Quoting Deming: A bad system ...

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

W. Edwards Deming at a February 1993 seminar.

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Opengrep quickstart

Since I could not find a quickstart to run opengrep with the full set of rules from their fork I thought I'd document what I found out. Setup Download the opengrep binary from github and make it executable with chmod +x . Clone the rules repo: git clone git@github.com:opengrep/opengrep-rules.git and clean it up to make it usable to opengrep: cd opengrep-rules rm -rf ".git",".github",".pre-commit-config.yaml", "elixir", "apex" find . -type f -not -iname "*.yaml" -delete rm -rf .github rm -rf .pre-commit-config.yaml Ensure opengrep can load the rules with: opengrep_manylinux_x86 validate . The same can be done for custom rules maintained in a separate repository. AFAIU Multiple repositories can be specified by repeating -f option as needed, see below. We are now ready to scan a repo, from the repo root directory run: opengrep_manylinux_x86 scan \   -f <path_to>/opengrep-rules \   --error \   --exclude-rule=VAL some ti...
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Spite Driven Development

There's many things that motivate us, and like tools from a toolbox, we pick the one that we find to be the most appropriate for the occasion. Spite Driven Development can be a powerful motivator, as long as it's not the only one. SDD essentially works like this: someone slights us, and we resort to proving them wrong by (over)doing exactly the thing that they don't think we can do. This is all fine, in the short term. SDD comes with a few caveats: SDD can feed on resentment and feed resentment equally. Feeding our resentment uncontrollably is an excellent way to end up being miserable SDD leave us hollow when we've accomplished our mission, because it an external motivation . We won, now what? Maybe the other person moved on or does not care, or even worse they genuinely compliment us! if we don't succeed we might end up attaching our sense of worth or identity to the thing we are trying to accomplish. It's easy to see that this is not-a-good-thing™ Profession...
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Mirth: recover space when mirthdb grows out of control

I was recently asked to recover a mirth instance whose embedded database had grown to fill all available space so this is just a note-to-self kind of post. Btw: the recovery, depending on db size and disk speed, is going to take long. The problem A 1.8 Mirth Connect instance was started, then forgotten (well neglected, actually). The user also forgot to setup pruning so the messages filled the embedded Derby database until it grew to fill all the available space on the disk. The SO is linux. The solution First of all: free some disk space so that the database can be started in embedded mode from the cli. You can also copy the whole mirth install to another server if you cannot free space. Depending on db size you will need a corresponding amount of space: in my case a 5GB db required around 2GB to start, process logs and then store the temp files during shrinking. Then open a shell as the user that mirth runs as (you're not running it as root, are you?) and cd in...
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