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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 2 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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Jonathan Corbet

This year's COVID vaccine is coming out in the US. Just booked my appointment so I can get jabbed ahead of the fall travel nightmare.
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Jonathan Corbet

If you want to know where the action is in a wildfire, just follow the aircraft. I'm supposed to be getting work done, but its hard, especially when they keep flying over my house.

Hopefully they are starting to get a handle on some of these.
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Jonathan Corbet

So there are fires burning up and down the Colorado front range. At least one person has died already. The air inside the house makes my eyes burn. It seems like a good time to be careful.

There are people seriously talking about the possibility of a serial arsonist setting these things off. But, then, some idiots decided that last night would be a good time to go play with fireworks above town and duly set another one. I guess we should not attribute to malice that which can be explained by appalling stupidity.
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Jonathan Corbet

There are now two fires visible from my house... Slurry bombers overhead. Still a tiny problem compared to what some others are dealing with, but still... this sucks.
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Jonathan Corbet

I went to Jasper many years ago and thought it was an amazing place; I've always intended to get back there. Not this year, I guess.

This sucks; we are losing our treasures.

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/25/nx-s1-5052037/jasper-alberta-canada-wildfire
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Jonathan Corbet

The amount of LWN traffic that is just AI bots downloading the same stuff over and over again is staggering; it's increasingly hard to see any sort of human signal in there at all. Something is going to give here at some point...

https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse/
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Jonathan Corbet

Ah joy ... Google is turning off its URL shortener and breaking every link that ever used it:

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-url-shortener-links-will-no-longer-be-available/

A quick search on lore.kernel.org:

https://lore.kernel.org/all/?q=goo.gl%2F

...turns up about 19,000 messages with affected links. That's a lot of history that is going to become harder (or impossible) to find.
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Jonathan Corbet

"To better understand how the kernel community views Rust,
we collect the posts about writing Rust drivers from lwn and
ycombinator until 2023/08/05, and use Chatgpt to analyze
them."

I guess that's research in the 2020s... https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc24/presentation/li-hongyu
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