A blog of rants, screeds, and other nonsense

Here’s an infographic from Kathryn M. Everson.

I didn’t write it, but I want to make it available outside of social media where it is hard to surface. (I hope she doesn’t mind.)

What I love about this is that it explains that real science is slow and takes time. Hollywood movies portray science as a series of overnight miracles; Star Trek shows Jordi inventing entire new categories of science by the end of a 60-minute episode. Real science takes years. Real science is boring 99.99 percent of the time, punctuated by amazing discoveries. Real scientists are underpaid and over-worked.

Having a youtube channel is unrelated to someone’s qualifications.

read more

Here’s a meme that I collected from social media. I didn’t write it, but I thought I’d make it accessible here.

read more

There are times when macOS mucks with DNS lookups. For example, a corporate VPN client might tell macOS that DNS lookups for certain domains (i.e. domains inside the company) are to be handled differently.

read more

I fixed bug last night.

The bug was difficult to fix because the code was so complex. I wasn’t really able to fix it until I simplified the code. Once the code was simplified the bug was easy to fix. While doing this I found an anti-pattern that I now call “One loop trying too hard”.

read more

Biden has a mandate.

read more

Here are some of my favorite secrets about Google Docs, Google Sheets, Gmail, etc.

read more

Did you know that buried in the U.S. Constitution is a story? It’s in the first amendment!

read more

I learned that President Reagan was shot while walking home from school. I was about a block away from my house and I remember running the whole way home.

read more

If you have zero knowledge and need to make a decision, here’s some advice.

read more

Remember back in the old days when if you ordered anything from a company, delivery was “6 to 8 weeks”?

read more

According to The Red Cross, there are fewer house fires in December and January.

read more

Five things you should know about the Linux cal command. There are many, many, more features listed in the man page but these are the ones you should know.

The Unix cal command appeared in 1973 in what was called “Version 5 AT&T UNIX”. Linux and macOS (and all *BSD systems) have very different clones. Check the man page for details.

read more

The best financial advice I ever got:

Pretend you didn’t get that raise.

read more

You’ve tweeted that you feel “defund the police” is a terrible policy. I hope to change your mind.

Ignore the name. It is imperfect. In software engineering terms, “defund the police” is similar to the strangler pattern.

For the non-engineers reading this, TSP is a reasonable, pragmatic, and down-to-earth way to slowly replacement an old system with a new system. The name is terrible… I would have called it the warm hug of gradual change.

read more

There are a zillion pages explaining how umask works from the user’s point of view, usually with great charts and tables explaining all the bits.

However in all my years I’ve never seen umask explained from the developer’s point of view. What do you provide to creat()/open()/mkdir() (in C) or os.OpenFile/os.Mkdir/os.MkdirAll (in Go) so that the user’s umask is in control.

read more

A coworker was amazed at my use of Vim, especially that I was able to navigate around files so quickly.

Here’s my advice:

read more

In response to a Facebook meme:

The typical American has visited 8 states, many have never been outside of their home state, nor have been outside the country.

read more

Replaced by https://www.yesthatblog.com/post/0068-go-off-by-one/

read more

Thoughts about “Do The Right Thing” (no spoilers)

read more

Go’s range operator (for x = range foo) has eliminated the most common trap where I make off-by-one errors. The next largest category of off-by-one errors would be eliminated if there was a way to specify the last item in an array. It would also improve a developer’s ability to convey intent.

read more

Q: I heard that the Google Captchas are used to train their neural networks so they can identify things like traffic lights, etc. How does this work since our thought process is in our brain?

Original question

read more

You know what I want in the world? I want people that are on the other side of political issues to change their mind. I want them to “see the light”.

read more

In my previous blog post I explained a trick for setting bash env variables when you run a script. In this post I discuss how to write bash scripts that handle such variables properly.

read more

If you want to set an env variable in bash for only 1 command, here’s some bad ways to do it:

read more

A poem I wrote earlier this year.

read more

• “Who Builds The H-Bomb?”
• Mark Levy, December ‘81

read more

I have a theory that 3 things lead to Obama’s win. He surprised the GOP three ways.

read more

Dear Google Meets,

We need to talk about your product.

read more

read more

Most of my company works remote, and with C-19 we are now all working remotely.

read more