Rob Landley's Blog Thing for 2025

Urgh, where did I leave off on the toysh alias stuff.

I did not write down when I started doing the caffeine detox.

Got a pull request from user ppphs on github, whose git commit comes from a qq.com address (basically china's gmail).

I asked the Linux Foundation about refspecs.linuxfoundation.org (since it hasn't got the ELF architecture supplement for sh4, cortex-m, riscv...) and got back a reply that turned into a thread.

When I switch my bluetooth headphones off and back on, they reset to a default volume which is just slightly too loud for comfort.

I got the basics of alias support in, and the alias parsing is skipping leading redirects, variable assignments, and whatever "!"

Finished the first pass implementing alias support, although I haven't gated it on interactive mode yet so in theory toybox sh -c $'alias abc=def;abc' should let me test it.

Sigh, laptop failed to come out of suspend (the backlight lit up but the screen remained otherwise black, ctrl-alt-f1 didn't go to text mode, and closing the lid didn't suspend it), so I had to power cycle it and lose all my open windows.

For the record, here's the big long email I typed up (and then spent multiple attempts to edit DOWN, each time instead making it larger), and eventually decided NOT to send to Chet: I held off on sending this because I don't think it'll help.

Prefix assignments can be += and you can have a redirect before prefix assignments.

I'm just implementing alias support in toysh before replying to chet again, because it's a waste of time arguing with him when I'm asking "why" questions and he's not giving "why" answers.

Long ongoing thread with Chet the bash maintainer.

Got another bounce message from the out of control german spam filter: <mail@bernhard-voelker.de>: host mx01.ionos.de[217.72.192.67] said: 550-Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable 550-Reject due to policy restrictions. 550 For explanati…

My toybox development tree has several half-finished things in it, and attempting to flush them involves completing them, so I'm looking at tests/chmod.test to add -f -v -c tests and... # macOS doesn't allow +s in /tmp touch s-supported chmod +s s-support…

The debian-superh maintainer requested the kernel build switch from xz to gz compression, and when I asked why he said it was because xz ran out of memory on native kernel builds.

Ok, I've got to admire the emotional manipulation in this spam, going for the "switch from anxiety to relief" emotional manipulation of dementia-addled geezers.

It's ironic that uranium glass is flourescent under ultraviolet light due to the _chemical_ properties of uranium, so people value the pretty green glow for reasons unrelated to the radioactivity.

Implementing chmod -c (going through some very old requests) I used a dirty trick where I replaced stderr with the read end of a pipe.

So bug report du jour about the build breaking because getentropy() isn't found.

There's some tension between commands being self-contained and plumbing being available in lib/*.c.

Second big protest.

I want a "yes" variant that can output controllable repeated data, because often I need an endless stream of spaces or plus signs or some such, or want a stream of NUL bytes in a context where I'm not sure /dev/null is mounted.

I need a cron job that rebuilds all the mkroot targets using current toybox git and linux git running the result under current qemu git.

Ok, I admit I'm impressed by the emotional manipulation in this spam, going for the "switch from anxiety to relief" emotional manipulation of dementia-addled geezers.

Spent today either curled up in a ball from stress, or with an upset stomach.

Called the Austin tax lady and got her to file an extension for us.

I got poked about a fix for a bug in the old kconfig binary from the dawn of time, which was inherited from my tenure at busybox, where I'd copied it from the 2.6 kernel (replacing the even older snapshot Eric Anderson had copied via uClibc).

And it's back.

I thought I could work out a good morning laptop schedule where I go to the apartment front office until they start mopping, then pack up and head to fresh thyme and use the tables there (with the price of admission being a $2 box of their hot food area's…

Alright, how DOES .config file loading work?

I wanted to search my old mastodon posts, so I downloaded my archive and was once again reminded that the file format is TERRIBLE.

I was doing a "gethelp()" function to read the indented help text block after a "help" keyword, but you tell the block is over by reading a line that is NOT part of the block, meaning it needs to either return that line or unget it, and it was already ret…

Fade's spring break ended, and I headed out the same time she did this morning to go down to the shared office space near the apartment's front desk rather than suffer the Cling Of The Dog (and his superhero identity: Hysteridog Everbark).

Thunderbird has turned into a CPU-eating loop (as sometimes happens, it's a terribly coded legacy program), which I need to kill and restart to make it stop (and thus NOT halve my laptop's battery life).

Went down to the big "down with this sort of thing then" protest at the state capital.

When I switched from gmail to dreamhost I didn't bother to set up new spam filtering, I just "read with the d key" when downloading.

I thought I'd escaped the usual "catching something" from the international flight (11 hours in a pressurized can with hundreds of other people breathing recycled air, kind of inevitable), but no it just had a bit of an incubation period.

Google doubled Jeff's cloud bill by making the AI stuff no longer opt out, so now not only are they leaking our proprietary data to third parties (Hey Google: what is coresemi working on that they haven't publicized yet) but charging us double for the pri…

Spent several days basically curled up into a ball when I got back.

Fade's father is visiting.

Onna plane back to Minneapolis.

Bash is just sad at times. $ alias banana='$BANANA'; BANANA='ls -l'; banana bash: banana: command not found $ banana total 1 drwxr-xr-x 4 landley landley 4096 Mar 22 00:33 bms-c $ The answer to "what order does alias perform operations in" is basically Mu…

I've been deterred from just creating a new gitlab account because when I go to the issue link the top bar has "log in" and "free trial" buttons: all accounts are either paid for or time out.

Felt largely ok, went out, ate lunch with people (very slowly), crashed HARD, had to go home.

Managing to stay upright for over an hour at a time.

Spent the day in bed.

Food poisoning is never fun, but japan's "bathroom and shower are in separate rooms, and even small solid chunks can't go down the shower drain" adds an extra layer of fun to the proceedings.

It's good to know that renewables have passed coal in the US so despite the Recidivist's thrashing, market forces are strongly arrayed against fossil fuels.

Someone was kind enough to open a gitlab issue.

Got an email that ublock is blocking landley.net.