Notices by Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social), page 11

This is my sad face that here in AD 2023, there are greenfield projects using 'first name' and 'last name' fields instead of 'given name'.

(I'm a bystander, so I'm just going to sit on my hands.)

The problem of wanting to dispose of old computer hardware with hard drives is that on the one hand I can't responsibly dispose of it with recoverable data, and on the other hand it probably doesn't work any more and even if it does, I probably don't remember ancient passwords and other things I'd need to actually erase the drives. Things that only have floppies are much easier.

(Yes, I have something with only floppies. Still. For reasons.)

TIL that if you're running the Prometheus host agent (node_exporter) version 1.6.0 on Linux, you probably want to upgrade to 1.6.1. The 1.6.1 changelog just says 'Rebuild with latest Go compiler bugfix release', but it should also have '... to probably fix an internal deadlock that crashes the host agent' (https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/issues/2705 ).

It has been '0' days since I got thoroughly rained on during a TBN ride[1]. We got caught out by a thunderstorm passing through and thoroughly soaked (after some time of darkening skies and warning thunder, so we weren't really surprised when it hit). Then we got to see (and ride beside) a swollen, fast-running Etobicoke Creek. Correlation is not causation, but. Also, I am much less sweaty from the ride than I normally would be. (The rain passed and we dried out.)

1: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/129044070

@ewenmcneill @isomer In re spamming syscalls, I have bad news about program startup of basically anything.

@thesamesam @isomer I've spent a long time using a shell without command hashing, a NFS home directory, and $HOME stuff first in my $PATH, and I don't think I've ever noticed problems.

(And for a long time we didn't have exactly the fastest NFS servers going.)

Dear bash: if you have a path for a command cached and trying to execute that file gets ENOENT, perhaps you should, you know, *check $PATH again*?

Blog post: Command hashing in Unix shells is probably no longer worth it https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/DropShellCommandHashing

tl;dr: command hashing was a speed hack invented by csh in the early 1980s on Vax 11/750s and 11/780s (with tiny memories and slow disks). It's 2023, and we don't use Vaxen (or 4.2 BSD) any more.

@thesamesam This is my face that that option isn't the default and has to be turned on. Guess what stock bash setups on various places don't do.

Sometimes I feel that I should find some program to write in Rust (to be my first Rust program and a learning Rust experience). The problem is I need it to be something real that Rust is on point for, and not for work (at work we deliberately write tools in only a small number of languages, for the obvious reasons).

My current temptation is seeing how badly my desktop would explode if I switched from my hand-crafted Unbound local resolver (with various DNS zones shunted places) to systemd-resolved and its ways of steering DNS resolution around. Resolved has some virtues, like everyone will cooperate with it (and I have some things that would do that).

Blog post about it: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdResolvedConsidering