Katya Ivanenko

The walls of Pompeii were mostly people being annoying

One graffito turns up on three Pompeian walls and it is a complaint about graffiti. Real CIL numbers, bad spelling, and why I take the walls into class.

The cash was in the Philippines, allegedly

Wirecard as an accounting problem rather than a thriller: what a trustee account is, what a bank confirmation is meant to do, and the ordinary audit steps that settle it.

Catullus 85 in Arabic, and what broke

I disagreed with Nefeli about excrucior, so I translated the poem into Arabic to test it. The root fought back and she turned out to be partly right.

EXPLAIN ANALYZE has never lied to me

A support query that took 13.8 seconds, a report that timed out at 300, and a fix that turned out to be statistics rather than an index. Real plans, Postgres 18.2.

Koji on barley, day by day

A 47 hour log of growing Aspergillus oryzae on pearl barley: bed temperatures, humidity, two interventions at four in the morning, and where the safety line actually sits.