palordrolap

Once upon a time, my computer’s hostname was 1x4x9. The case was a black tower, the first non-beige PC case I’d ever owned, so the name seemed to fit. Unfortunately, that hostname went out of use in 2010, long before I switched to Linux at home.

I don’t happen across Medium very often so I wondered what this sentiment was about.

Apparently Medium is basically YouTube for bloggers and essayists (with apologies to those who surely think that’s an insulting comparison) and the new CEO messed with the algorithm so much that now writers’ content isn’t being promoted as well as it used to be, and the people who subscribed (or followed, or whatever) aren’t even seeing that content as much any more.

~… and it seems there’s no option to get a notification about new content from favourite writer, but maybe I’ve missed it. No “ring that bell” here.~ Edit: When I turned on JavaScript I got a pop-up implying that exists, at least for people who aren’t logged in.

But as far as I can tell, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should hate the content that’s on there.

*Confused LMDE noises*

(The funny answer is that I’m somewhere up Mount Stupid, but if I am, it’s a bit like Everest base camp and there’s a nice fire going. I think I’ll stay here for a while.)

Either that or this thread and others like it have caused the hug of death from well meaning visitors. Whoops.

For the lazy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

It’s working for me right now. Unsure if Tobias happened to visit during (or shortly after) maintenance, or if he’s region locked.

The Mastodon thread explains it. GNU.org was being attacked by a botnet and the automated protection excluded many legitimate visitors. They’ve since dialled it back.

Edit: unnecessary word

I once heard about someone accidentally pouring tea from a teapot into a mug with instant coffee in it rather than hot water.

Your laptop has the GPU equivalent of that drink.

JavaScript is in that set of “some” languages. Most of it ties back to C’s struct tm which zero-indexes months (0-11), weekdays (0-6), and the rarely used day of year (0-365), as well as offsetting years by 1900.

The odd man out, so to speak, is the date (or “mday” as it’s called there), which is in the range 1-31. One (Perl) book I own suggests that the zero-based ones are used to index arrays of strings and implies this one is different because it generally isn’t used that way.

But anyway, these are decisions made 50 years ago that still haunt us.

Wait until you learn how months are numbered in some programming languages.

The clever documentation calls it “months since January”.

As someone who is firmly in the greybeard mould, I ain’t shaving my legs for this.

Keep going. We may be homing in on how the number order was derived for a dartboard.

ON ERROR RESUME NEXT

I seem to remember having little to no trouble with the 5 to 6 transition on my old system, so I’m inclined to believe that.

I just need to get my head - and backups - in order for the day I decide go ahead with 6 to 7, just in case it doesn’t go smoothly.

The SI prefix thing stems from a joke anyway. Allow me to trot out the etymology again:

Once upon a time in the 1980s, there was created a program for reading ELectronic Mail called Elm.

Someone created a rival mail reader called Pine, which followed both the tree pun as well as the fact it was a recursive acronym: “Pine is not Elm”.

Pine had an editor called the Pine Composer or Pico for short. Pico is both a typographical term as well as an SI unit. They may have been going for both. Too perfect a pun to pass up, perhaps.

Due to licensing uncertainty, someone else created a from-scratch clone of Pico called Nano, cementing the continuation of puns, but in the SI direction.

And then apparently someone else has decided to get on the bandwagon with Micro.

At the risk of invoking the ire of two communities, why shouldn’t we think of Micro as Emacs but with Lua instead of Lisp?

Well that’s something to keep an eye on.

That said, I’m on LMDE6 which is firmly stuck on the 6.1 LTS kernel branch, so I might not see any problems until I upgrade to LMDE7 and get 6.12 (or go nuts and install something else entirely).

…hail Hydra?

TIL that, at least according to the linked page, YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss (or %Y-%M-%D %h:%m:%s in strftime format) isn’t valid in either system.

ISO8601 apparently disallows spaces altogether, so that space should be a T for it to qualify there; RFC3399 allows the space, but insists there should be a UTC offset of some kind at the end.

Unrelatedly, the page’s use of %Z and %z doesn’t match with strftime formatting at all, so there’s at least one other standards problem lurking here.

Whereas Windows is the clap.

There’s at least one other option: Making it look like you’re doing what you’re told.

Exchange line 6 for “Su-u-ure. I bet you can’t walk away from my desk without asking me to do something.”

A clever manager would go away and come back in 10 minutes with twice as much “urgent” work as previously and no pretence, but it would be funny for those 10 minutes.