For all of the time so far that I've been poking at Python's typechecking, I've known that there was more than one program for typechecking but I've basically ignored that and used mypy . My understanding was that mypy was thefirst Python type checker and the only fully community-based one,with the other type checkers the product of corporations and sometimesat least partially tied to things like Microsoft's efforts to geteveryone hooked on VSCode, and I assumed that the type

OpenTelemetry ('OTel') is one of thecurrent in things in the broad metrics and monitoring space. As Iunderstand it, it's fundamentally a set of standards (ie, specifications)for how things can emit metrics, logs, and traces; the intendedpurpose is (presumably) so that people writing programs can stophaving to decide if they expose Prometheus format metrics, or Influxformat metrics, or statsd format metrics, or so on. They expose onestandard format, OpenTelemetry, and then everything

We mostly run systems, notapplications, due to our generally different system administrationenvironment . Many organizationsinstead run applications. Although these applications may be hostedon some number of systems, the organizations don't care about thesystems, not really; they care about how the applications work (andthe systems only potentially matter if the applications haveproblems). It's my increasing feeling that this has created differencesin the general field of monitoring such systems (as well as alerting ), which is a potential issue

This is a companion to my entry on the types of TLS seen forincoming email ; this is for May 2025because that's when the data I'm using comes from. This data coversnine days and about 12,800 external mail deliveries that originatedfrom people (instead of from things like mail forwarding), and I'mgoing to be rounding numbers off for my own reasons.

Of those external deliveries, almost all of them used some form ofTLS; basically

Back in April 2023 I did some statistics on what versions of TLSour external SMTP email gateway was seeing .Today, for reasons outside of the scope of this entry, I feel likerevisiting those numbers to show how things have changed (somewhat).As with the first set of numbers , thesecover the previous nine days of data to us , a fairly large computer sciencedepartment in a fairly large university.

(Conveniently, our external SMTP gateway is still running Ubuntu22.04,

When I wrote about the length of file names in early Unix , I noted that inode numbers were unsigned16-bit integers and thus you could only have at most 65,536 inodesin any given filesystem. Over on the Fediverse, JdeBP correctlynoted that I had an off by one error . The original Unixdirectory entry format used a zero inode number to mark deletedentries, which meant that you couldn't actually use inode zero foranything (not even the root directory of the filesystem

Recently I read a lobste.rs comment on one of my recent entries that said, in part:

Repeat after me everyone: the problem with these scrapers is notthat they scrape for LLM’s, it’s that they are ill-mannered to thepoint of being abusive . LLM’s have nothing to do with it.

This may be some people's view but it is not mine. For me, blockingweb scrapers here on Wandering Thoughts is partly aneditorial decision of whether I want any

At this point we've been running Grafana for quite some time ( sincelate 2018 ), and (Grafana) Loki for rather less time and on a moread-hoc and experimental basis. However, over time both have become'legacy software' here , by whichI mean that we (I) have frozen their versions and don't update themany more, and we (I) mostly or entirely don't touch their configurationsany more (including, with Grafana, building

I recently read Michael Stapelberg's My 2025 high-end Linux PC .One of the decisions Stapelberg made was choosing an Intel (desktop)CPU because of better (ie lower) idle power draw. This is a perfectlyrational decision to make, one with good reasoning behind it, andalso as I read the article I realized that it was one I wouldn'thave made. Not because I don't value idle power draw; like Stapelberg'smachine but more so, my