Dmenu is hard to describe.It's often called a 'dynamic menu'; at a technical level it's a popup text entry widget with autocompletion (with what it autocompletestaken from standard input) that prints your entered (or autocompleted)text to standard output. I've been using dmenu for quite a while and as part of that I've built an elaborate setuparound it. One of the things my dmenu does is run commands, andpart of my setup is that I invoke

These days, YAML is used as the configuration file format for anincreasing amount of systems that I need to set up and operate for work . I have my issues withYAML in general ( 1 , 2 ),but in the process of writing configuration files for programs thatuse YAML, I've found an entirely practical one, which I will summarizethis way: a YAML schema description is not actually documentationfor a system's configuration file .

It's entirely possible to write good documentation for a configuration

One of the things that I use Linux libvirt for is a collection ofvirtual machines that I only NAT onto the network, instead of givingthem their own distinct public IPs. When I first set this up, Ididn't do anything special to give these NAT VMs consistent IPs orany names at all, which made it a bit annoying when I wanted to SSHin to one (most of them are Fedora VMs, so I can actually do that).Eventually I went through the effort to set up

Once upon a time, there was a straightforward good way of displayingthings like alerts over time or health check failures over time inGrafana, as I wrote about in How I'm visualizing health checkhistory in Grafana . Unfortunately Grafanabroke the (once) very nice Discrete panel starting in 8.4,either through an unfixed bug or through an incompatible API change(in a minor release). As of the current Grafana 9.3.1 (as I writethis), I've managed to

One of the Go programs I keep around is gops , which I find handy for seeing ifI'm using outdated binaries of Go programs that I should rebuild(for example, locally built Prometheus exporters). I have a script that updates and rebuilds all of mycollection of Go programs, gops included, with the latest Gotip build (and the latest version of their code). Recently, rebuilding gops has been failing with an error:

go/pkg/mod/github.com/google/gops

One of the ever popular ideas for a 'better Internet' (or a betterservice of some sort) brought up by potentially well intentionedpeople is that you should have to use your real name instead of anypseudonym. There are many, many problems with this idea and you canfind it thoroughly answered (and debunked) in various places. Butrecently on the Fediverse I had an additional thought about it :

One of the not 100% obvious problems of a genuinely enforced "realnames only" policy

Over on the Fediverse, I said :

Small Prometheus thing I am happy about: the latest version of the Blackbox exporter now has a'probe_dns_query_succeeded' metric, so you can tell thedifference between 'the DNS server isn't talking to me' and 'the DNSserver sent me an answer without the data I was looking for' (or just'an answer that was fail/go away').

Now I get to (probably) change and update some of our

Many Unix shells have some command line argument that tells themthat they are a login shell; for example, Bash has '-l' (also'--login'), and I think that '-l' has become the de facto standard.However, this argument is not how Unix programs like sshd and login actually tell your shell that it's a login shell; instead,for a long time, a login shell has a ' - ' as the first characterof its program name ,

Recently I ran across a Python program we're interested in , and discoveredthat it required prometheus-client . Normally this wouldmean creating a virtual environment and installing the module intoit, possibly along with the program (although you don't have toput the program inside the venv it uses ).But when I looked out of curiosity, I saw that Ubuntu packages thismodule, which got me to thinking.

I'm generally a sceptic of relying on the Ubuntu packaged versionof a Python module (