Welcome to my personal website. I use this space to share some of my thoughts and software that I write in my free time. Sometimes I also publish photos. If you want to get in touch please use LinkedIn or Mastodon.
Probably not so much, or at least less than you might think.
We often need to store dates and times in a database and retrieve them later. I have seen people choosing to store those in the highest precision available. For example, in Python the precision for a datetime object is microseconds. That is one millionth of a second!
For a lot of use cases, this kind of precision is not needed. For many
cases, second precision is enough. Examples for use-cases that probably don’t need the highest precision are:
Blog posts
Comments
Social networks
Audit logs
Furthermore, it makes sense to use the same precision in your code as
in your database. By doing so, you get the exact same date and time when you save an object to the database and when you retrieve it later. This is especially important in tests where exact equality is tested.
One example is MySQL which has the DATETIME(3) type where the number denotes the sub-second precision. Defining the precision explicitly makes it not only more predictable in your code, it also avoid wasting space.
As usual, it depends on the use case. It does make sense to think a little bit about the precision to avoid problems later in the development process.
I was looking for an easy way to create new jekyll posts via command line and found the plugin Jekyll compose. I am very late to the party but wanted to give this a little bit more visibility as I have used a more bare-bones Jekyll beforehand.
Installation is simple via:
To show the full URL in Chrome, right click on the address bar and check “Always show full URLs”. This shows the http(s) portion of the URL in all cases and not only the domain name.
I just released the first version v0.1.0 of hermes on my Github account. Hermes is named after the Greek god - the messenger of Mount Olympus.
With hermes you can analyze you iMessage display statistics of your iMessage database on the command line and extract conversations. The supported formats at this time are JSON, plain text and YAML.
An example looks like this:
$ hermes statistics
Total messages: 100000
Received messages: 40000
Sent messages: 60000
Daily Average: 45.66
Monthly Average: <Not available>
Yearly Average: <Not available>
Chats: 30
Installing hermes
To install hermes, you can follow the instructions in the readme.
There are two ways of installing hermes.
Download the latest binary from the releases page. I am providing 64 bit binaries for both Intel and ARM architectures for MacOS.
Build hermes from source with go install github.com/f-ewald/hermes@latest. This will get you the most up to date version.
After installing it, you can use it with either hermes or ./hermes, depending on your installation location.
Usage
The simplest way to get started is to call hermes directly and follow the instructions from the help. At the moment, there are two main commands available: statistics and conversations.
% ./hermes
Hermes is a command-line interface for iMessage databases.
You can use it to analyze and display retrieveConversations and view statistics.
Usage:
hermes [command]
Available Commands:
check Validate the environment
completion Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
conversation Show retrieveConversations, find participants
help Help about any command
statistics Display message statistics
Flags:
--config string config file (default is $HOME/.hermes.yaml)
-d, --database string Full path to the chat database if it is different than the default path.
-h, --help help for hermes
-o, --output string The output format. Can be either json, yaml or text (default "text")
Use "hermes [command] --help" for more information about a command.
You can view statistics with the statistics command.
To display conversations, use the conversations list command. This returns a list of all conversations sorted by internal id together with the participants. If this is a one-to-one conversation, there will be only one participant. Group conversations have multiple participants.
To show the conversation, use the conversation get <id> command. Replace <id> with the unique conversation identifier that can be obtained from the list command. The conversation will contain the participants and all messages ordered by date. Each message is prefixed with the unique participant identifier.
Troubleshooting
The most common issue is that there is no access to the iMessage database due to MacOS’ system restrictions. This can be solved by giving the terminal “Full Disk Access” in the system settings und the “Security Tab”.
Future plans
I am planning to write tests for main parts of the software. Right now, there are no known bugs, but is not in an ideal state. After this, I am planning to improve the help and access to the database. Due to MacOS’ increased security features over the last years, you currently need to give your terminal full disk access or copy the database to another location, both of those approaches are not ideal.
Contributing/Bug Reporting
If you want to contribute to hermes, feel free to get in touch with me or create a pull request on Github.
If you have any interesting ideas for statistics that you would like to display but don’t know how to implement them, you can also get in touch with me via email via hello@.
