“Hallelujah” is a song about sex — but it’s not dirty sex, it’s holy sex.

Ward Cunningham, creator of Calvin & Hobbes?

Marathon’s Security Officer already had the green armor and shiny mask.

It has been obvious for many years that the Trump movement aims at the downfall of America, through the promotion and exaggeration of America’s flaws and the increasingly violent suppression of its virtues.

But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

S

I recommend picking up Graham Hutton’s short text Programming in Haskell, Second Edition. Even if you don’t end up using Haskell in “real work” (and you might!) it will teach you a remarkable number of things about how functional programming works.

England has a surfeit of terms for obnoxious people.

• Jobsworth (obstructive clerk or bureaucrat)
• God-botherer (religious fanatic)
• Cockwomble
• Minging cockwomble
• Tremulous bollock-for-lobsters cockwomble
• Sir Æthelbert Plonker Cockwomble of the Drubbing-over-Head Cockwombles

I may have made those last two up.

The term “open source software” was coined specifically to refer to software licensing that recognizes a particular set of freedoms. It is not a generic term for source-available software, and never was.

One of the freedoms of open source is “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.”

Calling the Hippocratic license family “open source” is inaccurate, since its entire goal is to discriminate against certain fields of endeavor.

It’s better described as a sort of source-available license.

Lichess may be the best board game software for any board game ever. It’s that good.

Eight: English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Japanese, ASL.

Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?

Russian occasionally. ASL when I’m counting how many seconds the cat has to stay quiet before I give her a treat.

The ruble is worth more than the penny, but it’s way down from 2008 when it was almost a nickel.

Remember when a “pop-up blocker” was a browser plug-in because the browsers didn’t yet consider it a competitive feature?

(Well, okay, Opera and iCab did.)

Number of ads my OS shows me: 0

To be clear, I mean people who praise Hitler, get swastika tattoos, blame everything on a Jewish Conspiracy, etc.

You know, Nazis.

Musks and Verses?

Not really. Nazis are scum and deserve to be kicked out.

I drifted slowly from right-libertarian to a more leftish position: pro-union, pro-social-programs, skeptical of the compatibility of unregulated capitalism with individual freedom. Still no fan of tankies.

This wasn’t from anyone sitting down and trying to convince me, though. Part of it was discovering how close right-libertarianism had always been to white-supremacism: some old Ron Paul newsletters were unpleasantly enlightening. Part was seeing people who called themselves “libertarians” line up with the far right to support state violence, especially against black and brown people. And heck, part was from getting richer and seeing how that worked.

I have a lot of sympathy for the frustrations that get young men into right-wing positions and occasionally I try to puncture some of the nonsense they’re being fed.

Maoism did a lot of evil without any religion. Were all of its perpetrators bad people?