palordrolap

It’s not about whether other people are willing to accept it. It’s about whether I’m willing to generate it. This is the other half of the principle.

Maybe I want to say it without saying it. There’s no rule against doing that, but people somehow think there is - or that there ought to be.

Most of the time I don’t swear, so it makes me uncomfortable to use the word. There have been and undoubtedly will be exceptions. When the mood takes me. When the word, unfettered, feels right. Today was not that day.

Funny how the partial omission offends some people more than the original word does. Adapt your parsers.

The Robustness Principle may seem like little more than a suggestion, but it is the foundation on which many successful things are based.

To boil it down to meme-level old-school Torvaldsry: Assume everyone else is a f–king idiot who can barely do what they’re supposed to and expect to parse their files / behaviour / trash accordingly.

If you do not do this, you are, without doubt, one of those f–king idiots everyone else is having to deal with. If you do do this, it does not guarantee that you are not a f–king idiot. Awareness is key.

Examples where this works: Web browser quirks mode; Driving a car; Measure twice, cut once. This latter one is special because it reveals that often, the f–king idiot you’re trying to deal with is yourself.

Assume everyone else is worse.

Fun corollary: In altering his behaviour towards f–king idiots people who should know better, Linus has learned to apply the robustness principle to interpersonal communication.

One might exist already: lzlib.

I admit I haven’t done a great deal of research, so maybe there are problems, but I’ve found that lzip tends to do better at compression than xz/lzma and, to paraphrase its manual, it’s designed to be a drop-in replacement for gzip and bzip2. It’s been around since at least 2009 according to the copyright messages.

That said, xz is going to receive a lot of scrutiny from now on, so maybe it doesn’t need replacing. Likewise, anything else that allows random binary blobs into the source repository is going to have the same sort of scrutiny. Is that data really random? Can it be generated by non-obfuscated plain text source code instead? etc. etc.

You want to win me over? For starters, provide a layer that supports all hooks and features in xdotool and wmctrl. As I understand it, that’s nowhere near present, and maybe even deliberately impossible “for security reasons”.

I know about ydotool and dotool. They’re something but definitely not drop-in replacements.

Unfortunately, I suspect I’ll end up being forced onto Wayland at some point because the easy-use distros will switch to it, and I’ll just have to get used to moving and resizing my windows manually with the mouse. Over and over. Because that’s secure.

Technically, it’s inherited from older, non-x86 systems that had a dedicated ‘Compose’ key on the keyboard. Here’s a picture of a Sun Microsystems UK-layout keyboard; take a look at the bottom right of the main section: Link to a wiki hosting the image

(These keyboards also had the Sun (looks like a diamond) key well before Microsoft decided they’d like a Windows key on every keyboard. But then lots of other non-Microsoft computers did that. Apples, Commodores, etc.)

Note that the tiny circle on the key is a light which comes on when the key is engaged and goes off when the composition is complete. The Caps-, Num- and Scroll Lock keys also have built-in lights. For that reason, some people will use Scroll Lock on PC keyboards, especially if the Compose-emulation is able to toggle the Scroll Lock light in the same way.

(Even though I used similar keyboards many, many years ago, I’m not actually sure if the key has the light in it or whether the light is under the key and the circle is merely a window, but that’s not really important right now.)

If I remember correctly, clicking distro links on Distrowatch causes Distrowatch to increase its ranking of that distro, so it’s theoretically possible that MX Linux is only at the top because people who don’t use it and haven’t heard of it think “wtf is MX Linux?”, click the link and push its rank ever higher.

Urban Dictionary (not Linux related nor particularly SFW, but bear with me) had a similar problem with their table of “popular definitions” links. (They eventually took them off the site.)

If memory serves (for a second time), some of the links went to non-existent definitions, but those links looked like the only way to reach those definitions, so people clicked them, increasing their popularity and keeping them in the list. Along comes another visitor, “oh what’s this”, repeat ad nauseam.

Sounds like a TempleOS advocate. Someone out of the 1980s where everything on a machine was integrated and standard across the line. If you stuck with a particular manufacturer. And didn’t look too close.

Been feeling old and out of touch lately, and seeing this was comforting somehow.

I mean, I’m still old and out of touch, but it’s nice to see that one particular ancient technology might still be considered the best way to do something.

On the other hand, desktop computers are getting a bit long in the tooth as a concept these days…

In some languages
a newline does not
necessarily indicate
the end of a statement.

In others, sometimes it could, but would leave things ambiguous
as to whether the statement was ended or not.

And so, punctuation is necessary.

That started out as a fictional implementation in the turn-of-the-century webcomic User Friendly (main site died a while back, unfortunately), and then someone decided that it would be fun to implement it for real.

The one in the comic was deliberately created to be evil. Not sure about the real-world implementation.

LMDE is already on pipewire as far as I can tell. I have a process running by that name, as well as one called pipewire-pulse which I assume is providing some or all of the old pulseaudio functionality for whatever might be expecting it.

No problems I’m aware of. I thought I was having problems early last month, but that turned out to be hardware failure.

That license plate is Cyrillic, but it isn’t a recent, non-specialised Russian one. Both Greece and Russia use Latin homoglyphs (that is, letters of theirs that look like the Latin alphabet) on their plates so that tourists more familiar with the Latin alphabet can read license plates.

This plate has a Ц, which isn’t in that list.

Which leads me to wonder where it’s actually from. Specialist Russian or one of the old SSRs, maybe?

Are you sure it doesn’t work on zsh? It’s valid POSIX shell code, and like bash, zsh is a superset of POSIX, at least if I remember correctly.

This is not to goad you into destroying your filesystem. Replace the rm with something relatively harmless like echo "BANG! You're dead!" if you decide to test it.

Seems to fit. The Apple apple in the logo was rainbow-striped between 1977 and 1998.

The colours were in the order 432165 though, so an argument otherwise might be possible. Is it possible to be agy or bselnai?

(And why does that read like Hungarian? I looked it up. “agy” means “brain”. this is a deep conspiracy! ~is dragged off screaming~)

I remember a story about someone who did something similar with a server that kept hanging. They rigged up a second computer to ping it over the local network and if there was no response for a certain amount of time, the computer would eject its CD-ROM tray which had been lined up neatly with the reset button on the server.

Since it couldn’t eject fully, it then retracted, having rebooted the server.

I assume that was a temporary fix… and it was probably a Windows server tbh.

The closest I’ve done is having a job run every 12 hours checking if a process was over a certain memory usage (memory leak) and restarting it if it was. That was also Windows, but the same thing on Linux wouldn’t have been difficult… not that the Linux servers ever had that problem.

Attempting to avoid politics is itself a political stance. Enjoy your paradox, fellow lemming.

Untested partial solution that you may already have tried:

1. In the window manager’s keyboard settings, create keybinds for raising and lowering windows.

2. Create a script that uses dotool, a third party tool which can send keyboard events and mouse movements, to call the previously configured keybinds.

3. Missing bit: Figuring out whether the window is raised or lowered to know which keybind to send.

The author of dotool says that they wrote it because ydotool (the alleged successor to xdotool, I assume), needs root and a background daemon. That said, the linked page seems to indicate that dotool also needs some permissions.

I’m not affiliated with either.

Real “What does God need with a starship?” energy.

This works for those of us in GNOME and GNOME-derived places.

Seems like KDE doesn’t have anything quite so simple. A quick web search suggests the correct command is kioclientN move filename trash:/ where N is the version number of kioclient. Very verbose. Worthy of a shell alias.