Author: David Faden
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Parsing “Pollinator Post”
May Chen runs a treasure of an e-mail newsletter, the “Pollinator Post”, where she shares macro shots of insects and plants, mostly local natives, from her hikes around the East Bay, along with commentary drawing on her decades of experience as a docent. Until recently, these posts were available only via an invite-only e-mail group,…
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Thinking about “Think Stats”
I saw Allen Downey lament on LinkedIn that when he gets a message from Google Alerts about “think stats”, and it’s not about his book “Think Stats”, it’s usually someone saying something negative about statistics. Well, just let me say, I think stats are great, and I’m sure “Think Stats” is great too! I’ve just…
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Covington Sensory Garden Natives Blooming November 1, 2025
The Covington Elementary sensory garden features a lot of native plants. Here are the ones I noticed blooming Saturday while we were working on some upkeep. Common Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) Many of the plants in the main yarrow patch in the garden aren’t just done blooming; their tops are brown and crispy. This one in…
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KmpMatcher + links
In an earlier post, I talked about extracting attachments from .eml files, which I was doing in pursuit of a half memory of having implemented the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm. That turned out to be a dead end so I ended up consulting a lot of other sources and glomming together something new from those. You can…
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Lessons from Casai
I was curious what an ex teammate had been up to, which led me to this Medium post from him: CTO Logs: Casai. Impressive and a little intimidating, and this just covers part of what he’s been up to. It covers his journey from joining the company as CTO, building up its engineering workforce, to…
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Errors you might see if you forget `bazel_dep(name = “protobuf” …)
If you forget to include the dependency on protobuf in your MODULE.bazel file while including a cc_proto_library target, you may see errors like the following when you try to build that target: ERROR: /private/var/tmp/…/external/abseil-cpp+/absl/utility/BUILD.bazel: no such target ‘@@abseil-cpp+//absl/utility:if_constexpr’: target ‘if_constexpr’ not declared in package ‘absl/utility’ defined by /private/var/tmp/…/external/abseil-cpp+/absl/utility/BUILD.bazelERROR: /private/var/tmp/…/external/protobuf+/src/google/protobuf/BUILD.bazel:483:11: no such target ‘@@abseil-cpp+//absl/utility:if_constexpr’: target ‘if_constexpr’…
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“The Wild Trees”
Richard Preston’s 2007 book “The Wild Trees” drew me along, partly through instilling a fear that the next paragraph would reveal a fatal fall. I’m glad to see that the main protagonists still seem to have survived to this day: Stephen Sillett, Marie Antoine, Michael Taylor. I appreciated the adventure and the science, the personal…
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SQLite blessing
Appreciating this message from the SQLite source code: May you do good and not evil.May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.May you share freely, never taking more than you give. Amen!
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Extract attachments from .eml files
I have a need for an implementation of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm (or similar) handling streaming input. I’m pretty sure I’ve implemented this previously and thought I might my find my code in an old .zip file I’d sent someone in e-mail. But Gmail refuses a direct download of the attachment, I guess due to it…
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YOLO doesn’t see a poppy?
I’m excited to start playing with You Only Look Once, https://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/. The installation instructions worked beautifully: % git clone https://github.com/pjreddie/darknet% cd darknet% make% wget https://data.pjreddie.com/files/yolov3.weights% ./darknet detect cfg/yolov3.cfg yolov3.weights data/dog.jpg…data/dog.jpg: Predicted in 0.334838 seconds.dog: 57%car: 52%truck: 56%car: 62%bicycle: 59% Neat! I think this also my first time encountering this license: https://github.com/pjreddie/darknet/blob/master/LICENSE.fuck. One little project I…