Work

What do I do, when I don’t understand the vagaries of tech? Why? I ask my friends to drum some sense into me. As I write more code, I wanted to get some sense of the cultural norms about how to use git. So I asked my young friends, Nabarun and Sayan all sorts of dumbass questions. Here it is, warts and all for posterity (but lightly edited). If you’d love to come teach me or be part of the conversation, head on over to the IRC #learnandteach channel on the freenode server. ...

Since I am a little out of sorts today, I decided to clean up the subscriptions options on the site. Both the mail and the rss feeds are on one page now. For easy findability1. The feeds are also categorised into work and personal, if that’s your jam. Here ya go! Subscribe! Yes, that is the technical term for it. Yes, of course I made it up. This is my domain. I get to make up everything around here! ↩︎ ...

Listening to me bitch and moan about the new direction CentOS, CentOS Stream, is now going in, someone sent me this post to tell me why this was a good thing. It’s a lovely post and I agree with most everything the author says. But I do believe, he talks past the main reason folks like me use CentOS. (and the main reason, Rocky Linux now exists.) CentOS came into existence because sci/tech folk wanted a base to build on and became popular, because old harried sysadmins like me wanted to support small shops, who did not have the budget to run servers and wanted to get out of the ever tightening thumb of Microsoft. ...

That long winded message was what greeted me this morning when I did my morning update the computer routine. E: linux-firmware: installed linux-firmware package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 2 Nothing like a bug that sticks in your craw and prevents you from starting the day. And then leads you down that crazy path of figuring out what the error is. And then going down the rabbit hole of realising that this error happened because that went wrong. And then tracking it all down. And then going batshit crazy. And then trying to figure whether updating Linux was a good thing to do in the first place. And then wondering if even installing it was a good thing? And then questioning your life choices in general. ...

*Update: 15/01/2021. It’s done. I moved everything and it all seems to be working. If something is broken, let me know, on [the fediverse][cbj], or mailing me at jason at this domain. To my tech posse, no there is no forwarding of old links happening. The site is too small and I have no time. Nobody is going to miss this. And to that one little friend, who noticed that the site was dead and actually cried, I love you.* Happy New Year and welcome to the first newsletter of the year :) ...

Whenever Emacs saves a file, it makes a backup of the original. So if I had a file.txt and I make changes and save it, Emacs firsts backs up the original to file.txt~. While I love this functionality, and it has saved me from a pickle more than once, I don’t love the way my folders get polluted with ~ files all over the place. My blog’s drafts folder had hundreds of these. ...