@ndw@mastodon.social
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

ndw

@ndw@mastodon.social

By way of #introduction, I'm an inveterate hacker of markup (XML, HTML, SGML, TeX, JSON, DocBook, RELAX NG, XML Schema, Schematron) and wrangler of bits (XProc, XSLT, XQuery, Java, Scala, Python, JavaScript, C#). Author. Photographer. Occasional cook. Frequent bottle washer. Employed by Saxonica. Resident of Wales. Website tinkerer, https://norm.tovey-walsh.com/

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ndw, to random
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So, I put some code in a private repository on GitHub. Then Microsoft slurps it up and shoves it into their steaming pile of whatever they call it. Later, someone asks a question and they get a (maybe useful) slug of my code without any credit or respect for my privacy. Is that about right?

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

It's really frustrating because GitHub is a decent enough UX for git and most developers are familiar with it. From a business model perspective, I'd pay for a "clean" service, but (a) now that they've figured out how to make me the product, there's no incentive for them to offer that service and (b) I wouldn't trust them anyway because there's no practical way to audit what they do.

ndw, to random
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

If you publish a software product on the web, is it necessary/reasonable/unnecessary/silly to publish the MD5 hashes of the download artifacts? If it's some flavor of reasonable to do so, what's the right way to go about it? Putting the hashes in web pages on the same server seems somewhat incautious.

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@Paxxi Verification, mostly.

ndw, to photography
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

Our Christmas cactus decided to have a spring fling!

https://so.nwalsh.com/2023/04/29/100614

debcha, to random
@debcha@mastodon.social avatar

TIL: lace cards

It’s a computer punch card with every possible spot punched out, so what remains is a flimsy filamentous net of paper that instantly tears and jams up the card reader.

Old-school denial of service attack.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lace_card

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@stuartyeates @beet_keeper @debcha I've read this thread a couple of times and I'm not sure I fully understand what's being attempted. You can match both entity declarations and entity references with regular expressions, but I'm not sure it's going to be practical to try to do both at the same time.

CerstinMahlow, to random German
@CerstinMahlow@mastodon.acm.org avatar

I'm at a CS workshop and I'm the only one with #stickers on her laptop. Like, honestly? Am I just old?

On the other hand, most of the audience looks like half my age anyway

#GenX #WritingResearch

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@docum3nt @CerstinMahlow Bah, humbug. A laptop without stickers is unprofessionally naked in public.

mjgardner, (edited ) to programming
@mjgardner@social.sdf.org avatar

This is hilarious. A #Google engineer invented #zx to make command line scripting easier with #NodeJS, because at a certain point #shell scripts get too complicated and you need a Real #Programming Language.

https://github.com/google/zx/

This is exactly #Perl’s use case from thirty-six years ago. But the kids want #JavaScript everywhere and would rather it take more work to convert their ascended #Bash scripts to a vastly different syntax.

https://github.com/google/zx/issues/581#issuecomment-1516573139

#Unix #Linux #ProgrammingLanguages

ndw,
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@mjgardner What if #Perl, but worse?

ndw,
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@mjgardner That's appalling.

ndw,
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@mjgardner And for the record, I say that as a #Perl fan. It was my goto scripting language for a lot of years. I've mostly moved to Python, mostly because the Perl build became brittle with respect to tools I used.

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@mjgardner I'm sure that's better for your mental health anyway, but it's still appalling.

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@mjgardner I haven't had any problems like that in a long time. I work with python in a virtual environment and use python 3.x exclusively and it just works. The fact that #Saxonica can now publish easily installable Python wheels for #SaxonC is icing on the cake.

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@mjgardner Yeah. The phrase "in a long time" as distinct from "never" was an explicit choice :-)

ndw,
@ndw@mastodon.social avatar

@mjgardner I know man. I was there. Am there. You just gotta roll with the punches. And #XML was a reaction to #SGML for the web, so it all goes around and around.

ndw,
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@mjgardner I use #Emacs. I'm ready.

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