The AMD Ryzen 1800X in my work machine and the Intel Core i7-8700K in my home machine are both 95 watt TDP processors. Before I started measuring thingswith the actual hardware, I would have confidently guessed thatthey would have almost the same thermal load and power draw, andthat the impact of a 95W TDP CPU over a 65W TDP CPU would be clearlyobvious (you can see traces of this in my earlier entry on myhardware

I was recently considering a shell script where I might want tofeed a Bourne shell 'here document' to a shell pipeline.This is certainly possible and years ago I wrote an entry on therules for combining things with here documents ,where I carefully wrote down how to do this and the general ruleinvolved. This time around, I realized that I wanted to use a muchsimpler and more straightforward approach, one that is obviouslycorrect and is going to be clear to everyone. Namely, putting theproduction of

Jeffery Kegler's Parsing: a timeline ( via ) is what it says onthe title; it's an (opinionated) timeline of various developmentsin computer language parsing. There are a number of fascinatingparts to it and many bits of history that I hadn't known and I'mglad to have read about. Among other things, this timeline discussesall of the things that aren't actually really solved problems inparsing, which is informative all by itself.

(I've been exposed

In a comment on my entry on finalizers in Go ,Aneurin Price asked:

So there's no deterministic way to execute some code when an objectgoes out of scope? Does Go at least have something like Python's"with" statement? [...]

For those who haven't seen it, the Python with statement is usedlike this:

with open("output.txt", "w") as fp:    ... do things with fp ...# fp

I've been using xterm for a very long time, but I'm also awarethat it's not a perfect terminal emulator (especially in today'sUnicode world, my hacks notwithstanding ).Years ago I wrote up what I wanted added to xterm ,and the recommendation I've received over the years (both on thatentry and elsewhere) is for urxvt (aka rxvt-unicode ). I've made offand on experiments with urxvt , but for various reasons I'verecently

When I talked about my new home machine , Imentioned that I wasn't even trying to use UEFI on it after myexperiences with my work machine , fundamentallybecause Grub2's UEFI setup makes an unfortunate configuration choice.Today I'm going to talk about what that choice is and why it's anunfortunate one, at least for people like me (and for people withservers).

Put simply, it's that the UEFI Grub2 requires you to put grub.cfg in the

Our IMAP server has never been entirely fast, and over the yearsit has slowly gotten slower and more loaded down. Why this was soseemed reasonably obvious to us; handling mail over IMAP requireda fair amount of network bandwidth and a bunch of IO (often randomIO) to our NFS fileservers , andthere was only so much of that to go around. Things were gettingslowly worse over time because more people were reading and storingmore mail, while the hardware wasn't changing.

We have a long

When I started out with PCs, you needed a bunch of expansion cardsto make them do anything particularly useful. In the era of my firsthome PC, almost all I used on the motherboard was the CPU and thememory; graphics, sound, Ethernet (if applicable to you), and evena good disk controller were add-on cards. As a result, selecting amotherboard often involved carefully counting how many slots yougot and what types they were, to make sure you had enough for whatyou

I recently wrote about whether Ubuntu 20.04 will include Python2 , and threw in a sidebar about it in RHEL8. Thanks to comments from Twirrim and Seth (on this entry ), I then found out that Red Hat has recentlyannounced that they won't won't be including Python 2 in Red HatEnterprise Linux 8 .This is in a way very useful to know, because we'd like to buildsome systems with RHEL 8 in the not too distant future if we can