Toots for elb@social.sdf.org account

Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-02-02 at 22:37

"Doing a CAR of an atom may very easily wreck the system."

-- L. Peter Deutsch and Edmund C. Berkeley, The #LISP Implementation for the #PDP-1 Computer

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-02-02 at 21:13

"One can argue that programmers produce efficient code in a language only when they understand the implementation."

-- Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel, The Evolution of #Lisp, History of Programming Languages II, 1996

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-02-02 at 16:10

"To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and it seemed natural to use the λ-notation of Church (1941). I didn't understand the rest of his book, so I wasn't tempted to try to implement his more general mechanism for defining functions."

John McCarthy, #History of #Lisp, ACM SIGPLAN Notices 13(8), Aug 1978, pp. 217--223

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-31 at 11:44

There's a poll about whether to install vim or emacs in my timeline. Obviously from someone who didn't see my earlier post that vim is unusable on files with long lines while Emacs remains smooth. If you can't edit it, what good is your editor?

[#]emacs #vim

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-30 at 16:02

Laptop maker challenge 2020s (difficulty: impossible): put enough clearance between the screen and keyboard that my screen doesn't have key outlines all over it no matter how often I clean it.

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-29 at 14:36

I have a file that is 27+ MB and one line of ASCII text.

[#]Vim absolutely chokes on it and is completely unusable. It takes many seconds to open the file and many seconds to invoke, for example, $.

[#]Emacs says "are you sure you want to open this file? It's really huge!" Then it operates completely normally and every command is as fast as you'd expect on a three-line fifty-byte file.

I'm not making any value judgments here, but in passing I'll mention that I'm an Emacs user.

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-23 at 14:10

So now, not only could all Volkswagen connected car owners be tracked, all Subaru connected car owners could be tracked? Maybe we just ... shouldn't make connected cars. #privacy #security #IoT

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-16 at 18:20

Here we go, time to get some #Medley #Interlisp going!

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-16 at 02:28

So ... is there any reason I shouldn't put a nest of meaningless pages on my web site in robots.txt as forbidden, link them into web pages in a way that should be invisible to (or obviously ignored by) humans and un-followed by browsers, and then put URLs for some of the deeper pages into fail2ban? It feels like this should allow human traffic, allow valid search crawlers, and blackhole AI crawlers.

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-15 at 00:37

My #emacs people ... does anyone know how to re-process #mu4e contacts without re-indexing the entire mail database? When I add something to my contact filter I have to re-process 50k emails and it isn't great.

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-14 at 18:40

Update! A new first-line tech support guy came along, told me it's a boot problem again, and gave me some hints on how to fsck and attach to the recovery console.

None of them have addressed the fact that it's a kernel panic, nor do any of them seem to have any idea what a kernel panic is. Or maybe they're just not even reading the ticket?

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-14 at 15:29

Oh good another first liner came back and said he sees some 100% CPU usage and gave me a bunch of links to generic performance monitoring advice, including a slashdot article. Meanwhile the highest CPU usage I see on the graph is THE NODE REBOOTING AFTER THE KERNEL PANIC and it's not near 100%.

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-14 at 14:58

Every semester, I try to get better #PDF #accessibility working for my lecture slides in #TeXLaTeX #beamer. Every semester, I fail for some reason. This time, the problem is that I cannot figure out how to color clickable links without breaking the Beamer theme navigation elements. Using configurations for hyperref like an empty linkcolor works without the accessibility setup, but the accessibility stuff can't handle an empty color. Maybe next time. #a11y

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-14 at 11:51

Me to #DigitalOcean support: my droplet has been running for a few days and then kernel panicking with errors in the block layer requiring a reboot, I think there might be a drive problem.

DO support: If your droplet won't boot, it's probably the boot loader [boot loader troubleshooting paste].

Me: ...

I've been happy with these guys for a long time, but this is not confidence-inspiring.

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-13 at 21:40

In a (recently) rare occurrence, something #retrocomputing worked! It turns out my #NeitherNet adapters work perfectly fine if I just solder the pins. ;-) Witness the Apple #IIgs loading an AppleTalk file share from a Mac SE via NeitherNet!

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-13 at 19:55

I enjoy that when I see #golang go.mod files in the file selector, they have little musical notes beside them.

Four-voice 8-bit sequenced #Amiga #music files should absolutely take precedence over build system configurations.

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-13 at 16:00

This is maddening. Opening local files in #Electron apps in #flatpak that are not granted full access to the local filesystem has been broken for MONTHS. It looks like maybe the reason is that the perfect is the enemy of the good (?), but in any event there doesn't appear to be a timeline for a fix.

Putting everything in the web browser is a MISTAKE.

https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/43819

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-11 at 15:51

Now updates are failing because my #rustlang compiler is too old. Help, I'm stuck in the land of juvenile software development practices.

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2025-01-11 at 15:48

I made the mistake of updating my #homeassistant which made me update #zwavejs and now for some reason my Z-Wave devices, which zwave-js says are connected, show up as "not ready" in Home Assistant. And this is why I was happily running 2022.12. #HomeAutomation #WebDev #SoftwareSucks

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Written by Ethan Blanton on 2024-12-31 at 21:01

I want to give a shout out to Leo Brodie and FORTH, Inc. for having the heart and commitment to release Brodie's beautiful books Starting Forth and Thinking Forth online for free (quite some time ago!). The former is available both as a PDF of its original form and in an online update, and the latter in a revised edition under the Creative Commons. The #Forth community and programmers and learners of all kinds are lucky to have these high-quality resources.

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