24 August 2026

From past chats

Capture the seconds before a rare Go failure

For a long-running Go service with an intermittent latency spike or stuck goroutine, try the runtime’s flight recorder before adding another broad layer of logging. Keep a short moving trace window and snapshot it only when an existing signal fires, such as a health-check failure or request exceeding a deliberately high threshold. Start with one non-critical service, record the memory and CPU overhead, and decide in advance how traces will be redacted and expired. A useful follow-up question is: which failure can the program recognise reliably, even when it cannot yet explain the cause?

Make RSS polling quiet when nothing changed

The bulletin pipeline is a good place to test conditional HTTP requests end to end. Check whether the published feed returns ETag or Last-Modified, persist that validator beside the last successful poll, and send If-None-Match or If-Modified-Since next time. Treat 304 Not Modified as a successful no-op and log full downloads separately from unchanged polls. This produces a small, measurable improvement and also reveals whether the hosting layer preserves validators consistently across deploys.

From the lmika.org front page

Turn the Albury stop into a gauge-history field note

The station, platform and parallel approaches make a compact story about how incompatible colonial rail gauges shaped a real place. On a future stop, photograph three pieces of evidence—the station scale, a surviving transhipment feature or alignment, and the modern standard-gauge route—then caption each with what changed in 1883 and 1962. The result could be a short then-and-now post rather than a general trip diary. A useful question to investigate is which traces of the break-of-gauge operation remain legible to a passenger today.

Do a five-minute bird-room hazard sweep

For visiting cockatiels, make a one-page household checklist that anyone using the spare room can follow: no aerosols, perfumes, smoke or overheated non-stick cookware nearby; windows, mirrors and doors accounted for before out-of-cage time; unsafe foods and cleaners inaccessible; and the owners’ vet plus transport carrier details visible. Also keep wild birds away from their food and water and note any sudden respiratory, coordination or appetite changes. The practical follow-up is to ask the owners which household products and emergency signs they consider non-negotiable.