David Cantrell 🏏

RE: https://mastodon.social/@simple_sabotage/116557383570133022

Implausible ways seem to also work. See any infrastructure or housing development in the UK for examples.

Outgoing as an unofficlal swap with a @postcrossing chum today. #AlecBedser had "mad skills yo", and took an absolutely ridiculous 96 5-fers in 485 first class matches.

#alecbedser #postcrossing #postcards #cricket #surreycricket #theoval #kiaoval #WorldAltTextChampionshipEntry

A very nice pair of pieces for all my #programmer chums to read today. The first summarises bugs in some #Rust code: https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2026/q2/332. The Rust code in question replaces older #C code which only didn't have those bugs because it had had 30 years of bug reports and patches. The second article dives into some common patterns patterns in the bugs. Those patterns will occur in code written in *every* language, so the lessons to be taken will apply to *you*: https://corrode.dev/blog/bugs-rust-wont-catch/

#bugs

Important news! I can now type 🧙 on my keyboard.

#wizard #emoji

After my recent playing around with #Copilot, I thought I'd take a look at my Github billing report to see how much I'd used. I have, this month, used US$5.80 worth of Copilot ... and US$870 of actions.

Most of those computrons got burned when #Dependabot pushed branches and then when it created pull requests so that it could whine at me about point releases of stuff like #CrossPlatformActions (https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/action).

1/n

Go home #Github, you're drunk

#WorldAltTextChampionshipEntry #ElectricFish #Egyptian #Hieroglyphs

@manwar Test2 is great, but whenever I see something using yath on one of my #CPAN testing machines it seems to be incredibly slow. Don't know why, and have better things to do than investigate, but that's put me off using it.

This is a proper banger: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002tbpz

#comedy #deaf #coda

Fairly sure I just spotted a bug in some #Intel8008 code. Yes, 8008, not 8080 or 8086.

It's at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Intel_8008&oldid=1346138297#Code_example_2

second update: I continue to correctly understand my doctor by going to #Morleys for a #healthy #nutritious #lunch of #burger and #chips

@futurebird for #dictionary and #BlackAdder fans ... #Johnson's dictionary *does* include "#sausage", but at least in my copy it is not sorted as we would, so I suspect that the writers really did check.

@futurebird here's what the #OED says. The best citation comes from https://metseditions.org/editions/Kdk5mzWSl54vimQ3IG67mc85Epdb5yb

#bike #dictionary #WorldAltTextChampionshipEntry

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@bsdphk/116419755925180688

Back in the 1980s when I was but a larval programmer my father, who worked on the railways, heard about #Ada, and tried to encourage me to give it a whirl, as it would surely be what everyone used in the future. There was even a compiler available for CP/M that I could have used at home. I took one look at it and decided that writing Z80 assembler was easier and therefore better. It was, of course, only easier because I already knew it. And so I have never used Ada.

Many years ago I saw the ads for #AvenueQ and ignored them, I thought it was a muppet musical for children. It was only after its original run had finished that I heard anything about what it was actually like.

Today I finally saw it. Fun. Not great. But fun.

The internet is *not* made just for porn. It is also made for sharing #theatre recommendations. You should go.

#MusicalTheatre #musicals #puppetry

Watching the #BristolBears / #Harlequins match, and baldy moustachey #EllisGenge looks great!

#rugby #grooming

Grargh! #Solaris #tar hates #GNU extensions. And #cpanm can't be configured to specifically use #gtar instead of whatever tar it finds first in the path.

Therefore ...

`sudo ln -sf $(which gtar) $(which tar)`

No, I'm not kidding.

https://github.com/DrHyde/perl-modules-Palm-TreoPhoneCallDB/commit/4b8b4f72ed474e17eacca7eb0a2c275d37e662b4

#perl #ComputerAbuse

Received today on a #postcard from #Bulgaria via @postcrossing. The "stamp" is just a slip of paper with the value written on it by hand, which is then stapled to the card. Does anyone know what the language is on the bottom line? #Romanian?

#philately #postcrossing #stamps #language #WorldAltTextChampionshipEntry

Back In The Day - early/mid 90s - I saw #SCO (or possibly #Novell) demo a version of #Unixware on some funky PC hardware where you could add and remove physical CPUs and memory on the fly. Does anyone remember what that hardware was?

And does anyone know when this feature will be added to #QEMU? It's just that my #FreeBSD testing VM has just started swapping, and I'd like to allocate more memory without having to stop it.

#retrocomputing

@drajt I suppose I could stick a #RaspberryPi in the chain. Attach the kb to the #RPi (maybe via a converter, maybe directly to the GPIO pins), then have that pretend to be a USB keyboard talking to the KVM. Because obviously chucking a 64-bit supercomputer that basically comes free with a box of cornflakes (I so love living in the future!) into the mix will fix everything! It would at least be easier for me to debug.

If anyone can point me at any #Lenin novels or any of #Stalin's #WizardOfOz #fanfic I would be grateful. I wish to complete my collection of terrible books by terrible people.

Manfully resisted having Greggs deliver my lunch by the cunning expedient of having cold leftover pizza from last night.

#healthy #nutritious #lunch

Exactly how many canons of the church did I just break? It was delicious.

Sorry no #alttext because I’m on the bus. Probably damned for that too.

#lent

The #Irish are filthy cheats and owe me the 35 quid I should have won by betting on #Scotland to win the #TripleCrown. DM me for bank details.

#SixNations #Rugby #RugbyUnion

@pertho @justine right now #evi builds in exactly the same way as #vim does, so no porting necessary. Thankfully all that hard work got done years ago 🙂

Configuring a new dev VM, and it came out of the build script with an *ancient* #vim. Now building #evi. I will then install #Copilot.vim in it because I am a pervert.

Gonna build a #CPAN testing VM with #DragonflyBSD. Any gotchas that my fedihomies think that a seasoned Unixhead should know about?

#perl

@BRicker @Boston_PM my favourite C portability screw up is #bzip2 which insists that `short` be 16 bits.

Getting that to work on a platform where short, int and long were all 64 bits, and where you only had C89, no fancy C99 data types like `int16_t`, was "fun".

`WARNING: connection is not using a post-quantum key exchange algorithm.`

Well that's a new one.

#ssh #OpenSSH #crypto #ActualCryptoNotStupidSpeculation #QuantumCryptography

A few days ago I tried to build some perls with 32 bit ints and 128 bit floats. Cue test failures. Today I tried again, and this time I read my notes from last time on how to do it, and it Just Works.

Yay past me!

(the #BigInt modules bundled with some versions of perl don't like that combination of data sizes; the solution is to ignore their test failures, install anyway, and then upgrade to the latest versions from the #CPAN)

#perl #32bit #RidiculousComputing #ComputationalPerversions

Is @kagihq the same #Kagi that used to do #shareware registrations?

Received today via @postcrossing - this home-made collage card. The #stamps are, from top left to bottom right, from #Yugoslavia, #Switzerland, #WestGermany, #Netherlands, #France, #EastGermany, and two from #Hungary

#postcrossing #philately #WorldAltTextChampionshipEntry

CRUSHING DEFEAT in this evening's #BGA online #go league game.

https://online-go.com/game/84475291

Alas you miss out on most of our incontrovertibly true and infallible words of wisdom in the post-game analysis because we did that on a video call instead of in text.

#BritishGoAssociation #weiqi #baduk

At the #ENO for #Brecht / #Weill’s #CityOfMahagonny. Sold out.

#opera #music #EnglishNationalOpera

@peteorrall @glitzersachen @rl_dane I do like the bit of systemd that tries to auto-restart failed services, detects repeated failures and so on. That little bit is like #daemontools, only written a lot less carefully.

Oh how wonderful! I got a feature request for Number::Phone, asking me to add support for the #MSISDN format which is standardised in ITU-T #E164. The request is in Github issue 164!

https://github.com/DrHyde/perl-modules-Number-Phone/issues/164

#perl #telecoms #ITU #SpookyCoincidences

Reckon it might be worth putting a tenner on #Scotland winning the #TripleCrown.

#SixNations #Rugby #RugbyUnion

@awb I can't unsee someone using a port of #DCL

@moof have you been on the #DocklandsLightRailway in London? The trains are robots that drive themselves, and you can sit at the front. The "driver's" seat is in great demand and it's not unheard of to see grey-haired suited commuters pretending to drive. A few years ago the operators even gave away inflatable toy steering wheels: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8273/8921671706_7cabf8e7a2_b.jpg

The theme for today's @postcrossing stamps is "AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH TOO FAST SOMEONE MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!"

#postcrossing #philately #stamps #cinderella #CinderellaStamps #hashtag

@mjd Spear-shaped, as in "Gardena", the "spear-armed Danes" in the first line of #Beowulf. Not to be confused with the similar gear- in "geardagum" also in that line, meaning "days of yore" (yore/year-days)

@losttourist @aroundthehills anyway, I have now downloaded The Game from the naughtynet to watch at my leisure after all the other more important games such as #Cardiff vs the #Benetton cardigan factory from two weeks ago, and #Sheffield vs #Whitehaven. That last one is especially important as without it there would be no way to know whether Whitehaven still exists or whether it got et by #Dagon without anyone noticing.

@deepthoughts10 Back In The Day i just blocked all IP ranges assigned to China and Russia because literally all the traffic from them to me was junk. IIRC #RIPE and the other regional RIRs published lists. The #perl module Net::CIDR did most of the work of combining lists of netblocks.

My latest @postcrossing correspondent said that amongst other things she's into #owls, #ScienceFiction, and #Cryptids. I think that every single one of these birds is a #SuperbOwl.

#philately #Cinderella #CinderellaStamps #WorldAltTextChampionshipEntry #postcrossing

"I like science fiction" she said on her @postcrossing profile.

#Philately #Cinderella #CinderellaStamps #Postcrossing

From the Architects' Journal. If that's one of those buildings that are "so hard to reuse" then I'll posit that it's because they're fucking hideous and no-one wants to reuse them.

OK OK, I know what the real reason is - it's because the buildings aren't very good and need lots of work to make them fit for modern purpose. And renovations attract 20% #tax, unlike new builds.

#ReadTheAltText #Architecture #EcclesiasticalMillinery #LeeVanCleef #WorldAltTextChampionshipEntry #hashtag

Since when did I have to run `update-rc.d` to make new services work at boot on #Linux using #SysVinit?

Oooh one of my favourite films is on at the #BFI in March - #HardBoiled!

#cinema

#ICE should be renamed Superschnellzug, or #SS-zug, now that the ICE brand has been ruined.

#DeutscheBahn can have that #2amThought for free :-)

#TodayILearned #TIL ... that you can use combining accents on the # of a #hashtag! For example #̧Cedilla. Why? Because someone, in a heroic feat of #DefensiveProgramming, thought "I bet some #weirdos will do that, I'd better deal with it sensibly". Why would weirdos like me do that? Because we're weirdos!

Also, you can pile them on top of each other! Therefore the official hashtag of #Zalgo is not #Zalgo, it is #̶̧̼͖̖̦͍͉̝̗͐̈́̏͜Zalgo.

#Unicode

Dear #Fediverse #Video people, does there exist such a thing as a #VGA to #Displayport adapter? I have an elderly machine that only has VGA, and my KVM only has Displayport. The usual suppliers of cheap electronic tat are only advertising DP-to-VGA adapters, and I'm not convinced that cheap electronic tat will convert in the direction I need. I definitely don't need high resolution or ridiculous refresh rates - this is VGA, and I'm not an #̶a̶u̶d̶i̶o̶p̶h̶o̶o̶l̶ video gamer.