The next "back from travel" to-do is installing Debian on my old 32bit netbook.
It went well and now I'm in the phase of looking up how to do things in Debian that are not as apparent as they are for Xubuntu.
For example, installing gnome-system-tools to have a GUI tool for managing user accounts and groups.
Another was for the touchpad, doing a setting to have taps count as mouse clicks.
Next is: customise GDM or replace it with LightDM for clicking to select login account? #Debian
@array good suggestions to note.
I don't really know what this machine is for now. In March 2020 it became my work-from-home computer with just the task of running a Citrix client for remoting to the office. Thus allowing my main personal computer to remain always free for my own use. At that point it had Xubuntu 18.04 on it, which was still current.
Fast forward to now, I have a newer 64bit laptop, letting my old one take that role.
As 18.04 no longer updates, hence over to Debian which does.
@geraldew Just for reference, I could run a Centrino, single core, 32 bits, 512 MB laptop with antiX. It could even start Firefox and browse lightweight pages, as I said it really has very low requirements and footprint and 32 bits is still supported. And of course it flies with better hardware. ;) Anyway if your machine works fine with Debian then it's perfect, Debian is plain awesome. I run Sid myself in my desktop PC with Xfce and I couldn't be happier. :)
Really not my area of knowledge but this seems a good piece about the decline of Cantonese in Australia and beyond. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-06/takeover-melbourne-teen-and-the-cantonese-language/103069564
I got very used to hearing the lilt and tone of Cantonese in Perth during the 1980s thanks to a couple of cinemas running lots and lots of Hong Kong movies.
While I'd occasionally hear it on campus and around the city it seemed to fade away during the decade.
One of the curious things about my age point is that I do have memories of pre-decimal life. I have a little stock of pre-decimal coins that were mine to play with from before the currency change in 1966, Yes I was only four but I used to make rubbings of the coins, the shilling being a favourite. Then I had years of familiarity with most imperial measures prior to the 1970 to 1974 transitions.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia for details.
Not sure if I can write this without it sounding like a whinge, not merely an observation.
I've just read an article linked as "Docker is not the only game in town when it comes to #Python app deployment".
Except, the word missing there was "web" - because indeed it is only about deploying web applications written in Python.
For reasons unknown I still have zero interest in making web applications.
But for many developers nowadays, that's the only type they seem to think exists. #Python
A new blog post from me where for some reason I felt like explaining the obvious just in case anyone hadn't found it obvious.
It was meant to just be about programming languages and the idea of "Define Before, Execute After" but I felt I had to add some comments about Compiled versus Interpreted languages.
As usual it was supposed to be brief but I'm not good at achieving that. https://geraldew.wordpress.com/2023/12/05/uncommented-beginner-programming-concepts/
Years ago, in some coding at my workplace, which means it was in VBA, I added spoken voice clips to let me know when processes reached various stage points.
It just played canned spoken phrases that I'd made with a free program I found online.
At the time I had a very large cubicle with few neighbours who were mostly absent. It let me get things running and then go work on another computer, but hear exactly when I needed to attend to the process running one - i.e. without watching it.
To be honest I don't clearly recall why I stopped using the technique.
It might have been because cubicles got smaller and denser, and a talking computer was a problem rather than a solution.
But it might equally have been that I found it too hard to get the balance right - between constant chatter and prudent status updates and requirement of reactions. And thus the whole method annoyed me more than I felt it worth resolving.
Or maybe my need for running long processes went away.
As either a programmer or a data analyst I don't use my ears at all. But listening to classical music I can recognise instruments, composers, musical eras and individual singers.
Which then is more odd:
that I don't think to use that ability in my code or data work?
or that I don't have ready tooling too enable such approaches?
One of the curious things about #Python on Ubuntu is that Python is essentially pre-installed with the Linux distribution. That seems to be because Ubuntu itself uses Python quite a bit for various parts of its setup and routine processes.
Not a complaint as it works well for me, and in a way makes a good "fence" in which I can code and avoid non-stock dependencies.
For Foldatry, I only need to have "python3-tk" added via the admin account.
Wonder if anyone has mapped that out across distros.
Many Linux distributions include Python out of the box, for the same reasons you said -- they ship tools, sometimes part of the base OS, that are written in Python.
Essentially you should never install dependencies for your own local apps into the system-wide Python installation (though this has gotten less clear lately, with "externally managed" markings and such).
Thanks to a post by @liztai I've given my Wordpress Blog the ability to be followed via the Fediverse, and hence Mastodon.
Of course, with only one blog posting there so far, that doesn't mean much. However by following it myself I will be able to just post to the blog and then simply boost that item here - so that's handy.
Last night's program-not-working situation has this morning been resolved by finding it was silently crashing with a file I/O error.
I have coded a fix for handling that but now I'm loathe to remove that bad file as its presence is clearly a useful thing to test every part of my program.
This seems to beg a question of how I could deliberately create (and re-replicate) a test file that would give an I/O error.
Not sure if I'm ready for that rabbit hole on a Sunday morning.
For testing external conditions safely and reliably @geraldew, you need a #TestDouble of that external system.
That is, a fake system which implements (enough of) the external dependency API your system relies on, but doesn't actually do the external things (database, network, filesystem, etc.) and instead provides the potted responses or exceptions that test how your system behaves.
Have used it in the past to check that a project management system would set up its directory structures without destroying existing directories, symlinks, or other fs cruft.
One of the things I learnt many years ago is that you usually can't fight battles about how people "should" use words/terms.
By the time you feel a need to argue, with "should", the majority have already adopted a usage that you simply won't shift. Wishing I'm wrong about that won't change the fact.
Instead you can write clearly about concepts, as those are what's important anyway. You can adapt the words you use as language changes - and in the tech domain, language certainly evolves.
@geraldew All Open Source licenses are permissive. Calling the GNU GPL restrictive is corporate spin. Calling non-copyleft licenses permissive is the same as calling the GPL restrictive, so we should not do that.
From the @osi style guide: Use alternative terms like non-reciprocal, non-code conditions, attribution-only.