barosl

I was told that some people in Busan, the Korean city nearest to Japan, felt the earthquake and even felt dizzy.

Oh wow, yes I remember now, I used to type `Alt+F` and then `S` immediately because Notepad didn't support `Ctrl+S` back then. Thanks for giving me nostalgia!

> Some time ago, I noted that the Windows 95 CD contained a variety of multimedia extras

That "some time ago" is 20 years ago. It is crazy that Raymond has been able to consistently write historical yet fun blog posts for decades. What a dedication.

I tested the demo at https://moq.dev/publish/ and it's buttery as hell. Very impressive. Thanks for the great technology!

Watching the Big Buck Bunny demo at https://moq.dev/watch/?name=bbb on my mobile phone leaves a lot of horizontal black lines. (Strangely, it is OK on my PC despite using the same Wi-Fi network.) Is it due to buffer size? Can I increase it client-side, or should it be done server-side?

Also, thanks for not missing South Kora in your "global" CDN map!

Actually the default value of `APT::Install-Recommends` had been false, and it was changed to true in Debian 6.0 Squeeze (2011-02-06). I didn't like the change at the time because my Debian and Ubuntu systems suddenly installed more packages by default. However, now that I think of, the distinction of recommended packages and suggested packages was blurry before the change, because both were opt-in. Auto-installing recommended packages, while allowing the user to opt out is a better default I guess. But I still turn off auto-installation of recommended packages in the systems I manage.

fish doesn't use SQLite, but its own plaintext format. They've been trying to migrate to other formats.[1] Currently fish stores timestamps and directories in its history.

[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/3341

There still seem to be some remaining issues. My Cloudflare Pages site is still giving me 500 errors. I looked up the response headers and realized that when requests are served by a certain data center, they fail, but if processed by another data center, they succeed. I suspected there to be some stale cache data, so I looked around the Cloudflare console but found no way to invalidate the cache in the Pages menu (the one in the domains menu didn't work). I also sent a ticket to their help center, only to be greeted by an AI. Probably waiting more will solve this problem automatically.

Off topic, but it is good to see an article about the LIEF library on Hacker News. I recently had a need to modify the header of an ELF file and LIEF was a lifesaver. Thanks to all the authors and contributors!

History classes are always fun! I didn't know dash had the command history feature. It is just disabled by default.

Yeah, I also used Docker (actually, Podman) as an alternative Python package manager and it worked well enough. Most of all, it felt somewhat cleaner and more reproducible than using plain virtualenv.

Of course, I migrated from it after I learned uv.

A very well written article! I admire the analysis done by the author regarding the difficulties of Python packaging.

With the advent of uv, I'm finally feeling like Python packaging is solved. As mentioned in the article, being able to have inline dependencies in a single-file Python script and running it naturally is just beautiful.

  #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run
  # /// script
  # dependencies = ['requests', 'beautifulsoup4']
  # ///
  import requests
  from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

After being used to this workflow, I have been thinking that a dedicated syntax for inline dependencies would be great, similar to JavaScript's `import ObjectName from 'module-name';` syntax. Python promoted type hints from comment-based to syntax-based, so a similar approach seems feasible.

> It used to be that either you avoided dependencies in small Python script, or you had some cumbersome workaround to make them work for you. Personally, I used to manage a gigantic venv just for my local scripts, which I had to kill and clean every year.

I had the same fear for adding dependencies, and did exactly the same thing.

> This is the kind of thing that changes completely how you work. I used to have one big test venv that I destroyed regularly. I used to avoid testing some stuff because it would be too cumbersome. I used to avoid some tooling or pay the price for using them because they were so big or not useful enough to justify the setup. And so on, and so on.

I 100% sympathize with this.

Just the default one. I tried some alternative keyboards and they are better in some ways but in the end the default keyboard was enough. Termius provides input of some special keys (e.g. Ctrl, Alt, Esc, Tab, Home, End) so that's another reason why the default keyboard is enough.

I tried Mosh but it didn't fit my taste. It tries to "predict" the state of the screen before being acknowledged by the server, but sometimes the prediction is wrong and Mosh reverts the cursor movement and redraws the affected area of the terminal. For example, when I'm using split windows in Vim or tmux, Mosh allows typed characters to overflow beyond the separator, briefly, until being told "no" by the server. Personally I find this behavior very disturbing. Enduring higher lags was more bearable to me.

I also write code using my phone when I'm on a bus or the subway. It requires some patience but after getting used to it, the experience is surprisingly pleasant especially if you're familiar with terminal-based tools. My environment consists of:

  - Galaxy S24 Ultra
  - Termius: I think it is the best terminal emulator and SSH client on Android. The sad thing is that the paid version is a bit too expensive. ($10 per month, no permanent option)
  - tmux: Mobile connections are brittle so it is a must.
  - Vim: Allows me to navigate the code freely without using arrow keys, which is really useful on the touch keyboard.

Not that of a big deal, but the thing that I think is more pleasant on the phone than on the PC is that I can use my fingerprint to log in to the remote server. The fingerprint is stored in the TPM so it is safe. It feels magical!

Edit: The biggest pain point for me was the limited width of the smartphone screen. It is a bit hard to skim over the code quickly because most lines are severely cut. Text wrapping helps this but personally I hate text wrapping. Keeping landscape mode is not an option because the code area is completely hidden when the touch keyboard is displayed. That's why foldable phones are great for coding, as they have a wider screen. My previous phone was Galaxy Fold and it was a wonderful coding machine.

> if "rm -i" is the default the "rm" level gets disabled, because "rm -i -f" is the same as "rm -f"

You can use "\rm" to invoke the non-aliased version of the command. I made "rm -i" the default using an alias and occasionally use "\rm" to get the decreased safety level you described. I think it is more convenient that way.

> to overload the bit shift operators for stream I/O

MFC extends this idea to network programming, allowing the use of shift operators to send and receive data.

We have

  github.com/[username].gpg

to get their OpenPGP keys, too!

> states.intersection({'VALID'} | {'IN_PROGRESS'})

Does this Python code count? Haha.

The cool thing about this project is that as it uses systemd's socket activation, it requires no server processes at all. There is no waste of resources when Cockpit is not being used. Accessing a page is literally the same as invoking a command-line tool (and quitting it). No more, no less. What a beautiful design.

> A server-side JavaScript script might pull data out of a relational database and format it in HTML on the fly. A page might contain JavaScript scripts that run on both the client and the server.

This is exactly what we do with server-side rendering today, huh. So the originally intended uses of JavaScript included servers too.

> Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects

This, not quite so.

The funny thing is, I do know about WeeChat (the IRC client) and did use it in the past, but still thought the article was about WeChat (the Chinese messaging service) for a moment. I'm embarrassed!

Oh wow. So some countries had free local calls, which boosted the local BBS culture. That's pretty cool, huh. I had no idea. In my home country there was no such thing, so BBS's tended to be owned by big companies.

I also learned the lesson to use a different history file recently. I added `HISTSIZE=-1` to `~/.bashrc` to make the number of items stored in the history unlimited, but the history kept being truncated. The problem was that Ubuntu's default `~/.bashrc` file set `HISTSIZE` at the beginning of the file, and it had a side effect of truncating the history immediately. I had tried various methods but in the end, using a different history file felt the cleanest.

They said they were planning to expand its coverage to the multi-region use case last year[1], but nothing's concrete. I've heard good things about Fauna, but having to rely on their own query language put me off. I might have to revisit it in the future, though.

[1] https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/10/cockroachdb-serverless/

I recently tried CockroachDB's serverless offering and I was very satisfied with it. It has a generous free tier, easy-to-understand pricing, and a query analyzer that helps me estimate how much a query would cost. It is still in beta but already feels extremely polished.

The only complaint so far is that there are very few supported regions. (Oregon, N. Virginia, Frankfurt, Ireland, Singapore, Mumbai for AWS, and São Paulo, California, South Carolina, Iowa, St. Ghislain, Jurong West for GCP, as of now.) Even the list of supported regions could not be found online, only to be found after signing up. Was it intentional to drop the information from the documentation? Not that this is a huge problem, considering I'm still on the free plan, but I wonder if they're planning to add more regions in the near future.

PEP 518 lists some reasons not to use configparser and I agree with them wholeheartedly.[1] Personally I don't want to use ill-defined formats, even for simple projects.

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0518/#configparser

The addition of a TOML parser to the standard library is really welcome. I've always wanted to use TOML in my Python scripts but having to import an external library made me use JSON instead, which was awkward due to the lack of comments.

This vulnerability seems much harder to exploit. I've just checked the services I'm in charge of and while there are a few uses of `${ctx:...}` in those codebases, the corresponding context values are all injected internally and not able to be manipulated by the user.

> Since the lower four bits are /2

Wow, so the second field of every timestamp in a ZIP file must be an even number? That's shocking to me! It seems that RAR and FAT32 share this problem. How could I not know this?

After reading the answer, I've got some questions:

1. I like little-endian systems because adding or subtracting small numbers is easier in those systems byte-wise. Would the same benefit apply to human languages?

2. Why did the Arabic numeral system choose big-endian in the first place? It could easily have been little-endian, even including zeroes, likes 001 meaning one hundred. Who made the choice?