alex

alex, 3 months ago to random

Patriotism is a terrible topic for a song. That’s what makes me cringe when I listen to Preciosa Puerto Rico by Marc Anthony. But when that tempo change in the middle around the 3min mark comes up, it just makes me want to get up and shout with jubilation! It is only later that I wonder: what if this had been a German singing about Germany (substitute your own boogeyman). Aaargh! I am convinced: patriotism is an illusion used to achieve something. It might be something good, a national infrastructure project, but inevitably it will be used for evil. But that song … ah, it melts my heart!

alex, 3 months ago to random

I made two strategic mistakes. The first was reading about how to install a Python program using virtual environments until I had tears streaming down my face and finally it failed because I think I need the Qt 5.15.4 runtime installed and I didn't know how to proceed. Then I made the second mistake when I thought it was probably a good idea when I read "If you have Docker installed, the webapp can be run in a container…" It's been downloading and installing stuff ever since.

alex, 3 months ago to random

The post on commit signing by @glyph reminds me of my reluctance to electronically sign private emails. To me, signing documents is a tool society uses against the people doing the signing. It’s a liability I take upon myself in order to get something: a wedding, a house – the other party is binding me to something. Conversely, when I’m not getting something of value I’m not signing anything. I prefer the liberty to repudiate everything. “I didn’t write this.” I’m not promising anything.
https://blog.glyph.im/2024/01/unsigned-commits.html

alex, 4 months ago to random

I want to love Forth and Lisp and Perl and Go and I sort of want to know Rust and Haskell and OCaml and Elixir, but really, the most important electronic computing platform for the largest number people is … spreadsheets.
Formulas and graphs turn these into the multifunctional tool that spread from accounting specialists to financial reporting to project managers planning to household budgets to birthday and wedding guest lists.
If you think about it, spreadsheets for the masses succeeded where Emacs failed. Spreadsheets allow you to build the tools you need. And sure, as a programming professional I have heard my share of horror stories: salary distributions and bonus programs, airport light systems, and many other things that should have used relational databases and REST services and whatever. But people know spreadsheets and use them to solve their problems.
Spreadsheets are underappreciated. Certainly they are underappreciated by programmers, I think.

alex, 4 months ago to random

I remember being very disappointed in the Sennheiser noise cancellation headphones for in-office work because they cancelled the droning of ventilation and computers and air conditioning and the like, so when you put them on it's like being under water, but they didn't cancel human voices all that much. In fact, project managers on the phone, people mentioning my name, questions related to the project I was working on – it all stood out, now. My interpretation was that this sort of noise cancellation was optimized for noisy workplaces where you still needed to hear your colleagues. Like (military) airplanes, for example. Which is exactly what I hate the most.

alex, 4 months ago to random

I write a lot of Perl code for my own enjoyment and sometimes I need to look at libraries. The differences in coding styles is vast. Half of them have code I can't read. That makes me sad.
When I look at boring Go code, I hope that this is not going to happen. For the moment, when I look at libraries, they seem very readable to me. We'll see how things develop over the next 25 years. I mean, who knows whether to Google language is still going to be around in 20 years.

alex, 4 months ago to random

I just realized that the source files for my wiki are 2.9GiB. Compressed archive is 2.8GiB. I'm guessing it's all images. 😬

alex, 4 months ago to random

If I had any young people ask me for advice (which they aren’t and when I was young I also didn’t) I’d say this: the world is designed to keep you docile and distracted. If you want to do adventurous things, risk things, go far, you must do it now. If you wait it is too late. Everybody going on adventure everywhere is ill prepared. The same is true for any kind of change. People like me tell you that we’ve got it but we don’t – and by the time you realize that everybody is fumbling and improvising and you finally learned how important it is to network and to be sly and all that, to be politically active, to organize, you’re as old as me and still haven’t done a thing. Sure, it’s never too late but if you get started early, there’s still time.
And if instead you think, old man, I have done all that and more, what are you talking about? Then I am relieved and my fears are unfounded. Thank you!

alex, 4 months ago to random

The feeling when you're typing and deleting messages on fedi or irc and know that nobody is getting notified of your typing. Bliss.

alex, 4 months ago to random

Every time I upgrade my system I look at the list of packages and wonder whether I could uninstall some of them. I look at their description and try to uninstall them. That lists all the things that will get uninstalled alongside it and so the process repeats, lots of exploring of packages, and then, eventually, they're gone.
And when I reboot, it's my time to cry, maybe… at least that's what I fear. Going to reboot right now to get past that feeling of dread.

alex, 5 months ago to random

If you had a blog with images, and you include images as relative links, just the filename for example, no domain, nothing, that is to say a perfectly valid URL, and everything looks as expected, what would you expect the feed to contain? My naive idea is that I can send the same HTML to the feed and it is up to the feed reader software to resolve relative links relative to the original URL of the blog post (which is hopefully part of the feed). One thing is for sure, though: the images of the blog post cannot be rendered as-is since the links won't work without some extra effort. From my perspective, it would be just as valid to just render the blog post without the images. I guess I'm curious about your expectations.

My own feed reader reduces every feed item to a small extract of uniform size with no images. If the extract catches my interest I will click through and read the actual blog post on the remote site.

alex, 5 months ago to random

A new bot behavior I'm seeing on my site: my wiki software allows you to fetch a feed for every page. Either it contains updates to the page, or a feed of the pages linked, it depends. It's for humans. Of course some shit engineer decided that it was a good idea to scan the web for all the feeds that are out there (so rare! so precious!) and to download them all, forever (uncover the darknet! server our customers). Now I have to block IP number ranges, add user agents to robots.txt files (not all of them provide some), or block user agents (not all of them provide a useful one). I block and block and block (for the environment! to avoid +2.0°C and the end of human civilization). Knowing that all these shit requests exist out there – a hundred thousand requests or more per day, wasting CO₂ – makes me sad.
#ButlerianJihad

alex, 5 months ago to random

I was at the Swiss Mechanical Keyboard Meetup. I wanted to get rid of my keyboards and instead I bought one. 😓
Tables by @xtaran and @deshipu Andrew Stephan and others…
https://swissmk.ch/

Very flat keybords and one that looks like a make-up box
Mostly white keyboards with weird labels
Colorful keyboards

alex, 5 months ago to random

I still remember that moment when my wife came home from work one day and told me that in a corporate message at the office they had replaced "work-life balance" with "life balance" since obviously work is part of life and not in opposition to it.

Sometimes I try to imagine the kind of self-denial and subservience it takes for people to say these things.

I shudder at the thought.

alex, 5 months ago to random

I carried my laptop around in a backpack today. Now it no longer boots. At first it switched off when I was about to provide my login password. I started it again and it switched off sooner, as soon as I had typed the disk decryption password. Now it switches off as it is about to show me the disk decryption password. Like… no power? Batteries super low? But it’s connected to the power and “charging” according to the light. It is also not based on a timer: when I hit ESC to get into the boot menu, I can look at stuff. Running memtest now, for example. So… perhaps the power key is stuck but the boot menu ignores it? I’m confused.

alex, 5 months ago to random

I was reading a web page about Forth by @ratfactor and ended up learning about dc as an alternative (or predecessor) to bc. I didn't know. How cool is that.
https://ratfactor.com/forth/the_programming_language_that_writes_itself.html

alex, 6 months ago to random

The feeling when you look at your windows and their title bars are so full of stuff you can't move the window without activating any of the gazillion widgets. A bit like trying to find a spot of whitespace on a status on fedi that you'd like to expand but there are so few words and so many links and buttons and the phone is small and your fingers are large and life is short and then you die.

Tempted to tag this hashtag user experience. Of life, I guess.

alex, 6 months ago to random

When I see the kind of replies people with thousands of followers get, I promise myself to nuke my account or limit the number of followers to 1000 or whatever it takes to come back the quiet life.

alex, 6 months ago to random

I really like the pictures @harshad takes.

alex, 6 months ago to random

Today is backup day! Every day is backup day. But today is the day I'm actually doing it.

alex, 6 months ago to random

I’m still fascinated by the idea of optimistic merging. I try to do it more and more. It still feels weird but the arguments make sense to me.
“One person asked me later to explain why I recommend to merge quickly, without waiting for Continuous Integration testing to finish, and without review of the code. I'm going to call this strategy Optimistic Merging or OM. Here's the reasoning behind OM.”
http://hintjens.com/blog:106

alex, 6 months ago to Blog

These days I’ve seen a bunch of sites that look like personal pages (blog or wiki or digital garden or Zettelkasten…) running software the authors wrote themselves or got from a friend. I think it would be neat to list them all somewhere, with a link to the site, screenshot or two, a link to the software and some comments by the author. Or maybe we could have a webring linking such pages. No screenshot required. We’d call it “The text and the code go hand in hand” (or something shorter) with the tagline: “People with a tool tailored to their specific needs to present themselves and their projects on the web”.
#blog #wiki #DigitalGarden

alex, 6 months ago to random

I think when I switched from the old OS to Debian, something about the printer config got lost because now, printing always leads to paper being stuck. But when I print from my wife's Mac on to the same printer, no problem. It's 2023 and printer problems are still a thing.