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Oracle has a very generous free tier that comes with dozens of fully loaded footguns.

I keep investigating software and then losing track of it so I figure I might as well write it down somewhere.

I spent a decade writing small fibonacci numbers in issue trackers (from 6-person startups to Google) in service of sprint planning. It hasn't ever helped forecast work, but I haven't been able to clearly articulate why until recently.

A bunch of people have been writing replacements for CLI tools. Here are some I've investigated.

Getting off Google Photos and onto Immich got surprisingly involved.

When you think about memory usage, usually you're trying to reduce it. CPython, malloc, and your kernel all helpfully try to help you use less memory. However, I found myself fighting against all 3 of those because I was trying to use more memory.

The current state of penetrating the Great Firewall is basically what you'd expect: a bunch of half-abandoned projects with partially written documentation. As a bonus, some of it is in Chinese.

While contemplating what image format I should use for an image gallery (answer: webp avif), I stumbled upon loading="lazy". This sounded perfect! No need to muck about with IntersectionObserver or pagination. Just toss all your images onto a page and let the browser figure the rest out.

You've got a python process that runs another process and waits for it to finish. Maybe it's some ffmpeg process or something. Everything is great until, one day, you notice that you've got dangling ffmpeg processes.

A common question I field is something along the lines of "what is wrong with this redirect/HTTPS certificate/header?" The person asking is often trying to debug something like their nginx config with their browser.

In python, you can create your own class and stick instances of it in a set or use them as keys of a dict without overriding any dunder methods. But what actually happens when you do this? How does python hash your object?

Battle.net

2 issues ago, I talked about how important IE6 was to the formative years of my programming experience. Perhaps more important to me was Battle.net 1. B.net was a matchmaking service for Blizzard games (I was late to the scene, so mostly Brood War, The Frozen Throne, and Lord of Destruction).

Symantec, Comodo, Honest Achmed

Last week, we talked about how YouTube helped kill IE6. More recently (2018), Google did something similar (use their marketshare to do something that was tough).

How YouTube Helped Kill IE6

When I am old and have grandkids, I'm going to regale them with stories of IE6 compatibility. IE6 was an important part of the formative years of my programming experience. You would write some HTML/PHP/JS/CSS and make it fast and gorgeous and everything was great. Then, you'd show it to someone and they'd see something totally broken because they were using IE6.

Welcome to the inaugural issue/volume/post of Computer Stuff! I've been reading a lot of Matt Levine's Money Stuff (which is about corporate finance), so I thought I should write posts in the same style under the title Computer Stuff (about software). This will probably be weekly, but since this is the first, I feel like I'm allowed to use any material since the beginning of time.

How do I make my computer do lots of things fast (especially if the computer runs Linux and the things are being done in Python)?

Definition

When a story ends on a happy note for the sake of ending on a happy note in contrast to everything the plot had built up, cheapening everything that happened before.

The SC2 campaign was neutered and I am bitter about it.

(This post has an update from August 4, 2016 at the bottom.)

I upgraded openssh-server to 6.9p1-1 and was no longer able to connect with PieTTY (and PuTTY). According to the changelog:

There are two things every web framework needs: a deceptively short "hello, world!" example and a todo list or blog app. Thus, when I set out to write pigwig, I needed to also write blogwig. Despite my obvious preference for statically generated blogs, this one needed to be dynamic and so needed a database. SQLite3 seemed like the popular choice, so away I went.

In #learnprogramming on Freenode, someone came in with this question:

But notify-osd/notification-daemon!

They're dead. notify-osd has had no releases in over a year and notification-daemon is worse by 4. With the advent of Gnome 3, both have fallen by the wayside since the Gnome shell now handles notifications.

Motivation

GitHub doesn't let you host private repositories for free. (Also, their commit list view is silly.) GitLab's setup is ridiculous. Getting hosted on GitLab.com might be an option, but I haven't explored it thoroughly.

Linode has 2 forms of e-mail:

This is just going to be a rundown of my e-mail set up. Prepare for some obscure software.

Background

Font rendering is hard. Getting the fonts you want on the web is even harder because not everyone has the fonts you want to use installed. One solution is to render the fonts as images using canvas or a pre-rendered image.