Notices by Linus Torvalds (torvalds@social.kernel.org)

@gregkh @sima “eventually calling __get_free_pages”?

You have to realize that when the GFP_xyz flags were introduced - back in 1992 - “get_free_page()” was the only way to allocate memory.

So “GFP” wasn’t some odd internal thing. There was nothing else (ok, there was a very simply malloc() library on top of that “you can free and allocate one page” mode).

No “eventually” about it. It was the thing.

Some of you know today as π-day.

But the real insiders know that today is the 30th anniversary of the 1.0 release of Linux.

@monsieuricon I think we should do this by default on the security list.

Not for the levity, but just to counteract the “security is more important than anything else” vibes. Security researchers have this “the sky is falling” thing going on for everything, it’s very tiresome.

Being the responsible parents we are, we have Carbon Monoxide alarms in the house, because hey, it’s what you do. Right?

Of course, they have never gone off (knock wood), so you do tend to forget that they exist at all.

Well, yesterday one of those alarms decided that it needed to really remind us that it exists, and that it’s been ten years since we activated it. Because it’s now time to replace it.

Of course, nobody was home - except for the dog. Who is now traumatized by that beeping hell-box that suddenly decided that it was a good idea to tell everybody out of the blue that it needs replacing - at 95dB, just to make sure.

Kidde - I’m sure you could at least start out with just a mild chirp, instead of going full “the bark collar from hell” crazy. No?

Well that didn’t last long.

Do I reset my staycation counter to day one, or do I keep this at day six?

The reason why it’s taking so long is mostly that we’re in a fairly sparsely populated area on the outskirts of town. So not only do we have a lot of these big trees around, PGE also always ends up prioritizing the areas with many more customers affected.

But it doesn’t help that this really is a pretty massive tree, and it has also fallen in a way that makes it hard to remove, with the middle unsupported.

One of our neighbors has a brother that is a logger, and he apparently thought you might want two trucks to get it out: one to support the tree while the other cuts it from above.

Me not being a logger just nodded wisely.

RE: https://social.kernel.org/objects/98d5c1fa-1f94-452d-868c-f49b6f250579

I’m clearly a master of SEO.

When I google for “cold dark place filled with sadness and despair” right now (with the quotes), google gives me exactly one result - my Linux kernel github repository.

I will call my new hobby “Reverse Emo Googlewhacking”.

You’re welcome.

PSA: when I’m unanimously elected Grand Pooh-Bah and Emperor - it’s only a matter of time, since the current political model certainly isn’t working - the whole “Sunday is the first day of the week” nonsense in the US calendars will go away.

Just so you know.

Yeah, I can deal with it by just setting my locale to be UK instead of US, and since I’m ok with 24-hour time anyway, that works well for me.

I just want to save everybody else from this insanity. Who is with me?

So to prepare for that inevitable day, I would strongly suggest that any calendaring app writer already make “Monday is the first day of the week” an option. You know it’s what most people think anyway.

Kudos to Google Calendar for getting this right when so few others do (eg the “snooze until” calendar in gmail does not 😒).

@tommythorn strangely, I don’t actually mind imperial measurements. I’m perfectly fine converting C to F and back without any issues, and same for miles and km. I still have no idea how many feet to a mile, but it has never actually come up as an issue.

During travels, I’ve had rental cars that have speedometers in mph, while the posted speed limit is in km/h, and after a short initial confusion about why everybody is driving so slow, I adapt just fine.

I even got used to the strange date order.

But middle of the weekend is not the first day of the week. Not even after living here for more than a quarter century. It’s one of the very few things that still trip me. It happened today, in fact.

Thus the upcoming imperial decree.

Life is good. We have a dishwasher again.

Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking.

I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many.

@powellnathanj lovely. They fixed it at some point since I originally subscribed. Except today I couldn’t actually even get to my account since I couldn’t prove to them I was human.

Maybe they’ve fixed whatever went wrong by now, maybe it was just the smoke in the newsroom, but it’s all moot by now. The phone worked fine.

@morgthorak I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

@juancnuno it’s not hard to cancel. It’s just really annoying. I at one time tried to use a pre-paid credit card just because I despised that practice so much, but that didn’t work.

If you rely on that kind of behavior to keep your customers, what does that really say about you?

The fact that they have some technical problems right now, and you can’t actually read the articles without going into soem endless captcha hell - who does that idiocy any more anyway - was just the last drop for me.

I didn’t mind subscribing per se.

@brianstorms Shh! Keep this private between just the two of us, but I actually have and use an ad-blocker. But I see those ads on my tablet, and I find them unreasonably annoying.

Don’t charge me, and then also show page-wide stupid and annoying ads. The news I can get elsewhere with less annoyance, and I’ll probably miss wordle and the new math game in beta the most.

Bye bye, nytimes.

When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more.

Ironically, another pet peeve of mine was the “you can sign up online, but you have to call and talk to a human to cancel”.

But with apparently nothing but your main page (and your ads - surprise surprise) working, that was actually good for once.

@kainoa real

@w I’d pwn u on in Pokemon GO while I go walking most days (now that it’s not raining any more in Portland).

Yeah, that’s the kind of high-adrenaline gaming dude I am.

Sorry to disappoint.

Dear lazy-web - question time.

I’ve maintained a branch of the old micro-emacs (not GNU emacs) for decades. And by “maintained” I really mean “mostly kept working”. It’s a scrappy little editor from the eighties(!) and the “s” in scrappy is silent.

The version I have grown accustomed to isn’t even the most recent version of microemacs, it’s a offshoot from uemacs 3.9 that was maintained by Petri Kutvonen at Helsinki University because it was portable and supported DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix.

Over the decades, I’ve “enhached” that thing to actually mostly understand UTF-8, and increased some internal limits, but it’s mostly the same thing that I used in the early nineties.

Anyway.

I don’t love the fact that it’s a very limited text editor. I’d like syntax highlighting etc. But my fingers are absolutely hardcoded to it, and I am not in the least interested in something that makes me switch away from those (much less start using a mouse to move around etc).

Which is just a very long way to say: “Does anybody know of some slightly more modern GUI editor that actually has good support for really changing keybindings”.

And I mean really configurable. As in “I can make ESC-J auto-justify text, and ESC-Z be ‘exit-and-save, and ^X^C will exit without saving”. Not some half-way state where “sure, you can make ^X exit, but no, you can’t make ^X or ESC act as Alt / Meta keys for other keys?

And yes, I know one answer is “teach your fingers new ways”. But my micro-emacs works just fine, and so it really isn’t worth it to me.

And please - don’t even bother replying with “Xyz is a great editor” unless you know and can show exactly how to rebind a key sequence like that ^X^C. I don’t use nearly all the uemacs keybindings, but I use an odd set of them.

I’d rather maintain just a keybinding file than a whole scrappy editor.

@axboe you should get rid of the two preceding lines as welll (the iov_base/iov_len initialization). They are now wrong, and the iov_iter_ubuf() will overwrite them anyway. The compiler will presumably not generate code for them as it notices, but still..