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Things happen.

zev honked 10 Jun 2026 13:38 -0700

It baffles me that so many people can agree with the common understanding that symbolic constants are preferable to sprinkling numeric literals throughout their code, and yet still simultaneously somehow think that space indenting is a good idea.

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.)