activescott's Notes

Public notes from activescott

Monday, August 31, 2026

$100 Million Fidelity Bond

Protects the taxpayer in the unlikely event of a company failure; the bond is there to satisfy the financial obligations of the company.

$50 Million Written Performance Guaranty

Ensures the taxpayer exchange funds are returned in the amount of deposit.

$30 Million Errors & Omissions Insurance

Safeguards against employee negligence resulting in a loss to the taxpayer

IPX1031’s parent company, Fidelity National Financial (FNF) is the world’s largest provider of title insurance and real estate related services.

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Squire is an HTML5 rich text editor, which provides powerful cross-browser normalisation in a flexible lightweight package (only 16KB of JS after minification and gzip, with no dependencies!).

It was designed to handle email composition for the Fastmail web app. The most important consequence of this (and where Squire differs from most other modern rich text editors) is that it must handle arbitrary HTML, because it may be used to forward or quote emails from third-parties and must be able to preserve their HTML without breaking the formatting. This means that it can't use a more structured (but limited) internal data model (as most other modern HTML editors do) and the HTML remains the source-of-truth. The other consequence is excellent handling of multiple levels of blockquotes.

It is possible to use an NFS file system for storing the PostgreSQL data directory. PostgreSQL does nothing special for NFS file systems, meaning it assumes NFS behaves exactly like locally-connected drives. PostgreSQL does not use any functionality that is known to have nonstandard behavior on NFS, such as file locking.

The only firm requirement for using NFS with PostgreSQL is that the file system is mounted using the hard option. With the hard option, processes can “hang” indefinitely if there are network problems, so this configuration will require a careful monitoring setup.

It is not necessary to use the sync mount option. The behavior of the async option is sufficient, since PostgreSQL issues fsync calls at appropriate times to flush the write caches. (This is analogous to how it works on a local file system.) However, it is strongly recommended to use the sync export option on the NFS server on systems where it exists (mainly Linux). Otherwise, an fsync or equivalent on the NFS client is not actually guaranteed to reach permanent storage on the server, which could cause corruption similar to running with the parameter fsync off.

After watching this amazing talk, I realized that as long as we can guarantee that WAL (Write-Ahead Logs) buffers are written to the network storage, the database should be able to recover from the errors in case of a failure. Armed with this knowledge, I made an attempt on storing Postgres data on an NFS share.

A library that provides an embeddable, persistent key-value store for fast storage.

This code is a library that forms the core building block for a fast key-value server, especially suited for storing data on flash drives. It has a Log-Structured-Merge-Database (LSM) design with flexible tradeoffs between Write-Amplification-Factor (WAF), Read-Amplification-Factor (RAF) and Space-Amplification-Factor (SAF). It has multi-threaded compactions, making it especially suitable for storing multiple terabytes of data in a single database.

Saturday, August 29, 2026

Friday, August 28, 2026