I'm currently feeling unhappy about Twitter, because last Friday Iconfirmed that my Linux Twitter client isgoing to stop working in less than two months in Twitter's clientapocalypse ( my iOS client is very likely to be affected too).This development isn't an exception; instead it's business as usualfor Twitter, at least as long term and active users of Twitter seeit. Twitter has a long history of making product changes that wedon't want and ignoring the ones that we

I've mentioned ZFS block pointers in the past; for example, when Iwrote about some details of ZFS DVAs ,I said that DVAs are embedded in block pointers. But I've neverreally looked carefully at what is in block pointers and what thatmeans and implies for ZFS.

The very simple way to describe a ZFS block pointer is that it'swhat ZFS uses in places where other filesystems would simply put ablock number. Just like block numbers but unlike things like ZFSdnodes , a block

When I wrote yesterday's entry , itbecame clear that I didn't understand as much about how ZFS isstructured on disk (and that this matters, since I thought that ZFScopy on write updates updated a lot more than they do). So todayI want to write down my new broad understanding of how this works.

(All of this can be dug out of the old, draft ZFS on-disk formatspecification , butthat spec is written in a very detailed way and things aren'

In the past, for example in my entry on how ZFS bookmarks can workwith reasonable efficiency , I have given whatI think of as the standard explanation of how ZFS's copy on writenature forces changes to things like the data in a file to rippleup all the way to the top of the ZFS hierarchy. To quote myself:

If you have an old directory with an old file and you change a blockin the old file, the immutability of ZFS means that you need to writea new version

It all started with a Reddit comment thread called The "massexodus" from Github to GitLab: 10 days later .In it, someone commented that they didn't understand why there wasa need for cloud Git services in the first place, since runningyour own Git server for your company was easy enough. I think thatpart of this view is due to the difference between 'on premise'and 'off premise' approaches to environments , but as a sysadmin I had a twitchyreaction to the '

Pete Zaitcev recently made hisprogram Slasti run underPython 3. In his LJ entry ,he said this about the work:

Overall, the biggest source of issues was not the py3 model, buttrying to make the code compatible. I'm not going to do that again ifI can help it: either py2 or py3, but not both.

For all that I've had plenty of issues with Python 3, I wholeheartedlyagree with Pete Zaitcev's view here; it's

Almost five years ago, I wrote Reversing my view on Python 3 fornew general code: avoid it (which Pete Zaitcev recently reminded me about ). I have now reversedmy views once again and now I feel that you should definitely usePython 3 for new code. There are three reasons for this, two positiveand one negative.

The first positive reason is that the current Python 3 ecosystemis generally vibrant and alive, unlike the state (almost) five yearsago. With Python 3 having become a success

This is a saga. You can skip to the end for the actual answer if you'reimpatient.

Yesterday I wrote about the history of terminating the X serverwith Ctrl + Alt + Backspace .I've known about this feature for a long time, but I only wind upusing it very occasionally, even for Cinnamon on my laptop . This infrequent usage explains how I onlyrecently noticed that it had stopped working on my office machine.When I read the Xorg manpage foranother reason recently, I stumbled

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry ,today I feel like writing down a broad and simplified overview of howmodern Linux systems boot. Due to being a sysadmin who has stubbed histoe here repeatedly, I'm going to especially focus on points of failure.

1. The system loads and starts the basic bootloader somehow, through eitherBIOS MBR booting or UEFI. This can involve many steps on its ownand any number of things can go wrong, such as unsigned UEFIbootloaders on a Secure Boot system .Generally these