up a notch, this is a gentle intro to Delve.

Naveen Ramanathan

My Journey Optimizing The Go Compiler — Assel explains how a simple task evolved into a legitimate compiler optimization (aimed at 1.15) and proves we should all have a curious mind.

Assel Meher

The 'Ultimate' Go Study Guide — A large repository of code examples with comments and notes from Hoanh’s attempt at learning the language. If you pick up concepts well from straightforward examples, this is worth a look.

Hoanh An

???? Jobs

Software Engineer at HiPeople (Remote/Berlin) — Fast-moving startup (backed by top tier VCs) shaping the future of modern recruiting is looking for engineers who love working with Go.

HiPeople

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Articles & Tutorials

Making a Multiplayer Game with Go and gRPC — Started as a (somewhat ambitious) project to learn Go, Sam walks us through the algorithms, design decisions, mistakes, and where Go helped and hurt the game.

Samuel Mortenson

Documenting a Go GitHub Repo — Or, “How to Keep the README in Your GitHub Repo in Sync with Your Go Doc.”

Eyal Posener

The 5 Crucial PDF & Office Features For Corporate Apps in Pure Go — UniDoc develops pure Go libraries for managing PDF and Office files since 2016. Here are the features developers use the most.

UniDoc sponsor

▶  Discussing Building Immediate Mode GUIs in Go — Elias Naur, creator of Gio, joins the popular Go podcast to discuss building GUI apps with Go, the pros and cons of immediate vs retained mode and examples of each.

Go Time Podcast podcast

The Creation of a Realtime Patient Monitoring System with Go and Vue in 3 Days — This is the Go content I am here for. Connecting with monitoring devices and leveraging Go’s strengths to create a helpful, distributed application. Great work.

Kasun Vithanage

Add It Up: Azure’s Go Problem — Here’s one takeaway from the Go Developer Survey. Of the major clouds, Azure is the one Go developers seem least enamored by.

Lawrence E Hecht

Why You Should Generally Be using the Latest Version of Go — No surprising arguments here.

Chris Siebenmann

???? Code & Tools

XLSX: A Library for Reading and Writing XLSX (Excel) Files — Got spreadsheets? Want to make spreadsheets? There’s a lot you can do with them here.

Geoffrey J. Teale

SQLBoiler: Generate a Go ORM Tailored to Your Database Schema — A long standing library that has now switched to modules.

Volatile Technologies Inc.

Decimal: Arbitrary-Precision Fixed-Point Decimal Numbers for Go — The library laments that it can only support decimal numbers with up to 2^38 digits after the decimal point so take care ????

Spring Engineering

Beta Launch: Code Performance Profiling - Find & Fix Bottlenecks

Blackfire sponsor

Redigo: A Go Client for Redis — In related news, Redis 6.0 has just been released.

Gary Burd

ntp: Facebook's NTP Libraries — NTP stands for “Network Time Protocol”, if you were wondering. Basically, clock synchronization.

Facebook Incubator

grobotstxt: A Native Go Port of Google's Robots.txt Parser and Matcher Library — Now you can crawl your own site, just like Google does.

Jim Smart

A Compiler for a Small Custom Language Into x86-64 Assembly — One of those ‘labor of love’ type projects that you might enjoy poking around in. You won’t use this project directly, but you might be intrigued how to create a similar compiler for your own thing.

Maurice Tollmien

MIDAS: Microcluster-Based Detector of Anomalies in Edge Streams — A Go reimplementation of this C++ version.

Steve Tan

Liftbridge 1.0: Lightweight, Fault-Tolerant Message Streams — A server that implements a durable, replicated message log for the NATS messaging system.

Liftbridge




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A general view of the stadium during the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 final

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 27: A general view of the stadium during the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 tournament at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 27, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of the stadium during the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 final

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 27: A general view of the stadium during the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 tournament at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 27, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of the stadium during the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 final

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 27: A general view of the stadium during the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 tournament at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 27, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of Spain dressing room

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of Spain dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of Spain dressing room

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of Spain dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of England dressing room

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of England dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of England dressing room

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of England dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of England dressing room

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of England dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of England dressing room

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of England dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of England dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of England dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of the Spain dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup final

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: (EDITOR'S NOTE: Image was created as an Equirectangular Panorama. Import image into a panoramic player to create an interactive 360 degree view) A general view of the Spain dressing room prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of action during the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 3rd Place match

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of action during the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 3rd Place match between Brazil and Mali at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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A general view of the Spain team

KOLKATA, INDIA - OCTOBER 28: A general view of the Spain team prior to the FIFA U-17 World Cup India 2017 Final match between England and Spain at Vivekananda Yuba Bharati Krirangan on October 28, 2017 in Kolkata, India. (Photo by Tom Dulat - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)




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Abramov breaks his interview hoodoo ahead of the final

Russia's Sergey Abramov broke one of his superstitions and gave FIFA.com an interview ahead of his country's big final against Argentina at the FIFA Futsal World Cup Colombia 2016.




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General view of play during the FIFA Futsal World Cup semi-final match

MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA - SEPTEMBER 27: General view of play during the FIFA Futsal World Cup semi-final match between Iran and Russia at Coliseo Ivan de Bedout on September 27, 2016 in Medellin, Colombia. (Photo by Jan Kruger - FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)