aduitsis

For some reason, yesterday's HN post "I can't keep up with React" came to mind :)

If the script must iterate over the lines of its input, I've found perl -nlE to be a godsend. Basically it is equivalent to

  while(<>){
      chomp;
      <insert your -E code here>
  }

UFS2? So you are using FreeBSD?! Yet another reason to support you folks, seriously.

It is mentioned: "The signatories include Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia."

At some point, pkg is to take over the updates of base, kernel, etc.

That isn't to say that the current freebsd-update isn't any good, just that it needs someone knowing they are doing. And even experienced people do make mistakes. Case in point, you tried to upgrade, you were given a locally-modified file under /etc/ to merge with the new version, you made a small mistake, shouldn't result in losing the system.

If I'm not mistaken, when Debian is confronted with the same problem usually asks whether to keep the old file or replace with the new, which basically narrows the ability to merge the two together in many cases. FreeBSD actually is slightly smarter there, in the sense that it can even detect whether the comment header of the file is the only thing that changes and actually merge it on its own. But, if there are real differences (e.g. you modified /etc/ssh/sshd_config), it asks you to merge the incoming with the current version. In any case, I think FreeBSD is extremely stable when it comes to what goes into /etc and how stable the file formats of individual files there are, so I think it would be perfectly reasonable to just simplify the choices presented to the user.

In my previous job we actually had an exhaustive list of IGNOREd files for freebsd-update, just to make sure that nothing was to get clobbered by some major or even minor upgrade. And that freebsd-update would practically run to completion without any interaction of this sort.

Beautiful, thanks! Good language support, includes some variants with the hints included in the glyphs. Nice!

Another one, BPMono. https://backpacker.gr/fonts/5

Very nice!

Noticed this uses pinger, which executes the actual ping command behind the scenes and parses the output. Which makes it fragile in case there are changes in the output format of ping. Are there any good alternative libraries that can use raw sockets, etc?

What clarity of thought! The article gets the point across in just a few concise paragraphs, wholly enjoyable. This is especially refreshing in an era where many similarly themed blog posts are 3-4 times bigger, and full of tangential and confusing rumblings.

Many thanks to the author!

I think some minuscule amount of energy is taken from the thermal bath (the environment is considered a thermal bath - you can take heat from it and it's so big its temperature won't budge), converted into electricity and then back to heat in the load resistor. They all remain in the same temperature if I'm not gravely mistaken.

Naive question, wouldn't this (converting Brownian motion into electricity) violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics?

(edit, this is explicitly addressed further in the article: That's an important distinction, said Thibado, because a temperature difference between the graphene and circuit, in a circuit producing power, would contradict the second law of thermodynamics. "This means that the second law of thermodynamics is not violated, nor is there any need to argue that 'Maxwell's Demon' is separating hot and cold electrons," Thibado said.)

Delighted that it includes Perl support!

(full list: CoffeeScript, CSS, Diff, ERB, Haml, HTML, INI, JavaScript, JSON, JSX, Less, Lua, Markdown, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Sass, SCSS, Smarty, SQL, TSX, TypeScript, XML, and YAML)

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. - Leo Tolstoy

I've read many years ago that in low temperatures, the SR-71 was prone to leaking fuel while in its hangar. But that was not dangerous because JP-7 won't catch flame without TEB.

EDIT: oh yes https://theaviationgeekclub.com/the-story-of-the-sr-71-black...

The graphical user interface still looks gorgeous! And it brings me a slight shudder that the look and feel might be more consistent that what we have today, even on the Mac.

Don't be. You are talking about the folks that pulled this off: https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2019.pdf

Haproxy is such a nice piece of software, sensible configuration, very stable and versatile. And, one thing that is highly appreciated, I've never seen it do something I wasn't expecting it to. This quality of minimal surprises in its operation isn't going unnoticed by any measure.

+1!

We don't know what we don't know, but one way or the other it's money spent on basic research and physics.

The article says something that is perfectly sensible. Reading it carefully, it seems that the author is doubtful whether building a 100km collider is the correct way forward, given its enormous cost. That is a very valid subject and totally worthy of serious discussion.

In any case, we should never forget that without advancements in fundamental physics we are going nowhere as a species. We might be able to come up with better refinements, better techniques, slightly better computers, etc. But sooner or later we are going to hit a physical limit, and we are going to need to seriously enlarge our fundamental knowledge corpus of how the universe operates if we are going to keep moving forward.

Oh, thank you, didn't know that!

Recently I found some old floppy drives at the back of a drawer. I manager to find an usb disk drive, inserted the floppy, what do I find? Sure enough, Perl code I've written back in 2000! Indeed, those were the days :)

Any chance Cor makes it into Perl 7?

Favorite syntactic sugar feature: the /x modifier which makes the regex ignore spaces and comments, meaning you can break your regex into multiple lines and comment them.

You are stating in step #2 that the Pi4 cannot output 4k at 60Hz. Could you please insert a footnote that it actually can?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/hdmi...

Quite right, thanks for correcting me. But I've been using FreeBSD since ~2001 and hadn't quite noticed, so the announcement did really help out :)

I think the idea of having a long term support release for 5 years was great [1].

FreeBSD 11 has been around for some years now, getting an update to which 11.3-RELEASE can be upgraded with minimal hassle is a major plus for FreeBSD.

([1] edit: referring to https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-Fe...)

Very good point, thank you.

As regards Perl 6, a recent development was to rename it to Raku, which (in hindsight) seems like a perfectly sensible decision. The overloading of the name Perl for a language that proved to be something different from Perl 5 caused trouble both ways. Perl 5 was widely considered to be a version that was to be eventually be replaced, whereas Perl 6 was considered a language that was a close and direct iteration of Perl 5. So we basically got the worst of both worlds. Perl 5 is very much in use today, still being actively maintained and is getting new features regularly, while Raku/Perl 6 is a beautiful new different language with interesting ideas being worked on by many brilliant folks, and the notion of trying to be in any way compatible with Perl 5 seems utterly irrelevant today.

The RPi4 is actually fully capable of 4k @ 60Hz, as long as there is no 2nd monitor. If there's a second monitor, then two 4k displays at 30Hz each.

A 10" google search can yield https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/hdmi..., where it is all explained.

On a general note, the RPi4 is in my opinion the most exciting computing piece of news there was in 2019, plus the recent arrival of RPi4 8Gb gives the option for even more RAM. This is a sub-100€ quad-core RISC device that can surpass desktop class machines from a few years back in many ways.

The last 64-bit RISC device with a normal desktop I could sit in front of and work, was a Sun Ultra 10 back in 2000. I think the RPi4 comes pretty sweet close to being a normal desktop class machine.

Today it's much easier, practically all universities participate as Identity Providers in SAML Federations and digital libraries participate as Service Providers. So you can just use your institutional login credentials to the identity provider page of your university. The service provider receives a signed SAML assertion that, well, asserts that you belong to your university and you are, say, a student. Most popular software is Internet2 Shibboleth (IdP and SP) in the academic field. It all works very well and has been for some time.

In the country where I live, you get access to office365, (physical) books, digital libraries (including Elsevier :)) and a wide variety of other services all via your institutional login.