Manish Goregaokar's Let's Stop Ascribing Meaning to Code Points starts out with this:

I've seen misconceptions about Unicode crop up regularly in postsdiscussing it. One very common misconception I've seen is that codepoints have cross-language intrinsic meaning .

He goes on to explain the ways that this is dangerous and how tangledthis area of Unicode is. I knew little bits of this already, butapparently combining characters are only the tip of the iceberg.

( via , and seealso .)

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I'm probably going tobuild a new home machine this year, finally replacing my currentvintage 2011 machine . As part of this(and part of motivating me into doing it), I'm going to persuademyself to finally get a high-resolution display, probably a 27" 4Kmonitor such as the Dell P2715Q. Now, I would like this hypotheticalnew machine to drive this hypothetical 4K+

It started on Twitter:

@tobyhede :What git feature would you show someone who has used source control(but not git) that would blow their mind?

@thatcks :Sysadmins: git bisect. People w/ local changes: rebase. Devs:partial/selective commits & commit reordering.

Given that at different times I fall into all three of these groups,I kind of cheated in my answer. But I'll stand by it anyways, andsince Twitter forces a distinct terseness on things, I'

I have an awkward confession. Until Aneurin Price mentioned it inhis comment on my entry on ' zpool history -i ' ,I had no idea that the internal, per-pool history log that zpoolhistory uses has a size limit. I thought that perhaps the size andvolume of events was small enough that ZFS just kept everything,which is silly in retrospect. This unfortunately means that thelong-term 'strategic' use of zpool history that I talked aboutin my first entry has potentially significantlimits,

My entry on web adblockers and the Usenet killfile problem sparked a discussion on lobste.rs ,and as part of that discussion I came to an obvious in retrospectrealization about why adblockers are so effective and are going to staythat way. Namely, it's because of the needs of modern ad networks.

The modern ad-laden web page is assembled on the fly in the browser,through a variety of methods for getting client-side included content;JavaScript, embedded iframes, images loaded from outside domains,

I recently wrote a little thing praising zpool history . At the time I wrote that, I hadn't reallyread the manpage carefully enough to have noticed an importantadditional feature, which is zpool history 's -i argument (and -l as well, sometimes). To quote the manpage, -i 'displaysinternally logged ZFS events in addition to user initiated events'.What this means in plain language is that ' zpool history -i ' showsyou a lot of what happened to your pool no

Once I worked out how to make xterm show Chinese, Japanese, andKorean characters , I had to figureout what font to use. I discussed the general details of usingFontConfig to hunt for CJK fonts in that entry , so now let's get down to details.

The Arch Linux xterm example uses 'WenQuanYiBitmap Song' as its example CJK font. This is from the Wen QuanYi font collection , andthey're available for Fedora in a collection of wqy-*-fonts packages.So

For a long time, my setup of xterm has not displayed Chinese andJapanese characters (or Korean ones, although I encounter thoseless often). Until recently it displayed the Unicode 'no suchcharacter' empty box in their place, which was okay and told methat there were problems, but after my upgrade to Fedora 25 itstarted showing spaces instead (or at least some form of whitespace).This is just enough extra irritation that I've been pushed intofiguring out how to fix it.

One of the common models for handling asynchronous IO is what I'llcall the queued IO model, where you put all of your IO operationsin some sort of a queue and then as things become ready, the OScompletes various ones and hands them back to you. Sometimes thisqueue is explicitly exposed and sometimes, as in Go, the queue isimplicit in a collection of threads all doing (what they see as)blocking IO operations. The queued IO model is generally simpleand attractive, either in threaded