Notices by bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺 (bert_hubert@fosstodon.org)

"In Dublin's official timezone data, for example, tm_isdst is zero in their summer and one in their winter, the opposite of the norm, but not on RHEL, which "normalizes" the data. If you lived in Dublin and used Fedora, and made an invalid assumption about tm_isdst values, you would not be on time for tea." - from https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/brief-history-mktime

After studying the strptime timezone %Z situation for a bit, I have concluded that both time and computers were a mistake.

@jmorris in many countries they aren't if you put odd stuff in there. In The Netherlands there is for example the concept of 'mandatory law' which declares all kinds of things void in contracts with consumers. Judges here will assume that consumers are not lawyers and will not consult lawyers for most things they buy or services they consume. So if you put stuff in the TOS that is too surprising, it isn't valid here.

Someone just reported a crash in my Dutch post code database tooling. Turns out this was very likely hardware related, which made me think of my ~16 year old blog post "The 14 stages of any real software project":
https://blog.netherlabs.nl/articles/2008/11/16/the-fourteen-stages-of-any-real-software-project

Just recovering from a helpful user who launched a web security scanner at my site and found 5 "issues", none of which were a security issue. But by opening public security tickets you cause a lot of work for a project, since we can't just close those & people start to worry if you ignore them. Please think twice before opening security issues if you aren't sure what they mean & you just copied them from a random site. Feel free to send an email before raising the alarm.

@dalias thanks I guess?

Part of our global dumbing down is the assumption no one wants to read anything anymore. This leads to ever briefer articles. Which sucks, since the world is too complicated to be understood through soundbites alone. However, if you invest time in decent writing & do the measurements, you find that tens of thousands of people DO read 3200 word posts straight through to the end:

@tante no one has any use for that information since no medical place is going to trust you to provide that information correctly (and right they are). Also, I have no idea either.

Recently I was invited to present on long term software development. I asked around for people's experiences here on Mastodon, and you delivered in spades! Please find here the collected wisdom in blog post form. Likely relevant for everyone shipping software that has to stay viable for a decade or more: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/on-long-term-software-development/

@vitaut earlier this week I had one that went three layers deep this way! Started with “JavaScript sorts a table badly” and went all the way to “our C++ sql library needs changes”

Doing a (brief) presentation Monday on long term software development (>10 years). Things you regret in year 8. I'd love to hear things you found out and wished you'd done differently. Or conversely, what worked out really well. Will turn this into a public presentation & blog post. To kick it off: PLEASE KEEP YOUR CODE AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE.

If you want to find bugs in your software, try documenting it & making screenshots of features. 100% guaranteed you'll find features that actually don't work.
Ask me how I know.

"Less than a week after its launch, the 🇪🇺 Copernicus Sentinel-1C satellite has delivered its first radar images of Earth – offering a glimpse into its capabilities for environmental monitoring." https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Sentinel-1C_captures_first_radar_images

Maybe fun to know - using #MS365 means that the US government has bulk access to your data, which matters if you are a government yourself. Supporters of Microsoft will tell you you can easily use "double key encryption" to protect your MS365 data against US government snooping. This is how easily you can do that. Hint, it involves GitHub and compiling code: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/double-key-encryption-setup

I've started a page listing for many fields (#physics, computing, #biology, history...) the most Totemic Books. The ones that are central to the field, the books you wished you had learned about earlier. The works no one in a field can do without. Please send me your suggestions so we can share the love more broadly! https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/totemic-books-for-many-fields/

Earlier post, but in recent talks I'm encountering more and more organizations that are losing their last technical people. You can outsource a lot, but most places have a core thing that they should really own. And once your own technical department is no longer viable, you are hosed. The longer story: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/your-tech-my-tech/

@vaurora this happens a lot to me, most recently in a policy paper from the municipality of Amsterdam, https://amsterdam.raadsinformatie.nl/document/14694106/1 - somewhat proud about that ;-)

Single sourced story so far, good to keep an eye on. "Sol-Ark OEM reportedly disables all Deye [solar panel] inverters in the US"
https://solarboi.com/2024/11/17/sol-ark-oem-disables-all-deye-inverters-in-the-us/

After every terrible election result we get 100s of pieces telling us exactly why this happened. But the supposed reasons are all different & conflicting. Below I argue we should take a leaf out of the UK's Home Intelligence WW2 project, where they fought propaganda & tracked "the vibes" to keep everyone on board with the war effort. We only have a few elections left to get to grips with populism, so we should stop the amateur hour sleuthing & figure things out:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/we-dont-know-why-people-are-voting-like-that/

People, I'm writing a piece on how we still don't understand why people vote for Trump. To do so, I need a ton of links to articles that DO attempt to explain why Trump won. They don't need to be right! I just need a lot of articles. Could you send me any links you encountered recently? I already have these: