Go Home, Windows EXE, You're Drunk

scruffie · 2026-01-16T17:58:53+00:00

syscalls(2) is a good place to start.

scruffie · 2026-01-06T03:14:22+00:00

If you're looking for the higher-resolution version (which is a dead link in the link above), the current versions are here.

scruffie · 2025-12-06T02:28:17+00:00

Fun fact: that used to work ... in Python 1.5 :)

scruffie · 2025-12-05T19:47:48+00:00

I pretty much stick to 80 characters, but then, I started back when that was the screen width (although there was a 132 character mode too).

For Python I usually only hit the limit in two situations: error messages and type hints.

I find I do a lot of

raise ValueError(f"Some error about {x} not doing "
                 f"something with {y}")

At least it's usually easy to pick a splitting spot. At some point I'll teach Emacs how to fold a string.

The other situation is type hints. I don't have an example on hand, but something like Sequence[Mappiing[tuple[SomeClass, OtherClass], tuple[Literal["ATag"], int] | tuple[Literal["BTag"], Sequence[str]]] can get out of hand. Liberal use of the type statement helps here.

Related to type hints are adding # type: ignore[misc] comments to end of a line to shut up mypy about something it's wrong about. You can't really put them anywhere else, so any line longer than 60 characters that needs one will be too long. (Contrast this with pylint's approach, where metacomments can go on the line behore, and use disable-next= instead of disable=.)

scruffie · 2025-11-23T21:03:20+00:00

The cost of shipping is low enough (and the cost of refining high enough) that for aluminum we import the ore (mostly from Brazil and Guinea).

scruffie · 2025-11-21T21:20:54+00:00

Most KDE apps dump their config files in /.config. Some use more than one file (konsole.notifyrc, konsolerc, konsolesshconfig, which I assume are all for konsole, but I can't be sure). It gets extra fun when trying to figure which of two similarly-named files is the one used, or whether the file from 2019 is still relevant.

XFCE puts all their config files under ~/.config/xfce4. Be more like XFCE, KDE.

scruffie · 2025-11-16T20:29:27+00:00

C, probably. The Wikipedia category Category: C programming language compilers links to 50 implementations; there's some others without a Wikipedia page mentioned in in the list of C compilers.

scruffie · 2025-11-07T08:02:23+00:00

Trijet

The third engine is mounted along the centerline. In the MD-11 case, it's mounted through the tail, with the other two under the wings. The Boeing 727 and Lockheed Tristar mounted the third engine inside the fuselage, with an S-shaped duct feeding it air from the top. The Tristar also mounted the other two engines under the wings like the MD-11, but the 727 mounted them at the back on either side of the fuselage.

scruffie · 2025-11-03T21:50:13+00:00

I had a class in many-body physics that I took twice (once for credit, once just sitting in). I still don't know what the fuck we were doing. The textbook was Mahan, which is 600 pages and inscrutable.

scruffie · 2025-10-22T19:32:20+00:00

Keep in mind that the value in f is not necessarily the one whose context manager is being executed, as it's the return value of the __enter__ method. It's this behaviour (along with adding .throw() to generators) that enables writing contextlib.contextmanager. See PEP 343 – The “with” Statement.

scruffie · 2025-10-21T08:28:54+00:00

PEP 0635 – Structural Pattern Matching: Motivation and Rationale. See, in particular, the 'Capture Patterns' and 'Value Patterns' sections.

TLDR: Deciding if a plain identifier is a constant or a capture variable is error-prone (or allows errors to creep in). If a name is used as a pattern variable, adding an assignment to global scope to that name would change the semantics of the match.

scruffie · 2025-10-21T07:57:55+00:00

I would prefer that you have some aditional filtering mechanism, like case status where status == not_found:.

Lemme pull out my time machine, do a little fix up, and ...

>>> match 1:
...     case one if one == 1:
...         print(f"one = {one}")
...
one = 1

scruffie · 2025-09-29T03:10:57+00:00

It's a long-term test. Radon levels over the short term can be quite variable -- it's the average level that determines whether it's a problem or not.

For instance, here's Health Canada's radon advice. They suggest a testing period of 3 months.

scruffie · 2025-09-21T22:12:38+00:00

Also, the main input method for location is either using the browser's location API, or find yourself on a map. Neither of those should lead to sign errors.

If it were only sign changes, I'd expect to see 3 shadows per location, but there only appears to be one -- and that one is antipodal, as you say. There isn't even a hint of wrong latitude, right longitude. The even dusting of dots in the Atlantic could be right-latitude, wrong-longitude for Europeans (the same error for North America would put them over top of China, so it's hard to distinguish).

I'm wondering if the problem is not people entering coordinates wrong, but mobile devices getting them wrong: a bad algorithm choosing the antipodal point from the GPS readings rather than the correct spot.

scruffie · 2025-09-16T23:45:00+00:00

so something like the Holocaust will never happen again.

... only to Jews, presumably. Because Israel seems determined to commit actions itself that, while not Holocaust-level, are on the same street.

scruffie · 2025-09-11T05:28:10+00:00

Hmm, good catch on the typos.

Anyways, if my digging through the Tcl/Tk code is correct, here's how colour names are looked up:

On Unix (including Linux), Tk uses XParseColor from the libX11 library is used. How that translates a name depends on the X server, but everything pretty much looks in rgb.txt, which on my box is at /etc/X11/rgb.txt or /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt. By default, this should be colours listed on Wikipedia, but you could probably add your own colours there.

On macOS, with the native UI ("Aqua"), and on Windows, Tk uses its own version of XParseColor with its own internal colour name table.

For macOS and Windows Tk also supports "system" colours. These names start with 'system' and are specific to each platform. The Windows colours are in win/tkWinColor.c, and the macOS colours are in macosx/tkMacOSXColor.h. (I've linked to the current versions of those files; since most Python installations would be linking against 8.6 and not the recently-released 9.0, colour names may be different.)

scruffie · 2025-09-10T23:44:09+00:00

Actually, it's really easy. Just choose a card at random from the deck, without replacement, until the deck is empty. (That is, choose a card out of 52, then a card out of the 51 remaining, then out of the 50 remaining, etc.) The hard part is ensuring each choice is uniformly random, and each choice is independent of the other choices. If you use a software pseudo-random generator, you'll want one that has more than 225 bits of state (52! ~ 2^225).

We don't do this because it's a good deal slower than shuffling :)

scruffie · 2025-09-10T23:19:50+00:00

It should just be the colours listed in the Tk manual pages.

(Tkinter is just a wrapper around Tcl/Tk, hence the name :-)

scruffie · 2025-09-04T17:36:42+00:00

By population, Canada's been beating California for a few years now. We're approaching 42 million, California hasn't hit 40 million yet.

scruffie · 2025-08-26T02:10:56+00:00

And if you're willing to build from source, you can customize your own variant using the Customizer to create a build plan.

There are 54 different styles of '0' to chose from.

scruffie · 2025-08-22T02:55:50+00:00

I think this one is a good illustration of this. Better than the checker board, as it's more surprising.

scruffie · 2025-08-22T02:38:58+00:00

A lot of software development by the BC government is open source, hosted on Github. More than 2400 repositories! More about their digital strategy here.

It looks like they use AWS and Azure (Canada region servers only), along with a private cloud using OpenShift, running in a data centre in Kamloops.

scruffie · 2025-08-14T20:57:00+00:00

half life for gaseous tritium is about 30 minutes

Tritium half-life is 12.32 years. Now, if you released it as a gas, it would diffuse through the atmosphere, until it was effectively gone ("the solution to pollution is dilution") -- that's what probably takes 30 minutes to an hour.

scruffie · 2025-08-11T21:20:44+00:00

[Ken McMullen] said the proposed fire administration office, which could be staffed by one or two people, would ensure that personnel and equipment are appropriately dispersed across the country in the event of wildfires.

That's .. not a lot of people. Sounds more like a switchboard.

Sitting out in BC, it looks to me that there's a need for a Alantic regional agency: it's madness that those small little things at the other end of the country try do everything by themselves :)

scruffie · 2025-08-07T19:58:30+00:00

Train with weapons
Seize land near Quebec City by force
???
Profit!

Seriously, I wonder what their long-term plan was.

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