Chris's Wiki :: blog

Recently I wrote an entry about a simple but difficult wish I had for a certain sort of terminal pager that handled emoji.

One of the broadly accepted things among at least system administrators is that our own code is a liability (some programmers may resist this idea somewhat more).

Ever since I started using PyPy and then had it quietly work fine for years, I've been keeping it in mind as a generally easy way to speed up any Python program that could benefit from a performance boost (which programs PyPy could accelerate sometimes su…

A while back on the Fediverse, I mentioned something about our departmental web server: Wow, people do some extremely slow downloads from work's main web server.

In theory, network booting with UEFI is fairly straightforward.

Yesterday I wrote an entry about why servers running Ubuntu can stall on boot for two minutes; the short version is that in 26.04, a network interface that either has no carrier or that has nothing else on it will cause systemd-networkd-wait-online to wait

Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have some standard physical servers.

If you have NFS mounts on a client using a sufficiently recent kernel, such as that shipped with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, and you inspect /proc/mounts (or 'mount -t nfs'), you'll probably discover a new NFS mount option that is listed for your mounts.

We have a long established approach for configuring our Linux systems, and specifically our Ubuntu systems (since these days the only Linux we run is Ubuntu).

If you look at it from the right angle, the existence of third party package systems that sit on top of Linux distributions is rather odd.

In a comment on my entry on universities, email, and the issues of running things in house, I mentioned that our departmental email system has a non-trivial cost in both hardware and staff time.

I've been using my home desktop for many years now, with a variety of disk drives, and over those years some of those disks have failed (without data loss, because I use software RAID mirrors).

Back in 2022 I said that my Firefox addons hadn't changed in a while, and while that's still mostly true there's been some minor changes that I want to write down.

So today I had a learning experience: Firefox Nightly apparently has decided to not allow extensions/addons to run for file:/// URLs and I am sorry, this completely breaks my environment (my startup page is a file:/// URL) and I find it infuriating.

When I wrote about the Emacs packages I use, I mentioned that I had Embark installed but barely used it because I didn't understand much about how to really use it.

One piece of technology news of the time interval is that Google is no longer going to be providing Internet search, it's going to be providing 'answers'.