A blog of rants, screeds, and other nonsense

To the person on Redit who called the Brexit plan obviously poorly concocted.

What is yak shaving?

The other day a vendor added $6k of “training” to my quote. Here’s how insulting that is.

Politics in the U.S. is bimodal.

Copied from Facebook. Not written by me. I’ll have commentary later this week.

Dear friends of mine who support Trump:

Your “it was Antifa” claims have all been disproven, but it did buy you an additional 12-24 hours to come up with some other cover.

Good job! Your strategy worked! …but not for long!

I think I’ve identified the bug in PowerShell’s handling of NAPTR records.

I can’t figure out how to Add- or Remove- an NAPTR record using PowerShell’s DnsServer module. Can you?

Configuring my new Canon printer to scan to gmail was a bit tricky.

Why don’t (most) public schools teach statistics?

[NOTE: This is a rough draft of a rant.]

Is “Die Hard” a Christmas film? Who cares!

Die Hard is anti-American propaganda. It is full of lies that give people the impression that the U.S. government can’t do anything right. Anyone raised seeing that movie will grow up with misconceptions about the government that are harmful to our society.

When I read this acting advice by Lauren Gunderson it dawned on me how powerful it would be if every tech conference speaker applied it to their talks. Change her word “scene” to “slide” (or section) and it mostly fits.

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.

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

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.

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”.

Biden has a mandate.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The best financial advice I ever got:

Pretend you didn’t get that raise.

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.

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.

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

Here’s my advice:

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.