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Jonathan Corbet

Not having a cat, I'm not given to posting cat pictures ... but my daughter's cat is here for a visit, so here's my chance.
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Jonathan Corbet

I was digging through my bookshelves when I stumbled across this book, untouched for years.

I picked up Anybody's Bike Book sometime around the mid 1970s, after having discovered the freedom that a good bike gives to a kid who needs to move around in northern Wyoming. It taught me that there was nothing in my bike that I couldn't fix myself — an empowering lesson to learn. With a mixture of plain language, clear descriptions, and sharp humor, it was perhaps my first example of what technical documentation can be.

So, a belated "thank you" to Tom Cuthbertson for this outstanding book; there is no doubt it had a strong influence on all the words I have inflicted on the world.
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Jonathan Corbet

So here is a weird one ... the LWN site has been seeing a steady stream of login attempts, all using weird yahoo addresses as the username. By "weird" I mean things like lllbnwidgqeerdyi@yahoo.com and other equally unlikely strings.

These do not correspond to LWN accounts, but somebody has looked at our login form for long enough to post the login attempts directly, without loading the form first. The attempts come from all over the Internet, suggesting that some sort of botnet is doing this.

I don't suppose anybody else has seen this sort of pattern, or has any idea what it is that they may be trying to accomplish?
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Jonathan Corbet

On the radar: file-based memory management

https://lwn.net/ml/all/20241122203830.2381905-1-btabatabai@wisc.edu

This looks like fairly wild stuff, haven't had a chance to figure out how it actually works yet.
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Jonathan Corbet

Definitely a day best spent outdoors
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Jonathan Corbet

Maybe these AI models are onto something after all? https://fortune.com/2024/11/14/grok-musk-misinformation-spreader/
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Jonathan Corbet

Snowy day in Boulder
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Jonathan Corbet

For morbid reasons of my own I keep an eye on the Apache OpenOffice project's regular reports to the ASF board:

https://whimsy.apache.org/board/minutes/OpenOffice.html

As is normal, the September report says that all is great with the project - community health is always "improving". And they are clearly on top of upcoming problems: "Python 2 is unmaintained. We have in the development tree the external python3 support. Internal python 3 support is difficult. We are checking alternatives." They plan to fix it in "the next major release". The project hasn't made a major release in ten years, so I wouldn't hold my breath...

(OK, so I'm still clearly in a snarky mode, sorry.)
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Jonathan Corbet

Perhaps I am the only one out there using the Python GnuCash bindings to load and manage accounting data, but just in case: the GnuCash 5.9 release has a bug that completely wipes out an accounting file when opened in a Python program. It's a good way to get an extreme adrenaline burst, but I really don't recommend it otherwise.

GnuCash fixed this upstream on October 26, but has not made a release with the fix, so my 5.9 Fedora version showed the bug in all its glory. I've submitted a bug there (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2323303), hopefully they will include the fix soon. Meanwhile, I strongly recommend that anybody with GnuCash 5.9 installed be extra careful.
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Jonathan Corbet

In Japan even the cannibals are polite...I guess...?
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Jonathan Corbet

RIP Phil Lesh

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/25/1227749378/phil-lesh-grateful-dead-dies

He brought a lot of joy to a lot of people and will be deeply missed.
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Jonathan Corbet

Filled out my ballot over the weekend — a rather time-consuming task in Colorado, as we have a lot of things to vote.

Now I just have to endure a few more weeks while the rest of the country catches up. And hope I don't find myself living in a fascist nation...
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Jonathan Corbet

So I am not quite sure what to make of this article. It is nice to see attention paid to documentation... but this is really about the man pages, and somehow the problem is Linus's fault...? The idea that we can solve it with some sort of editorial structure in the "post-Torvalds era" seems ... weird.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Linux-No-money-for-documentation-9978257.html
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Jonathan Corbet

Nature's way of telling you you're hanging out in the wrong tree: https://coloradosun.com/2024/10/09/eagle-nest-lightning-strike-boulder-county/
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Jonathan Corbet

"LWN is basically what ChatGPT summarization as advertised itself to be, except it's actually good and coherent and useful."

— HN commenter saagarjha https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41643325

Nice to know we haven't been overtaken quite yet :)
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Jonathan Corbet

So here I am in an airline lounge in Munich when suddenly everybody's phone starts simultaneously screaming bloody murder. I'm trying to decrypt the flashing red message in German, wondering if I have time to say goodbye to my family before whatever apocalypse is coming hits. Eventually I find the second version in English... It's national alert test day. I guess I can get another coffee after all.
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Jonathan Corbet

I have often complained that, even though thousands of developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel, there is not a single person whose job it is to write documentation for the kernel. The problem is wider than that, though: Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the man pages collection for the last four years, can no longer afford to do it for free.

https://lwn.net/ml/all/4d7tq6a7febsoru3wjium4ekttuw2ouocv6jstdkthnacmzr6x@f2zfbe5hs7h5
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Jonathan Corbet

Edited 3 months ago
The more I dig through kernel mailing list discussions, the more I think that we would do well to end the use of "NAK" entirely. It is an exercise of power that is hurtful to read and gets in the way of an actual discussion of how a patch needs to be improved. I have, in my maintainer role, never said "NAK" to a patch and plan to continue that way.

*Edited* since people are asking: NAK (or NACK) comes (I believe) from the ASCII negative-acknowledge character. In this context, is an abrupt way for a maintainer to reject a patch.
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Jonathan Corbet

I'll answer your email soon, honest, but first I have some important meetings to get through...
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Jonathan Corbet

@oleksandr Ouch ... it is sad indeed to see a site like that go down. "the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again" - indeed.

RE: https://activitypub.natalenko.name/@oleksandr/statuses/01J6HPBQ5S4S1W6H5R172A6GMT
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