There's been a thread about dependencies lately and the challenge of convincing developers to look at the full dependency chain.

I once maintained a C++ binary that included a PostScript interpreter, a JPEG decoder, a JavaScript interpreter, and a number of other utterly irrelevant pieces causing a huge factor increase in the size of the binary.

The culprit: A single logging statement that invoked a general-purpose printer that could print web stuff. Switching to sprintf fixed it.

My talk "Go: What we got right, what we got wrong" at GopherConAU is now available to all.

VIdeo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE5Tpp2BSGw

Blog: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2024/01/what-we-got-right-what-we-got-wrong.html

The content is the same except for the Q&A being unique to the video.

This link captures the confusion about how to pronounce "fsck":

https://lwn.net/Articles/190223/

Here's the truth. Ted Kowalski, username frodo, may he rest in peace, was the original author, just down the hall from my office in Murray Hill, and his name for the program had a 'u' where there is now an 's'. Management made him change it for distribution, but they couldn't make him change his pronunciation.

I'm giving at talk at GopherconAU (Sydney) in a few weeks, about what we got right and what we got wrong. I have lots to consider but admit I might be solipsistic on this topic.

So I'm open to outside ahead-of-time input, provided it can be given politely.

We're currently experiencing the usual unusual call volume.

The backslash file name separator on Windows still rankles after almost 40 years. It just looks wrong, unbalanced, tippy.

But even worse is that in common parlance now, \ is often called slash and / backslash.

Microsoft will never be forgiven for promulgating this affront.

"Oppenheimer" is very very good and passes surprisingly close to the documented history. I was captivated.

My nerd credentials must quibble though: Those nixie tubes showing the countdown were not invented until 1955 (I know because a dear friend of mine, David Hagelbarger, invented them) and also the spoken countdown is plausibly credited to early broadcasts of rocket launches.

Back in the early 2000s, programmers were encouraged to avoid threads. Today that sentence means something different.

Current pet peeve: News web sites that require you to log in but then log you out after a day or two.

Does anyone have any technology that works? I am becoming despondent over the state of things. So much technological progress and yet everything seems to be broken (or must be updated, which amounts to the same thing in user experience) all the time.

Sorry.

The satisfaction one gets from bringing a completely dead device back to life with a little application of heat, torx, and a few seconds of voltage across the battery inside. (Bose sleep buds 2)

Good job, AI.

Always bothered me that they have the term backwards. One cannot "unlock" an achievement, only achieve one. The phrase should perhaps be, "Unlocking achieved", as in, one has unlocked this prize, except that doesn't work well either. Oh the travails.

We live in a world in which songs, audio books, and podcasts, all of which are just audio files with a little metadata, require different tools to play.