HTTP headers that tell syndication feed fetchers how soon to come back
Programs that fetch syndication feeds should fetch them only everyso often. But how often? There are a variety of ways to communicatethis, and for my own purposes I want to gather them in one place.
I'll put the summary up front. For Atom syndication feeds, yourHTTP feed responses should contain a Cache-Control: max-age=... HTTP header that gives your desired retry interval (in seconds),such as '3600' for pulling the feed once an
Mapping from total requests per day to average request rates
Suppose, not hypothetically, that a single IP address with a singleUser-Agent has made 557 requests for your blog 's syndicationfeed in about 22 and a half hours ( most of which were rate-limitedand got HTTP 429 replies ). If wegenerously assume that these requests were distributed evenly overone day (24 hours), what was the average interval between requests(the rate of requests)? The answer is easy enough to work out andit's about
In GNU Emacs, I should remember that the basics still work
Over on the Fediverse, I said something that has a story attached :
It sounds obvious to say it, but I need to remember that I can alwaysswitch buffers in GNU Emacs by just switching buffers, not by using,eg, the MH-E commands to switch (back) to another folder. The MH-Ecommands quite sensibly do additional things, but sometimes I don'twant them.
GNU Emacs has a spectrum of things that range from assistingyour conventional editing (such as LSP clients)
Some thoughts on Ubuntu automatic ('unattended') package upgrades
The default behavior of a stock Ubuntu LTS server install is thatit enables 'unattended upgrades', by installing the packageunattended-upgrades (which creates /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades,which controls this). Historically, we haven't believed in unattended automatic package upgrades and eventually built a complex semi-automated upgrades system (which has various special features ). In theory this has various potentialadvantages; in practice it mostly results in package upgrades beingapplied after
I wish Firefox had some way to permanently mute a website
Over on the Fediverse, I had a wish :
My kingdom for a way to tell Firefox to never, ever play audioand/or video for a particular site. In other words, a permanent andpersistent mute of that site. AFAIK this is currently impossible.
( For reasons , I cannot setmedia.autoplay.blocking_policy to 2 generally. I could if Firefoxhad a 'all subdomains of ...' autoplay permission, but it doesn't,again AFAIK.)
(This is
Argparse will let you have multiple long (and short) options for one thing
Argparse is thestandard Python module for handling (Unix style) command lineoptions, in the expected way (which not all languages follow ).Or at least more or less the expected way; people are periodicallysurprised that by default argparse allows you to abbreviate longoptions (although you can safelyturn that off if you assume Python 3.8 or later and you remember this corner case).
What I think of as the typical language API for specifying shortand long options allows you to specify (at most)
You can only customize GNU Emacs so far due to primitives
GNU Emacs is famous as an editor written largely in itself, well,in Emacs Lisp, with a C core for some central high performancethings and things that have to be done in C (called ' primitives 'in Emacs jargon). It's perhaps popular to imagine that the overallstructure of this is that the C parts of GNU Emacs expose a minimaland direct API that's mostly composed of primitive operations, sothat as much of Emacs as possible can be implemented in Emacs Lisp.Unfortunately,
The Bash Readline bindings and settings that I want
Normally I use Bash (and Readline in general) in my own environment,where I have a standard .inputrc set up to configure things to myliking (although it turns out that one particular setting doesn'twork now (and may never have), and I didn't notice). However,sometimes I wind up using Bash in foreign environments, for exampleif I'm su'd to root at the moment, and when that happens thedifferences can be things that I get annoyed by
Why Wandering Thoughts has fewer comment syndication feeds than yesterday
Over on the Fediverse I said :
My techblog used to offer Atom syndication feeds for the commentson individual entries. I just turned that off because it turns outto be a bad idea on the modern web when you have many years ofentries. There are (were) any number of 'people' (feed things) thatadded the comment feeds for various entries years ago and then nevertook them out, despite those entries being years old and in some casesnever having gotten comments in the first place.
Giving up on Android devices using IPv6 on our general-access networks
We have a couple of generalpurpose, general access networks that anyone can use to connecttheir devices to; one is a wired network (locally, it's called our'RED' network after the colour of the networkcables used for it), and the other is a departmental wireless networkthat's distinct from the centrally run university-wide network.However, both of these networks have a requirement that we needto be able to more or less identify who is responsible for a machineon them .