This post concludes recent work and commentary on exporting masked data from one AWS Aurora PostgreSQL environment to another: PostgreSQL Masking Functions AWS RDS Aurora PostgreSQL Query Export to S3 Stub AWS RDS Aurora PostgreSQL Table Import from S3 Stub We were able to export masked data successfully and import it without issue. The export is significantly slower than the import, at least in our case where we needed many of the exports to have joins in order to restrict what data was expo...| renaghan.com
Here is the aws_s3.table_import_from_s3 stub that pairs nicely with the previously bloggedaws_s3.query_export_to_s3 stub. CREATESCHEMAIFNOTEXISTSaws_s3;CREATEORREPLACEFUNCTIONaws_s3.table_import_from_s3(table_nameTEXT,column_listTEXT,optTEXT,bucketTEXT,pathTEXT,regionTEXT,OUTrowsINTEGER)AS$$DECLAREcopy_stmtTEXT;BEGINcopy_stmt:='COPY '||table_name;IFcolumn_listISNOTNULLANDlength(column_list)>0THENcopy_stmt:=copy_stmt||' ('||column_list||')';ENDIF;copy_stmt:=copy_stmt||' FROM '''||path||''' WIT...| Padraic Renaghan
AWS RDS and Aurora database services have a very useful enhancement, aws_s3.query_export_to_s3, to the native PostgreSQL COPY command, that lets you export from RDS/Aurora directly to AWS S3 storage. This can be very useful for moving data around, including exporting from Production with masking functions to land in test/debugging environments. There are currently some limitations around cross-account exporting, like you can’t. But simple workarounds to post-process the files to either reke...| Padraic Renaghan
Protecting your data is important, both from people who want to get it, and more importantly from your own staff who are only-human, and thus subject to making mistakes. Using Production data can be very useful for all kinds of debugging and testing. But you don’t want to expose confidential production data to staff that do not need to see it. Masking is useful as you export data from Production and load it into your test/debug environment.| renaghan.com
A few notes on traveling with your iPhone, to a foreign country, where you want to be connected for Messages/Phone/Maps, but don’t want to burn through a bunch of data needlessly… Your modern iPhone likely has support for multiple esims. This makes it easy to keep your normal esim in place, add a separate local/regional esim for traveling data, and have close to the best of both worlds. All without paying exorbitant International Data Fees to Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile.| renaghan.com
You cannot control the order of Gradle dependencies. You will read that you can, it’s not true. You will read that the order you specify the dependencies is the order they are used when resolved, also not true. You will try some tricks thinking the order is alphabetical, or as specified, both not true. You will ask about it and get judgy responses about how it is bad practice and you shouldn’t ever need to do that, don’t have the same class in two places… and so on.| renaghan.com
Goal Record a Mac Skype for Business meeting to MP3 – participating in the meeting as normal with my headset – creating a MP3 with myself and other participants heard equally in both left and right channels. Took a couple of days, but figured it out. Here is the how-to… Note: I did this for Skype and Microsoft Teams. But the same approach will work for any conferencing software like Zoom or Webex.| renaghan.com
fwd:cloudsec security conference is being held virtually, streaming on twitch, on Monday June 29, 2020 starting at 10:00 am Eastern Time. Looks to be a great lineup of talks from the experts. The conference is non-profit, free, and open to all to attend. I created an iCal fwdcloudsec2020.ics file of the conference schedule for those that want to load into their calendar .| renaghan.com
I seem to try, and pay for, almost every new iPhone weather app. Weather is an essential function of my iPhone, I’d say number 3 after and Morning check, what the lies ahead today Making sure kids dressed appropriately for going to school and walking home Preparation for upcoming storms Intra-day rain forecast, “if I wait 10 minutes to walk to my car the rain will have stopped” Weather Push-Alerts, National Weather Service Winter Storm Warnings Week outlook, “I can mow the grass on Sa...| renaghan.com
A Keyboard Maestro macro that creates an empty text file in the currently selected folder in Finder. Sets the Finder selection to the newly created text-file.txt Puts Finder in Rename mode on the new file The Keyboard Maestro macro is shown below as screenshots. Also available to download as Text-File-Here.kmmacros and import into Keyboard Maestro. Similarly, although Finder already has a New Folder option, here is a Keyboard Maestro macro to download that creates a new folder and puts Finder...| renaghan.com
I work from home and my kids think my job is to “talk on the phone”, which tells you how often I am on conference calls Apple Earbuds and AirPods weren’t doing the trick for a variety of reasons. As usual, I asked The Wirecutter and purchased per their recommendation. The Jabra Evolve 75 headset is great Sound is good Microphone capture works well Flick-the-microphone to mute is handy Connects to multiple devices at once All day charge I also purchased the stand which isn’t required b...| renaghan.com
My recommendation for Mac power-user email client is MailMate. No question. No contest. However sometimes work security policies force you into Microsoft-Exchange-land and your only choice is to use Outlook for Mac You won’t ever be able to make Outlook work as well as MailMate, but you can do a few things to help you get closer. MailMate Smart Mailboxes can be somewhat mimicked using Outlook Smart Folder feature along with the Raw Query option.| renaghan.com
The recent dust-up over the Superhuman mail application tracking when recipients open email, down to the level of the exact timestamp every time they opened it and their location, brings to light an important privacy issue. When/where/if you read an email someone sent you is private. Email services that attempt to track that are intrusive. There are a few different ways you can reduce mail tracker spying… If you use GMail within Chrome or FireFox try Ugly Mail or Pixel Block or Trocker exte...| renaghan.com
Purchased a new 15" MacBook Pro. So far so good with the keyboard, but had problems with screen flicker. Took the MBP in for Apple Genius service and after 2 separate send-away-for-repair incidents, MBP coming back with no new parts, the local Apple Store gave up and just gave me a new MBP as replacement. Of course I still had the screen flicker with the replacement Some digging on the Internet led me to the conclusion that the problem is in Mac OSX software, in combination with the new Radeo...| renaghan.com
The Mac has very good parental controls, but it isn’t as easy as I’d like to simply block Messages and FaceTime . Hopefully Screen Time will be supported on the Mac someday. For now, if you are trying to setup a “Homework Computer” for the kids, here is a way to block Messages and FaceTime using Little Snitch. Little Snitch Little Snitch is a network connection filter. Allowing you to allow or deny network access attempted by particular software on your Mac.| renaghan.com
Wasted a day chasing down this issue, turns out to be a simple cause. Writing it up here to hopefully save others a few hours… So you want to retrieve an IAM user’s tags inside a Lambda function. Perhaps in a Lambda triggered from a CodeCommit push, that posts a notification to Slack or Microsoft Teams - and the Tag has the user’s full name and email address you want to use in the notification.| renaghan.com
This is my recipe for New Orleans Style Cold Brew Coffee . Cold-Brew is easy to make in bulk, ahead of time, and is less bitter that traditional methods. Chicory and Chocolate give it a distinct flavor. Adjust along with vanilla, cinnamon and other add-ins as you wish. This recipe makes 1 gallon, and takes 24-hours . Every two weeks I make 2 gallons over the course of 2 days.| renaghan.com
Matej Jellus, writes : A properly formed Git commit subject line should always be able to complete the following sentence: if applied, this commit will your subject line here. For example : if applied, this commit will Delete unnecessary files if applied, this commit will Add grep option if applied, this commit will Fix error when protocol is missing See the original post from Chris Beams| renaghan.com
This will change your life I have recently setup a few new Mac laptops and am reminded how absurdly small the default mouse-pointer is on the Mac. How to fix this: Mac, menu, top-left of your screen System Preferences… Accessibility Display Cursor Size, adjust the slider, I prefer position 3 I also recommend Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency| renaghan.com
MacStories via John Gruber: trackpad mode can be activated in a much easier way in iOS 12: just tap & hold on the space bar until the keyboard becomes a trackpad This will change your life On your iPhone and iPad, when you have the on-screen keyboard open and you are entering text, and you want to move around, usually to go back and fix a typo… Put your finger on the space bar and hold You will see the keyboard dim Your finger now controls a trackpad Move your finger around the keyboard and...| renaghan.com
Craig Morey, writing via MacStories: Could I recommend using an iPad as a good platform for doing front-end web development? No. Great analysis of tools, problems, and (partial) solutions for doing front-end web development on an iPad. It all applies to other forms of development in similar ways. We aren’t there yet, but are getting closer. Completely agree that Working Copy and Textastic are fantastic tools and get us closest to where we need to be.| renaghan.com
Arq Backup is a great personal backup product that lets you backup your Mac to your cloud storage provider of choice . I use Arq Backup for all the users of the many computers we have in the house. It works great, is fairly cheap, and gives you a high level of control over what gets backed up (folder selection, exclusion rules) when it gets backed up (scheduling, pause during hours) security of backups (client side encryption) One challenge is to make sure backups are running successfully for...| renaghan.com
After purchasing the 1st Edition hardcover of The Illustrated Network: How TCP/IP Works in a Modern Network by Walter Goralski and literally having it sit in my closet for 9 years, I finally decided to learn how IP addressing, networks, layers, routing… work. I donated the 1st edition and bought the revised 2nd epub edition as I wanted to have an updated and (literally) lightweight copy to keep on hand.| renaghan.com
As mentioned in Lambda@Edge CloudFront Debugging, it is very common to have services, applications, and worldwide CloudFront Edge Locations (especially Lambda@Edge) creating CloudWatch Log Groups in regions across the world. By default new CloudWatch Log Groups have retention set to Never, which is never what I want. I created a Lambda function that will search through all AWS regions, check the retention period of each CloudWatch Log Group. Any Log Group that has retention of Never will be c...| renaghan.com
Hugo Shortcodes are simple snippets inside your content files calling built-in or custom templates You can create custom Shortcodes to avoid adding raw html to your content. Below is a Shortcode to use Font Awesome icons without directly writing html. Add the following to new file layouts/shortcodes/awesome.html {{ if .Get 0}} {{ else }} Shortcode usage: {{< awesome "far fa-smile-wink" >}} {{ end }} That code will add all the Shortcode parameters inside the class attribute of the i html tag.| renaghan.com
James Beswick, writes on Medium: but there’s a kink in The Edge process that has caught me out a few times. When your code runs at The Edge, the logging happens in the CloudWatch region of that edge server. The logs might not be where you think they will be. Lesson: if you can’t find your logs and there are no 502 or 503 errors, The Edge is almost certainly logging in another region.| renaghan.com
Corey Quinn, writing on Last Week in AWS: if us-west-2 has an issue, and your plan is to fail over to us-east-1, you should probably be aware that more or less everyone has similar plans. You’ll be in very good, very plentiful company expect provisioning times to be delayed significantly Good point from Corey on this aspect of AWS disaster recovery planning. Of course you aren’t the only one with the same problem at the same time.| renaghan.com
I take a lot of notes for work. Mainly notes about meetings: Date Location (if not a phone call, where was I, helps the memory) Key Participants Major Discussion points Significant Decisions I don’t do anything fancy. No attachments, no embedded content, no tagging. Just straight-up text. A touch of Markdown, but rarely rendered Markdown, just bullets and headers in the text for organization. My notes and my email archive are, in effect, my work “memory”.| renaghan.com