Notices by Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social)

@Gargron thank you for doing this. Thank you for taking care of yourself.

@Mastodon plz send creatyre to canadia

@syncros I was working at Statistics Canada at the time. The #Y2K preparation was significant & the work was very much not imaginary: critical internal systems were failing validation tests up until a couple of weeks before the actual change. Person-years of work, possibly person-decades, were what kept the institution running.

And the stakes weren't just functional systems, but the integrity of statistical data. If that was messed up it would have been an existential issue for the agency.

@cks @syncros it's going to be hilarious when GPS implementations begin intermittently failing in 2036 and nobody believes it because 2038 is supposed to be the big problem year.

(Aw man, "retired"... _wistful sigh_ I don't think that's a thing anyone else I know will be about to think about as a realistic possibility. Good planning, man.)

@Gargron SPOILERS

@clacke by the way, thank you for starring that post I wrote to Nev about a trick for managing temp files on Dec 15 while I was on the bus. Reminded me I needed to write it; I just did.

https://mastodon.social/@gnomon/113720457791078580

→

https://paste.sr.ht/~gnomon/e3f2bd6723565d81438cffe5b993e1485d0d0652

@mhoye oh did you see that systemd 257 announced a new focus on an API to replace its own use of dbus, called varlink?

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1002398/d8e7bd4a6107e0a7/

https://lwn.net/Articles/742675/ (from 2018, earlier announcement)

> Poettering noted¹ that one might say that documentation for sd-json and sd-varlink is ""barely existing"", but there are examples of using them within the systemd source tree.

¹: https://mastodon.social/@pid_eins/113429681346022072

@nev exactly right, yeah. The "$verbose" variable and the behavior it triggers is just so you can avoid having to mess around with tee(1) in order to see your results interactively; you could also write it that way but it's a bit messier.

@nev ooh I have a trick to show you about managing temp files, I'll pastebin up a thing for you as soon as I get off this bus

@nev you're welcome, I'm delighted that was helpful!!

@nev you could, yep!

In fact you wouldn't even have to mess with tee, process substitution alone would work - something like:

result=''
verbose=1
url_next='https://whatever_apicall_to_get_page1'
until [[ ! $url_next == http* ]]; do
result=$(curl --dump-header '.headers' --url "$url_next")
if [[ $verbose == 1]]; then echo "$result"; fi
# url_next=$(grep ... '.headers.') # step to get the next link, or nothing
# step to do whatever with "$result" here
done

@nev does that structure mean you're downloading each page twice, once for the content and once to throw away the content but extract the link header?

(Which isn't necessarily a problem, it's fine)

@nev NICE

@cks @nev *hides a cartoonishly large wooden mallet behind my back* I want names

@cks @nev aww, I remember learning when Mark had passed away. I was just getting into IMAP for professional reasons at the time (cc: @waffles ). I can't very well apply the Mallet of Just Desserts in his direction.

(Well I guess I could, he probably wouldn't dodge it very well, but it would hardly be morally satisfying.)

Reminds me a bit of how one guy, Randall Becker, has been single-handedly ensuring for years that git still runs on Tandem Nonstop: https://lore.kernel.org/git/?q=rsbecker+nonstop

@waffles @cks @nev lol I'm in a round of interviews for a job tomorrow that would require me to learn Perl professionally in this the year of our flying spaghetti monster twenty twenty four

(it's not _just_ a Perl job but it does involve a small and unavoidable amount of it)

Love to have the president-elect of our neighboring nation, the one with which we proudly share the largest undefended land border in the world, "joke" about annexing our country, along with Mexico, Greenland, and... the Panama canal..? So great.

The scary part is all the US press rushing to normalize it. "Territorial expansion", not "invading sovereign nations".

Something has gone deeply sour in that part of the world.

@operand @mos_8502 lol eight megabytes my butt

```
0 20241223-21:50:54 u0_a381@localhost:~$ top -b -n 1 -p 17023 | tail -n2
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S[%CPU] %MEM TIME+ ARGS
17023 u0_a381 10 -10 10G 88M 6.5M T 0.0 0.5 2:52.83 emacs
```

```
gnomon@sundial:~$ top -b -n 1 -p 11162 | tail -n2
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
11162 gnomon 20 0 4478932 2.9g 27848 S 0.0 2.3 66,09 emacs
```

@jwz how have the suicide-proof toilets been there for *twenty-three years*, I remember reading your post agonizing over making the decision to put them in originally!

Sorry to hear about the drain woes. I do hope you find a generous and heroic plumbing patron.

#monsterdon
🎵 Hark! A horrid snow beast yawps
Murder to the ski patrol!
Death to skiiers, murder wild
Murder to the young and old! 🎶