Notices by Garrett Wollman (wollman@mastodon.social)

@ripienaar @b0rk I think bash has always had `source`, which is a csh-ism that was never in the Bourne or Korn shell, and it's always been equivalent to the `.` command going back to pre-1.x days.

@ripienaar @b0rk Quoth The Standard:

If file does not contain a <slash>, the shell shall use the search path specified by PATH to find the directory containing file. Unlike normal command search, however, the file searched for by the dot utility need not be executable. If no readable file is found, a non-interactive shell shall abort; an interactive shell shall write a diagnostic message to standard error, but this condition shall not be considered a syntax error.
(SUSv7 but unchanged I think.)

@b0rk I guess it is faster, in a very technical sense involving how the tty driver and line disciplines were implemented that you probably don't want to get into -- since every raw-mode application (like readline) has to context switch back to user mode so the application can read the terminal buffer and interpret the control codes. This is also why there's also a mode where the kernel interprets controls that send signals, but the application does everything else.

@b0rk (This is what allowed Big Iron like System/370s to handle thousands of simultaneous users, whereas Ken and Dennis were not even trying to do that on their little PDP-7 and PDP-11.)

@b0rk Nope! Unix has always used "character" terminals that contained no local editing logic, just depending on the host to do everything. IBM mainframes and similar systems tended toward "block mode" terminals like the 3270, where the host would transmit an entire form to be filled out remotely, and then when the user pressed "send" it would get transmitted to the host. This was done because interrupts were slow and expensive so you didn't want to take one for every key pressed on the terminal.

Anyone else seeing ssh script kiddies trying to log in as `%split%`? I guess their script must have a bug. (This is presumably a variant of the attack where they try to log in as various components of the FQDN, but I guess they screwed it up somehow.)

Decided to buy a 52-week T-bill this month rather than the 26-week bills I have been rolling over for a couple years now. The rates recently haven't been that much worse, and the Treasury market is likely to be fucked next month because of the budget/debt ceiling stuff (the Treasury is already into "extraordinary fiscal measures").

At today's auction:
26-week 4.372%
52-week 4.237%

In fact, every maturity *except* 52-week cleared the auction at a few bps over 4.3%. #investments #uspol

What is the origin of "I hope this message finds you well"? People did not write that 30 years ago, or even 20 that I can recall. What community did it escape from, Victorian England?

@robey Great thing about pw(8) is it doesn't care which order you use: `useradd`, `adduser`, `addgroup`, `groupadd`, whatever.

@Fiona At work, we mostly use function + year-entered-service or function + ordinal for things that exist in multiple instances. Our AFS file servers are named after maritime disasters (mostly oil spills these days). We used to use cartoon characters, and there were a series of login servers named after the characters in Scooby-Doo. Personal machines are named after either horses in Robin McKinley's Damar books or swords in Diane Duane's Middle Kingdoms books.

@mwl Hmmm....

webdns=> select serial from zone;
serial
------------
26906
25975
252888627
2007102006
28697
26886
22213
184
45238
253322835
(10 rows)

Ok, that fits. The one zone that actually used the data-based scheme (probably because it was imported from a manually maintained zone file) is an empty in-addr.arpa zone that hasn't changed in 17 years.

@SteveBellovin Re: JSON, back in the days when XML was The Hot Thing, Juniper needed a way for existing normal FreeBSD command-line tools to generate XML output, so they created a library (libxo, for Xml Output) which is like "structured printf", and added standard command-line options to invoke it. Then when JSON became The New Hot Thing, it was just one change in the library to add it as a new format. FreeBSD has shipped this for eight years now, with additional utilities converted over time.

@gumnos @joel rs(1) was part of a set of tools along with lam(1) and jot(1) that were posted to comp.sources.unix in ancient times and got included in 4BSD at some point. rs does the thing most commonly wanted in this scenario if you don't supply options.

It took visiting five different web sites and a google search to finally find the right Nvidia page for downloading the latest release of Cumulus Linux.

Some punctuation characters have control-character equivalents but most don't, simply because of how the ASCII table is laid out: there are only 33 control characters (values 0 through 31 plus 127) and most punctuation characters don't have values that land in that range when XORed with 64. Some terminals used this combinations for other things but mostly they were not implemented. (One important exception is that control-SPACE, which should be "`" (backtick) is often mapped to NUL.)

Ever wonder why the DEL (delete) character is shown as ^? if your terminal settings are messed up? Control characters are not arbitrary: the control key of a classic ASCII terminal was implemented as just (ASCII code of character typed) XOR 64. So ^A is 65 (ASCII 'A') XOR 64 = 1. ^@ is 64 XOR 64 = 0 (NUL), and ^? is 63 XOR 64 = 127 which is DEL. That's why not all punctuation characters have control-character equivalents. Early terminals didn't support lower case, so ^a is the same as ^A.

One thing I have never understood about my employer's use of Concur: every time we book a flight, we pay a commission to a travel agency. The agency provides us no service, and it's all on the traveler to actually browse schedules and fares in whatever GDS Concur uses -- there's just an extra $7 or whatever sent off to the agency for nothing, which we have to submit a separate "receipt" for. Why not just book directly with the airline on our travel cards?

@irene Sounds like it would be tasty, but I could never do it because that would be far too much food to have around at once. (Also, my favorite "baked" bean recipe is cooked on the stovetop, not in the oven.)

@irene @dan My freezer is very smol and mostly filled with the meat from my quarterly meat delivery service that I haven't figured out how to use yet. Oh, and bread, because in my house bread starts showing visible mold in three days on the counter.

@irene @dan This is the point at which you have bought half a steer or half a hog and realize you can't eat that much meat right away?

(My parents bought a quarter-steer once, when I was about 10, and had to buy a chest freezer just for that... they never tried that again, although they kept the freezer for another decade.)