Over time, I've noticed that I seem to have a relatively differentexperience of programming than many people do (or at least thepeople who write articles that show up in my Internet reading). Ithink that part of this difference can be attributed to me workingon a different sort of code than most people. To explain that, let'stalk about a split (that is really a continuum) between two sortsof code, product code and utility code .

Product code is what you use to

Somewhat recently we ran into an interestingly tangled issue around /etc/mailcap and MIME handlers on ourUbuntu 18.04 user login machines, one of those situations wherethere seem to be multiple problems that when combined together leadto an undesirable result. What happened is that we installed the docx2txt Ubuntu package afterit was requested by someone, but then found that this broke at least exmh 's ability to display MS Office'docx' file attachments. However, the interesting story is why.

As

At work, I have dual displays on my office desktop , specifically two Dell U2412M monitors(which are 24" diagonal with 1920 x 1200 resolution). This givesme a lot of space to work in, and lets me do things like have afull sized Grafana dashboard on theleft one while carpeting the right one with windows that areinvestigating the problems shown on the dashboard. Of course, given world and local events I'mnot at work

A while back I wrote an entry on how GMail hadn't been doing fullTLS server certificate verification when fetching mail from remotePOP servers . GMail may have verified thatthe POP server's TLS certificate was properly signed by a CA, but it didn't check the server name, which is the second part ofserver verification . This is not safe ingeneral ( even if you verify the IP address ),but Google (and GMail) aren't everyone and they sit in a very specialposition

Sometimes you notice things only when you don't have them. At workI have a dual display setup on my work desktop (arranged horizontally),but I only have a single display at home (mostly for space reasons).One of the differences I've noticed in how I use my screen spaceis that dual displays provide a natural division and split betweenthings , because of the literal physical split between the twodisplays.

(I've been noticing this lately because I'm working from home

Recently I read about how Fedora will be enabling 'swap on zram' , including forupgraded machines, in a future version of Fedora. I suspect that asimilar change may some day come to Ubuntu as well, because it'san attractive feature from some perspectives. My feelings are a bitmore mixed.

Zram is a dynamically sizedcompressed block device in RAM (ie a compressed ramdisk); 'swap onzram' is using a zram device as a swap device (or as your sole swapdevice)

Recently I was reading Kev Quirk's Centralisation and Mastodon ( via ), whichnotes how central Mastodon.social and a few other big instances are to the overall Fediverse, makingit hardly a decentralized network in practice. The article concludeswith a call to action:

If you’re thinking about joining Mastodon, don’t just join thefirst instance you come across. Take a look at the sign up section of the Mastodon homepage . There is a list[of] alternative instances that you can join,

Go has a generally well regarded time package. One of the things it can do is parse a string representationof a time based on a specification of the time format, using time.Parse() ; for example,to parse times like "Sat Mar 7 11:06:39 PST 2015" or "Sat, 07 Mar2015 11:06:39 -0800" (which are in Unix date format and 'RFC

System administrators are famously reluctant to change anythingunless they have to; once a system works, they like to freeze itthat way and not touch it. This is sometimes written off as irrationalover-concern, and to be honest sometimes it is; you can make afetish out of anything . However, it isn'tjust superstition and fetish. We can say general things like ongood systems, you control stability by controlling changes and note that harmless changes aren'talways actually harmless , but surely if