I uploaded a small package of my preferred monospaced console fonts here.
Today is Election Day!
Just a reminder that if you happen to be a Canadian citizen, today is election day. Try to get out to vote!
If you missed it, I wrote a little piece a few weeks back about what it means to me and why I think it’s important for us all to vote.
Migration to Debian 10 complete
The servers that host this website have been successfully migrated from Debian 9 to a fresh installation of Debian 10. As part of this migration quay.net now resolves to 99.79.1.85 and is no longer available on the old server, hal9000.
This upgrade means that the website now supports TLSv1.3 and a number of other improvements. If you come across any missing content or bugs, please let me know.
Asking all Canadians to vote on October 21, 2019
At the best of times politics can be complicated and there are a lot of reasons to avoid its discussion online these days!
The 43rd Canadian general election will be held on Monday, October 21, 2019. Elections Canada has a very good website dedicated to information on a variety of topics including how to ensure you are registered to vote, what sort of ID is required, and how you can go about casting your ballot.
Frustration with Ottawa’s seeming inability to govern in a unifying manner and the divisive nature of modern politics leads to at lot of less than ideal outcomes. This situation has had the effect of pushing people away from the process instead of engaging the public with the issues that face us in the 21st century. I’ve always felt that one of Canada’s strengths is that collectively we are pretty reasonable people even when the political class and populist politicians engage in pointless and self-serving grand standing. Broad public participation is one form of insurance that our representatives in Ottawa remain engaged in the hard work and compromise required to maintain peace, order, and good government in the immense country, of not insignificant complexity, that is our inheritance and charge.
With this view I ask that you consider voting on October 21st.
Sincerely,
Gabriel
Using ssh-agent on WSL: Take Two
I’ve updated my instructions for using ssh-agent with Windows Subsystem for Linux, as originally described in this post. From here on, I’ll be maintaining this on GitLab and any changes or improvements can be found there.
Disable terminal bell in WSL
Windows Subsystem for Linux is pretty nifty, but Windows has a very rudimentary terminal interface compared to most modern Unix implementations; though I do have high hopes for the new Windows Terminal project. One particularly annoying issue is that there is no way to directly disable sound, this can be a particularly annoying issue when using tab completion or backspace.
The easiest solution to this lack of functionality is to disable the bell in the Linux shell by modifying the readline(3) configuration in /etc/inputrc or ~/.inputrc.
# do not bell on tab-completion set bell-style none
Linus Torvalds on GPLv2 vs. GPLv3
I just came across this Q&A session with Linus Torvalds regarding the GPL, I was aware of his opinion, but I’ve never heard him talk about it in detail.
Go by Example
I learn well by seeing an example and figuring out what’s going on rather than watching teacher led demonstrations or some other method. I’ve found Go by Example to be the closest thing to my favourite technical manual, the venerable Advanced Bash Guide. For me it’s a great quick reference to understand how apart of the language works when I first encounter it.
Password Best Practices
I’ve been doing a bit of research for a small project to update project management practices and to refresh my knowledge of 2019’s best practices.
This is a pretty decent high level summary of how to approach password strength.
Tienanmen Square on r/AskHistorians
There’s an interesting thread explaining some of the internal politics that were underneath the deadly Tienanmen Square protests 30 years ago in Beijing.
It’s worth a read, if only to better place what happened in the Chinese context.