If you have a traditional window manager like fvwm , one of the things it can do is iconify Xwindows so that they turn into icons on the root window (which wouldoften be called the 'desktop'). Even modern desktop environmentsthat don't iconify programs to the root window (or their desktop)may have per-program icons for running programs in their dock ortaskbar. If your window manager or desktop environment can do this,you might reasonably wonder where those icons come from by default.

In a recent entry I mentioned in passingthat I once had relatively strong feelings about Python's ' A ifCOND else B_' conditional expressions but thosehad probably faded away. In a comment, Twirrim said:

I've started to use the A if FOO else BAR syntax, much to mysurprise. In general, I hate it.

One increasingly common pattern in the code I write:

logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG if args.verbose elselogging.INFO)

(or variations

In my recent entry on a RPM name clash between grafana.com's andFedora's packaging of Grafana , Josef"Jeff" Sipek wrote in a comment:

I think that's a bit backwards. I always consider the distro as theowner of the package namespace. So, it's really up to grafana.com touse a non-colliding name.

The distro provides a self-contained ecosystem, if a 3rd party packagewants to work with it, then it should be up

One of the interesting things from Geoff Huston's DNS-OARC 30:Bad news for DANE ( via , which has usefulcomments, especially from tptacek , and seen also Against DNSSEC ) is some informationabout the churn in new domain names over the time span of a week,in a section called "The modality of mortality of domain names".I'm just going to quote the end summary, but the whole section iswell worth reading. The summary:

The majority of the short-lived

Right now I am a bit unhappy at Fedora for a specific packagingsituation, so let me tell you a little story of what I, as a systemadministrator, would really like distributions to not do.

For reasons beyond the scope of this blog entry, I run a Prometheus and Grafana setupon both my home and office Fedora Linux machines (among other things,it gives me a place to test out various things involving them).When I set this up, I used the official upstream versions of both,

A while back I wrote about when I'll probably be able to use the(then) very contentious Python assignment expressions and said in passing that I didn't haveany strong opinions on them. There was probably a time when I wouldhave felt differently; for example, I used to have relativelystrong feelings about ' A if CONDITION else B ' conditional expressions and I'm not sure I do any more, although I don'tseem to have used them yet in any recent code.

(

I'll start with my toot , slightly shornof context:

Every so often I wind up viewing a version of the web that isn'tfiltered by uBlock Origin and my 'allow basically no JS' settings (inmy default browser) and oh ow ow ow.

(But 'allow no JS' is basically the crazy person setting and it'sonly tolerable because I keep a second browser just for JS-requiredsites. Which throws away all my cookies & stuff every time it shutsdown,

On Mastodon, I said :

Our Grafana dashboards are quite shiny, at least to me (since I builtthem), but I really should start resisting the compulsive urge to takea look at them all the time just to see what's going on and look atthe pretty zigzagging lines.

I have a bad habit of looking at shiny things that I've put together,and dashboards are extremely shiny (even if some of them are almostall text ). There are two problems with this, the

On Twitter, I said some things as followon notes to how Go is Google's language, not ours :

For example, C and especially C++ are community languages and thisshows in what gets added to their standards. You can find a lot ofpeople who think that C++'s growth is not a good thing. Go is unlikelyto grow that way partly because the Go core team is willing to donothing.

There are language communities and standards committees that arewilling to do nothing