My back hurts typing this, but… back when I was young there was a whole community called the “scene” to explore just that question. The demoscene is still alive, but it’s perhaps a little more mainstream and “clean” than it used to be? Anyway, people are still cranking out awesome demos that explores the question: what can we do with programming? There are tons of YouTube videos of demos, old and new, but here is a video that talks about the scene and the history behind it.

Immediately made me think of Betteridge’s law of headlines.

I will remain cautiously optimistic but until it makes it through Supreme Court it’s not a done deal.

For real, is they had one of those guys they have at football games walking up and down the line of cars with a tray of snacks, they would make a killing.

In the morning I think people are too much in a rush, but it’s always congested so maybe.

I wonder what the sampling/reporting issue is? Why Chinese specifically? Are there droves of Chinese gamers flip-flopping between Linux and Windows? That doesn’t seem likely.

Two ways I’ve handled this. If you have some orchestrator, like kubernetes, you can use the job feature to retry. In that case you just let the script exit with error status.

If we’re staying with just cron and shell scripts, look at using flock(1) with timeout in a bash script (example). You can create a lock to prevent multiple copies running and it cleans up automatically. You can combine this with time-stamped files to enforce a minimum amount of time since last run, or whatever you like.

I prefer having the retry handled outside the job itself, but I’ve used both approaches. I’ve grown to prefer separating the code for “doing the thing” from the code for “orchestrating the thing”, but it depends on what environment it runs in, how critical it is, and how who else may be supporting it.

Finally, set up something to monitor it and alert you if it hasn’t run successfully for some time.

Two reasons I can think of it being age related, though I think it’s pretty common at any age:

1. Cognition and short term memory isn’t what it used to be, and saying things out loud helps
2. With age you stop giving a fuck what people around you think (source: self)

Fail2ban is just another tool in your toolbox. Defense in depth, as others mentioned.

Fail2ban is primarily a tool to prevent brute force attacks, especially useful for services that don’t do their own throttling. For example I usually put ssh in fail2ban, but if Authelia’s built-in protection is good enough, then use that.

Outside ssh, anything that could be used to brute force credentials should be in fail2ban if they’re exposed: web sites with simple auth, mail, etc.

They should add a word salad for a complete meal.

This is the first time I’ve heard of siphon jet backup pumps. That looks like a really great option and I wish I had known about those years ago when I put in my own battery backup.

Yes, but Perl 5 did not, except for constant functions. Either way, the effect of that was outweighed by several orders of magnitude by the rest of the WTFs in that code.

All that is a bit beside the point I was trying to make, which is write readable code.

Use your own judgement to find a balance between readability and performance. Use profiling tools to find hotspots where performance is a concern and optimize those. Base your practices on evidence not dogma.

Yeah there is some overhead with a function call, but for our use case (low-traffic web and batch jobs) that wasn’t a big deal. And the rest of their code wasn’t exactly tuned for performance either.

Yes, it was the dogmatic approach to it that was the most infuriating.

I once, many years ago, worked with a programmer who had a strict rule of not introducing any functions unless the block of code was used at least twice.

Every code base they were the main developer on had source files thousands of lines long with if-statements nested to the 9 levels of hell.

We worked mostly in Perl and Deplhi (Pascal). Reading old code was… interesting. It’s wild when your Perl code is more readable than your Pascal.

I’m happy to say I don’t work with them anymore.

So yeah, break things into functions and name your functions and variables sensibly. Your future self will thank you.

The “what about second breakfast” meme comes to mind. Thanks for clearing that up!

My guess is that it changed from open source to a proprietary license. From Wikipedia:

Initially, Paint.NET was released under a modified version of the MIT License, with the exclusion of the installer, text, and graphics.[9] However, citing issues with the open source code being plagiarized by others that had rebranded the software as their own and bundled user content without their permission, the availability of the source code was restricted, in December 2007 Brewster announced his intent to restrict access to components of the program (including its installer, resources, and user interface).[10] In November 2009, the software was made proprietary, restricting the sale or creation of derivative works of the software.[10][11]

Yeah that’s my guess at well. Before I figured it out, I used a VPN connection into my local network (which works through hairpin NAT). I’m not a security expert, but that may be more secure than granting the permissions wholesale.

I had this happen too recently and only for certain apps. Turned out Android has a new permission that was being enforced: “Nearby devices”. Once I granted that to my browser, it could access my LAN again.

Just finished mowing in 75% humidity 75⁰F weather here. I hate the humidity more than the heat. I don’t understand how people survive on the Gulf Coast.

I think it’s fair to want a more helpful error message, but that’s not necessarily the purpose for path. There is a real cost to every entry in your $PATH. Not as much as in the world of spinning rust, but some.

There are some completion modules for shells that will suggest misspelled or even installable packages if it can’t find the command. Those are arguably better options.

As for traditional systems, I remember a time where running arbitrary commands, even with an --help argument could be dangerous and we had to set least try ‘man command’ first.

I thought this was how unix always has been? Sbin is for root binaries. It doesn’t make sense to include a bunch of commands you don’t have permission to execute in the path. I remember this being the case back in the 90s and didn’t realize it was no longer the norm.

That’s like saying you turn your space heater off. Literally.

Out of curiosity: how much power does consumen on average?