It's been a while since my previous set of power consumptionnumbers for a desktop , which I made back in2011 for my 2011 home (and office) machine .This time around, I have two slightly different machines and twosets of power numbers. My office machine is aRyzen 1800X with a Radeon RX 550 graphics card; my home machine is an Intel i7-8700K using its integrated graphics.

Unless otherwise stated

It's 2018, which means that 2020's end of Python 2 support is onlytwo years away. Two years seems like a long time, but it's notreally, especially if you're not a full time developer or Pythonperson, which is our situation.One of the questions about what we have to do about our current setof Python programs boils down to the question of whether Ubuntu'svery likely April 2020 Long Term Support release

I have both an iPhone and an iPad , both of which have fingerprint basedunlocking, which I use. I interact with the iPhone sufficientlyoften that I generally unlock it multiple times a day, but forvarious reasons I use the iPad much less frequently and can evengo for a couple of days before I dig it out and poke at it.

It's been winter around here for the past while, and Toronto'swinter is dry. These days that dryness is hard on my fingers,especially the

Recently I discussed how gzip --best wasn't very fast whencompressing our Amanda (tar) backup of /var/mail ,and mentioned that we were trying out zstd for this. As it happens, as part of our research on this issue Iran one particular night's backup of our /var/mail through allof the various compressors to see how large they'd come out, andI think the numbers are usefully illustrative.

The initial uncompressed tar archive is roughly 538 GB

Go has finalizers ,which let you have some code be invoked just as an object is aboutto be garbage collected. However, plenty of people don't like themand the usual advice is to completely avoid them ( for example ). Recently,David Crawshaw wrote The Tragedy of Finalizers ( via ),in which he points out various drawbacks of finalizers and shows acase where relying on them causes failures. I more or less agreewith all of this, but at the same time, I've used

As you might have guessed from my very weak excuse in a recententry , I've been increasingly tempted toswitch my primary browser over to Firefox Quantum (from Firefox56 ). Not because I knew I had to do it sometime(although that was true), but because I genuinely wanted to berunning Quantum; the more I used it in various secondary environments,the more I was okay with it, and I have a tropism towards the newand shiny. Today I gave in to that temptation

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, we have a quite large /var/mail and we take a full backup of it every night. In orderto save space in our disk-based backup system ,for years we've been having Amanda compress these backups on theAmanda server; since we're backing up ASCII text (even if itrepresents encoded and compressed binary things), they generallycompress very well. We did this in the straightforward way; as partof our special Amanda dump type

Back in November I wrote about a systemd mistake I made with ascript-based service unit , where Ileft out some service options and got a surprise when my servicedidn't work. A commentator recently made me realize that I didn'treally understand what was going on and what had happened; instead I was working by superstition . So I've now done someexperiments and read the systemd.service manpage again, and here's what I know.

The basic situation was that I wrote a

Professor John Regehr's Closing the Loop: The Importance ofExternal Engagement in Computer Science Research is an excellent article onthe general spots where academic computer science can becomedisconnected with the real world and the engineering problems thatare found there. Since I work in academia (and have read GregWilson for some time), this is an issuerelatively near to my heart and I quite liked how he presents thingsin the article. It's a new framing of the issues, one that putsthings in a clear