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
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. ...
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.
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...
I remember seeing somebody getting Lotus 1-2-3 resurrected somehow. And I know there is a spreadsheet implementation for Emacs. But I’ve not tried either. For more mundane tasks I’d say Libre Calc would be good enough – and I hardly use it, either. I think my main issue is that I’d like a command line spreadsheet thing that’s not very functional but a bit like bc or dc or orpie – a thing that starts up super quick, let’s me keep state, and all that.
I think what I'd like is this: On the Raspberry Pi 4 I got as a present from an old friend who doesn't need it anymore, I have a music server running. But when I'm asleep, it doesn't need to run so I'd like to pull the cable but I'm also afraid of corrupting the filesystem. So ideally there'd be a super tiny web server-like app running (20 lines of Go?) that would do nothing but serve a HTML button. If you click it, it runs "sudo shutdown now".
How does one revive a 1TB SD card that's dead… I jammed it into a RPI4, maybe the wrong way or something, I don't know, and now the card is dead. The laptop doesn't recognize it. Gaaaah.
I feel strange because half the spam that gets through the Migadu filters looks like political influencer shit. No more anatomical enhancements, no more getting rich.
“As we kick off the new year with declining mortgage rates, a looming budget cliff, and a historically low and aging housing stock, I’m reaching out to see if you’d be interested in having Blah McBlahface, the new CEO of the Creepy Crawlies Corpocaca, on your show to provide a look ahead for what the affordable housing market can expect in 2024.”
Is it because of a podcast feed that got masticated by some IT low life into a database? Gaaah.
I feel strange because half the spam that gets through the Migadu filters looks like political influencer shit. No more anatomical enhancements, no more getting rich.
“As we kick off the new year with declining mortgage rates, a looming budget cliff, and a historically low and aging housing stock, I’m reaching out to see if you’d be interested in having Blah McBlahface, the new CEO of the Creepy Crawlies Corpocaca, on your show to provide a look ahead for what the affordable housing market can expect in 2024.”
"Back in November, high-ranking politicians from Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, neo-Nazis, and sympathetic businesspeople gathered in a hotel near Potsdam. Their agenda? Nothing less than the fine tuning of a plan for the forced deportations of millions of people currently living in Germany." https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-against-germany/
Better fight them now rather than later…
Wow, the German fascists are alive and well.
"Back in November, high-ranking politicians from Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, neo-Nazis, and sympathetic businesspeople gathered in a hotel near Potsdam. Their agenda? Nothing less than the fine tuning of a plan for the forced deportations of millions of people currently living in Germany." https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-against-germany/
I remember how many thought it absurd that when I got Swiss citizenship I dropped the others I had. I said: one fascist idiot in this country will end up proposing taking away Swiss citizenship of criminal offenders for trivial reasons and if these people have other citizenships, they'll be able to deport them. Dropping my other citizenships makes this harder to accomplish. Although, then I'll be left in the same country with the fascists in power so I'm not quite sure what my best bet would be in that situation. I guess I'm thinking Switzerland was doing OK for two world wars compared to the neighbouring countries. Past success is no guarantee of future success, however. What a shit show.
Remember that the SVP (the far right party in Switzerland) sponsored the AfD (the far right party in Germany) with a few million Euros a few years ago. The fact that the AfD didn't publish this made it illegal, as far as I remember it. The phrase to look for is "Swiss Connection der AfD". You'll find plenty of links.
I remember how many thought it absurd that when I got Swiss citizenship I dropped the others I had. I said: one fascist idiot in this country will end up proposing taking away Swiss citizenship of criminal offenders for trivial reasons and if these people have other citizenships, they'll be able to deport them. Dropping my other citizenships makes this harder to accomplish. Although, then I'll be left in the same country with the fascists in power so I'm not quite sure what my best bet would be in...
So many helicopters up in the air. What’s wrong in Zurich? Did WEF start in Davos? Oh, indeed it has. Fuck them. I have zero faith in more meetings helping peace or the climate. 🤮
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.
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...
@republik_magazin writes about the Swiss secret service (they don’t call themselves that but it quacks like one) and how they surveil the Internet counter to promises made back when the law allowing them to do so was put to a vote (which they won). The following court proceedings showed that the secret service was overstepping those bounds and apparently the next step is to legalize it all, naturally. https://www.republik.ch/2024/01/09/der-bund-ueberwacht-uns-alle
(Got that link via a newsletter by my Internet provider, Init7.)
@republik_magazin writes about the Swiss secret service (they don’t call themselves that but it quacks like one) and how they surveil the Internet counter to promises made back when the law allowing them to do so was put to a vote (which they won). The following court proceedings showed that the secret service was overstepping those bounds and apparently the next step is to legalize it all, naturally. https://www.republik.ch/2024/01/09/der-bund-ueberwacht-uns-alle
The reason I picked Init7 as my Internet Service Provider is that they keep fighting the good fight. On their blog is the story of how the went to court against Swisscom, the telecommunications giant that grew out of the near-privatization of the old phone organization. The state still holds 51% of the shares, and they’re involved in providing services to end users, and building infrastructure like fibre – which makes it hard for other ISPs because there is no separation of concerns. Fibre infra should be in the hands of the state and end customer services can be privatized for all I care. But the current half assed setup seems to invite abuse… https://blog.init7.net/de/die-glasfaserstreit-geschichte/
The reason I picked Init7 as my Internet Service Provider is that they keep fighting the good fight. On their blog is the story of how the went to court against Swisscom, the telecommunications giant that grew out of the near-privatization of the old phone organization. The state still holds 51% of the shares, and they’re involved in providing services to end users, and building infrastructure like fibre – which makes it hard for other ISPs because there is no separation of concerns. Fibre infra...
"About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable." – Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software (1995)
The next 29 years must have been pretty terrifying for poor Niklaus.
These days I feel pretty good about Emacs, once I let go of the idea that it was just a fancy text editor. In the back of my head I still harbor the dream of writing a tiny text editor just for me.
"About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable." – Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software (1995)
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.
What I've been doing more than once these days is this: somebody reviews documentation (for programmers) that I write. Then I write more documentation, here and there, with many commits. And since it's documentation and I think it's good, I'm also pushing it to the site. But I still want a kind of post-publishing review. So I have a branch called "review-marker" and create merge requests in the company GitLab for this branch, cherry picking appropriate commits. The result is a topic specific branch with all that has changed since the files were last reviewed, and it still gives the reviewer a place to comment the files. We're all comfortable with leaving comments on merge requests, so that's nice. It still feels weird, though.
What I've been doing more than once these days is this: somebody reviews documentation (for programmers) that I write. Then I write more documentation, here and there, with many commits. And since it's documentation and I think it's good, I'm also pushing it to the site. But I still want a kind of post-publishing review. So I have a branch called "review-marker" and create merge requests in the company GitLab for this branch, cherry picking appropriate commits. The result is a topic specific branch...
Has anybody taken the #Firefox about:translation web app out of omni.ja and rigged up something different? In my case, I'd like a local HTML page + JavaScript + CSS so that I can type in German and get simultaneous results for Englisch, French and Italian, for example. All I know is that it isn't super trivial: I got some files like translation.html, translation.css, translation.mjs, global.css and common.css, I fiddled with it a bit, but it doesn't "work" right now… Also I know next to nothing about JavaScript, so that isn't helping.
Has anybody taken the #Firefox about:translation web app out of omni.ja and rigged up something different? In my case, I'd like a local HTML page + JavaScript + CSS so that I can type in German and get simultaneous results for Englisch, French and Italian, for example. All I know is that it isn't super trivial: I got some files like translation.html, translation.css, translation.mjs, global.css and common.css, I fiddled with it a bit, but it doesn't "work" right now… Also I know next to nothing about...
I was recently wondering why I had stopped serving both HTTP and HTTPS on my sites. Ever since Let's Encrypt, my sites have been HTTPS only, but recently the people defending the needs of old tech made me think we could have both. I suspect I stopped having both because search engine optimization suggested it'd be better for page-rank if there was only a single, canonical URL per page.
Now that I've basically decided to have my site without search engines, I might as well enable HTTP again, even if that means that some people get ads added to the web pages by their ISP. It's up to them, now: HTTP can be used by old hardware or frugal software where as the security (integrity) conscious can use HTTPS. Or am I forgetting something important?
I was recently wondering why I had stopped serving both HTTP and HTTPS on my sites. Ever since Let's Encrypt, my sites have been HTTPS only, but recently the people defending the needs of old tech made me think we could have both. I suspect I stopped having both because search engine optimization suggested it'd be better for page-rank if there was only a single, canonical URL per page.
I used to have GUI + d bound to dmenu, to start programs. Then I figured I might bind GUI + c to a calculator, GUI + d to a calendar ("d as in date" I guess) and so I moved the start menu to GUI + s, which sort of makes sense. Guess how often I'm opening the calendar app these days.
Instant bliss when I’m done about the world is to go for a run with my wife, slow and easy going, chatting as we go, even though there’s light rain, and then down by the river we know where the the common kingfisher alcedo atthis lives. Or are there more than one? Today we saw it twice (or two of them), and the second one dove into the water twice, and it ate a little fish. Those minutes spent there standing and staring, then slowly moving along the path, watching as it moves from lookout to lookout down the creek… I love those moments so much.
Instant bliss when I’m done about the world is to go for a run with my wife, slow and easy going, chatting as we go, even though there’s light rain, and then down by the river we know where the the common kingfisher alcedo atthis lives. Or are there more than one? Today we saw it twice (or two of them), and the second one dove into the water twice, and it ate a little fish. Those minutes spent there standing and staring, then slowly moving along the path, watching as it moves from lookout to lookout...
Gregory's Server
