There's so much new text on the web that the valuable old writing is difficult to find. I know that Ali Davis wrote an excellent description of various kinds of answers, with a very lucid example of how some answers open the space of possible conversations and others restrict it. I'm 99% sure she posted it to improvisation.ws, and while archive.org has others of her postings, that one is gone and I can't find it.
Sigh.
So I want to quote this little gem before it becomes impossible to find, from a blog mostly about economics:
The one revelation for me was Austria, especially rural Austria. At first I wondered if what I was seeing was an unrepresentative sample—tourist areas that looked richer than usual. But no, the whole of rural Austria looks extremely impressive—like a Swiss travel poster. It’s makes America’s built environment look shoddy by comparison.
Everything looked high quality and attractive. The trains, trams and buses all looked brand new. The roads had no potholes and were well designed. The drivers were all skilled and the traffic flowed smoothly. Doors and windows seemed as solid as a bank vault, not the flimsy Home Depot crap you get in America.
Yes, I know that America is richer than Austria. I know that there is more to GDP than the quality of the built environment. Services matter (don’t ask about their food). Size of houses matters. But I’d also argue that quality counts for something, and probably gets overlooked in GDP comparisons. If an Austrian (or German) told me that America seemed poorer than their home country, I would not argue with them. It’s all subjective.
The residential buildings in rural Austria were quite attractive, quite unlike the ugly new houses being built in America. I can’t blame America for lacking the beautiful baroque buildings of Vienna and Salzburg; we are too new to have any of those. But why is even the modern architecture in Austria so much better.
At some point I'm going to take my office chair to Salzburg to get about half of it replaced. An long-day bicycle trip each way, with the chair on a trailer. No doubt I will stay at my favourite hotel there, one that's a perfect example of the attitude he describes in that blog posting: Money was spent on something good and while the goodness somehow counts for something, counting it is difficult and not done.
That hotel is just pleasant. There's a bourgeois solidity that isn't visible in photos (on booking sites or here) and isn't visible in economic statistics either.
Meanwhile, here's a photo from a chain hotel in a rich American city. The door looked like plastic to my eyes, the frame too, and then there's the door handle.
debconf: cannot find a question for
means that the package database and debconf's database have lost sync. Packages are supposed to add and remove questions when they're installed/uninstalled, and mistakes can happen.
The solution is simple: Run /usr/share/debconf/fix_db.pl as root. fix_db.pl deletes any questions that related to deleted packages.
I liked Pivotal Tracker. I liked the tracker Abhijit and I used for aox. That's all. Of all the task trackers I've used over the years, those are the only two I liked.
So of course I had to write my own eventually.
Mine is a single file, easily edited, in almost this format, except that mine has special support for links.
I need to keep an eye on bugs in remote trackers, issues, pull requests, etc. and look at them every few weeks, so I wrote code that acts like a compiler. When I run that in the editor as though it were a compiler, the task tracker inspects the links, and if one needs attention, two things happen:
- It opens the relevant link in a browser.
- It shows an
error message
and the editor moves the cursor to the note containing that link.
That's it. That's really the only feature. I like it. git handles everything else. If I want to know when I added something, git blame tells me. If something is done, I delete that note and git commit.
I needed to reset the password of my account with a largish company recently, 14k employees, so I sent the following request: I need to delete my account. Apparently it's the only way to reset the password and use my new phone. Sounds rather dysfunctional, doesn't it?
Their reply conformed that they were pleased to confirm we have now actioned your request.
Dear support team: I don't want to have my prejudice boosted. Please don't use action
as a verb. Thank you.
I didn't expect that this would be common enough to see it myself:
What it means is that IPv4 has become (or is becoming?) less reliable than IPv6 as a transport. The web service (a nice professionally run place) detects that my
NAT gateway has tried to do something nasty, and blocks some functions from its IPv4 address. Thousands of people use that NAT gateway, because my ISP has more customers than IPv4 addresses and puts all of us behind one IPv4 NAT gateway.
IPv6 doesn't have this problem — each customer gets a unique IPv6 prefix so only the malevolent customer is blocked, the block won't affect thousands of bystanders.
China has a million unicode domains (慕田峪长城.网址 is the tourist site for the Great Wall), Japan has barely more than zero. That difference puzzled me until I saw the Japanese magazines below (posted by Derek Guy). […More…]
I replaced my old Mikrotik hardware recently. The oldest AP was almost fifteen years old, and Mikrotik still delivered OS upgrades for it: Fantastic. I'm a fan.
But I replaced it. My new setup involves three APs (my home has a very difficult layout) and four SSIDs. Setting it up was a little too tricky, RouterOS 7.14 is substantially different from both of the older approaches (capsman
and interface wifiwave2
). Mikrotik's documentation mostly explains it, this posting explains it differently. […More…]