Python Dependency Management is Missing a Piece
A comparison of dependency resolution across software ecosystems, and why Python’s model leaves library authors with no good options.
Technological tribulation XI
TIL: tar xf archive.tar.gz auto-recognizes gzipped tar (without the z option), but tar cf archive.tar.gz ... does not produce a gzipped tar. -_-
Some like it hardcopy
Am I alone in finding it hilarious that the print function in JavaScript pops up a Print dialog?
Technological tribulation X
TIL: If you let a domain name expire, hackers can purchase it using a service like DropCatch, then restore your old content but with the forms replaced with phishing loggers! Ugh, maybe I’ll just park my retired domains from now on… 😩
Expedited serpentry
The mamba project has made me love conda again. No more waiting minutes at a time for the solver, only to have it ultimately fail. Here’s my conda config – Zsh + conda + mamba + esc/conda-zsh-completion + aliases. These can help you defeat the pain! 👨🔧
Great news
Wow! Thanks, TurboTax! #softwaregore
A worm in your Apple
I will never forget August 2014 when we added analytics to Fiji to find out which features to focus on—and the community revolted on privacy grounds. Six years later, if you own a Mac, the nightmare has arrived: Apple knows everything you do. My next machine will run Linux. 😥
https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/
A dearth of lavish vacations
I’m not big on exotic locales, but it’s still rough seeing my Google Maps travel summaries splashing pharmacy and fast food as top highlights for the 10th month running. 😣
Have your cloud and eat it too
I wrote a beets plugin to upload music to iBroadcast. With the shutdown of Google Play Music, I’m surprised iBroadcast doesn’t have more buzz—I’m impressed with it so far. And beets is a dream come true for CLI-obsessed OCD music collectors! 🎶
At long last
Emily found a web-based Python turtle environment! I taught her about parametric equations and normalization and Python functions and HSV & RGB color spaces today! I HAVE WAITED TEN LONG YEARS FOR THIS!!! 💻🐢🤩🥳
Rational actors
Old news for most pro webmasters, but OMG User Agent strings. Care to play Guess the Browser?
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36 Edge/17.17134
https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
The keys to success
How to fix a MacBook Pro butterfly keyboard. ;-)
MY EYES! MY EYES!
A new era of DANCE!
My new StepManiaX stages are installed and ready to go! Goodbye, aging DDR Extreme arcade cabinet in my garage. Hello, year-round dance workouts in climate-controlled splendor. Huge thanks to Kyle Ward and everyone at StepManiaX for all their hard work making this hardware a reality.
Space lizards!
If, in the final 7000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, [and] built a civilization…it would be virtually impossible to tell…That’s what 180 million years of complete dominance buys you in the fossil record.
Committed to the bit
Charmed by its ready-to-hand predictive power, we will embed machine learning — like the asbestos of yesteryear — into larger systems, and forget about it. But it will remain susceptible to hijacking…
Hyperconnectivity
Bit the bullet and launched Gitter again after my 2-week vacation… let the triage begin!
Planes, Trains & 302 Redirects
$ curl https://www.sussex.ac.uk/gdsc/
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>302 Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Found</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="http://www.sussex.ac.uk/gdsc/">here</a>.</p>
</body></html>
Wrong direction, Sussex 🥴
Neeerrrrrd!
When has my IP change propagated? Terminal-driven alarm!
while [ "$ip" != "144.92.48.199" ]
do
ip=$(host http://maven.imagej.net | sed 's/.* address //')
sleep 60
done; while true; do echo -ne '\007'; sleep 1; done
In the beginning there was zero
I got a Fitbit! I like it a lot. After recording data for 2.5 days, it sent me my first 7-day summary. I am far too amused by the assumption that I must have walked no steps on days prior to device activation. Coin-flip fallacy variant: when data values are unknown, assume zero!
