When I started writing my entry on why it matters that map valuesare unaddressable in Go , I expected to endit with a remark to the effect that I didn't understand why the Go authors had put this restriction in thespecification but they probably had good reasons. But by the timeI finished writing the entry, I had realized the language semanticsproblem of allowing ' m["nosuchkey"] ' to be addressable. Then laterwhen I looked up how Go maps store their values (and keys)

Over on Twitter, I said something :

Hot take: YAML isn't a configuration language or a configurationlanguage format, it's a serialization format. Is de-serializingsome data structures the best way to configure a program? Maybenot. (Probably not. Mostly not.)

Like programming languages, all configuration systems communicatewith both the computer and other people. But most are designedonly for the computer to consume, not to be clear when people readit. De-serializing your live data structures

In a comment on my entry on maybe avoiding flapping alerts , antiphase brought up the conceptof a deadband , althoughwhat I'm going to talk about might be considered hysteresis instead. Put informally, the idea isthat you have a different threshold for turning an alert on and forturning it off. For example, you could trigger an alert when some_metric went over a value of 1000, but not turn the alertoff until the value fell below 900. This band where the

I use Vim a fair bit, but most of the time I'm merely doing ordinarytext entry, predominantly in insert mode. At the same time, I amnot the world's best typist (my Delete key gets a good workout).One of my long-standing Vim experiences is that I will be typingalong, happily entering text, and then I will do something andsuddenly I will have a jumble of unwanted text and text changes.

(This is different from the classical Vi experience where

One of the things I wish about Prometheus and Alertmanager is thatthey had better and more accessible support for avoiding flappingalerts. Flapping alerts are alerts that (if written naturally)stutter back and forth between being on and being off. One naturalway to get a stuttering alert is to write a simple, natural PromQLalert rule expression like:

expr: some_metric > 1000

If the metric is hovering just around 1000, sometimes above andsometimes below, this alert will turn on and

I try not to mis-use terms when I write entries here on WanderingThoughts , so when I had an entry where I was planning touse the term "hysteresis", I decided to actually look up its realmeaning first. That was a good thing because it turns out its actualdefinition is not quite what I thought (and I would probably havemis-used it). Let's start with the simple definition from Wikipedia's"hysteresis" entry :

Hysteresis is the dependence of the state

One of my core Firefox addons is uMatrix , which Iuse as my primary tool for blocking Javascript and other annoyances.When I most recently wrote about my Firefox addons back at the end of February, people commented to note that uMatrixdevelopment has stopped ( eg , also ). At the time Iexpressed hopes that uMatrix would keep on working despite this asFirefox evolved, because for me it seems to basically work fine inits current state. However, it recently turned out that uMatrix isnot quite as dead as

Recently, a problem report on the fvwm mailing list caused me to discover that Vim can react to losing orgaining X keyboard focus, through automatic commands (specifically FocusGained and FocusLost ).I'm sorry, did I say that Vim did that? Well, Vim does, but Vimisn't working alone; the venerable X terminal emulator xterm is apartner in this. Xterm, it turns out, can basically pass through alot of X events to "terminal" programs running inside it, including FocusIn

Over on Twitter, I had a little exchange:

@thatcks :Another day, another new vanity TLD that I'm never accepting emailfrom (because of spam, of course; the dominant use of vanity TLDs inemail senders is for spam).

@MrDOS :This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, though: by denying legitimate mailfrom these TLDs, you're guaranteeing that no one will ever be able usethese TLDs for legitimate mail.

@thatcks :When the spammers get there first, the