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Things happen.

zev honked 31 May 2026 20:32 -0700

I keep a dedicated, well-backed-up filesystem for relatively important documents of (at least potential) long-term significance -- mortgage, tax records, job contracts, etc. (This is not terribly noteworthy.)

Anyway, recent events have precipitated some somewhat memorable entries in my shell history:

$ cd ~/docs
$ mkdir -p kids/kid0

(A more conventional name for the latter will probably be chosen in a few months.)

zev honked back 25 Apr 2026 00:09 -0700
in reply to: https://social.treehouse.systems/users/whitequark/statuses/116462357423970287

@whitequark @baloo @be0ba Not exactly the same board, but for another Supermicro of (I think) a similar vintage, there's some info on finding the BMC's UART pins here: https://github.com/Keno/bmcnonsense/blob/master/blog/03-serial2.md

And for another tool recommendation, I'll suggest @arj's culvert -- not for any one specific thing offhand, but a very useful general-purpose "doing horrible things to Aspeed BMCs" Swiss army knife (usable without a bootable host via the Aspeed debug UART interface).

zev honked 22 Apr 2026 22:01 -0700

Sad to say farewell to The Bad Plus, but glad I was able to catch the final tour.

The Bad Plus performing on stage

zev honked 24 Mar 2026 13:37 -0700

Ways to make a software-rendered (on-screen) digital clock terrible:

  • use a proportional-width font
  • anchor to the right edge
  • display seconds

The combination of all three is both (a) something I've now encountered multiple times in the last 24 hours, and (b) worthy of a lengthy prison sentence.

zev honked back 18 Mar 2026 13:59 -0700
in reply to: https://mastodon.social/users/cks/statuses/116246807253993790

@cks @mhoye

There's no polite general way to ask a process to terminate

Is that not what SIGTERM is? (I suppose it could be argued that a signal that defaults to immediate termination isn't entirely "polite", but hopefully a program that would actually be sensitive to such impoliteness would install a handler for it to do appropriate things before exiting.)

you can only easily find out about a child ending if you're its parent.

In terms of portable mechanisms yes, though on a reasonably recent Linux you can use poll(2) or the like on a a pidfd for a non-child process.

(Offhand I don't know of any existing tools that expose pidfds in a shell-convenient way, but if someone were sufficiently desperate I expect a bash extension loaded via enable -f could probably do it in a reasonably ergonomic fashion.)