A blog of rants, screeds, and other nonsense

Did you know that buried in the U.S. Constitution is a story? It’s in the first amendment!

I learned that President Reagan was shot while walking home from school. I was about a block away from my house and I remember running the whole way home.

If you have zero knowledge and need to make a decision, here’s some advice.

Remember back in the old days when if you ordered anything from a company, delivery was “6 to 8 weeks”?

According to The Red Cross, there are fewer house fires in December and January.

Five things you should know about the Linux cal command. There are many, many, more features listed in the man page but these are the ones you should know.

The Unix cal command appeared in 1973 in what was called “Version 5 AT&T UNIX”. Linux and macOS (and all *BSD systems) have very different clones. Check the man page for details.

The best financial advice I ever got:

Pretend you didn’t get that raise.

You’ve tweeted that you feel “defund the police” is a terrible policy. I hope to change your mind.

Ignore the name. It is imperfect. In software engineering terms, “defund the police” is similar to the strangler pattern.

For the non-engineers reading this, TSP is a reasonable, pragmatic, and down-to-earth way to slowly replacement an old system with a new system. The name is terrible… I would have called it the warm hug of gradual change.

There are a zillion pages explaining how umask works from the user’s point of view, usually with great charts and tables explaining all the bits.

However in all my years I’ve never seen umask explained from the developer’s point of view. What do you provide to creat()/open()/mkdir() (in C) or os.OpenFile/os.Mkdir/os.MkdirAll (in Go) so that the user’s umask is in control.

A coworker was amazed at my use of Vim, especially that I was able to navigate around files so quickly.

Here’s my advice:

In response to a Facebook meme:

The typical American has visited 8 states, many have never been outside of their home state, nor have been outside the country.

Replaced by https://www.yesthatblog.com/post/0068-go-off-by-one/

Thoughts about “Do The Right Thing” (no spoilers)

Go’s range operator (for x = range foo) has eliminated the most common trap where I make off-by-one errors. The next largest category of off-by-one errors would be eliminated if there was a way to specify the last item in an array. It would also improve a developer’s ability to convey intent.

Q: I heard that the Google Captchas are used to train their neural networks so they can identify things like traffic lights, etc. How does this work since our thought process is in our brain?

Original question

You know what I want in the world? I want people that are on the other side of political issues to change their mind. I want them to “see the light”.

In my previous blog post I explained a trick for setting bash env variables when you run a script. In this post I discuss how to write bash scripts that handle such variables properly.

If you want to set an env variable in bash for only 1 command, here’s some bad ways to do it:

A poem I wrote earlier this year.

• “Who Builds The H-Bomb?”
• Mark Levy, December ‘81

I have a theory that 3 things lead to Obama’s win. He surprised the GOP three ways.

Dear Google Meets,

We need to talk about your product.

Most of my company works remote, and with C-19 we are now all working remotely.

Section 1

Cookies: We reserve the right to set cookies and use use services that set cookies. Hell if we know what happens after that. Even if we had legal agreements with those external services, we wouldn’t trust those third parties to abide by the agreements. Nether should you.

Section 2

Log retention: The web server we use logs all incoming requests (“traffic logs”) just like any reasonable web server software. We reserve the right to keep these traffic logs forever. We also reserve the right to delete the logs any time and for any reason; including that we’re too drunk, lazy, or stupid to find something else to delete when we need more space on the server. If we have to decide between deleting porn or these logs… don’t bet on the logs.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if the early primary states were picked from the battleground states of the previous election instead of being a fixed set of states? For example, the top 5 battleground states go first.

There’s a small controversy brewing behind the scenes at conferences because of this trend to require speakers to rehearse their talk via video conference prior to the event.

Clayton Christensen died on Jan 23, 2020 at the age of 67.

You may know him from his 1997 best selling book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.”

He was incredibly influential, well beyond the typical author.

I wrote this in Oct 1999. I’ve fixed up some typos but otherwise this is unchanged.

My Martin Luther King, Jr. day tradition is to listen to the speech he made at my alma mater, Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey, on Feb 5, 1964 (nearly a quarter century before I attend).