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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Case-sensitive is easier to implement; it’s just a string of bytes. Case-insensitive requires a lot of code to get right, since it has to interpret symbols that make sense to humans. So, something over wondered about:

    That’s not hard for ASCII, but what about Unicode? Is the precomposed ç treated the same lexically and by the API as Latin capital letter c + combining cedilla? Does the OS normalize all of one form to the other? Is ß the same as SS? What about alternate glyphs, like half width or full width forms? Is it i18n-sensitive, so that, say, E and É are treated the same in French localization? Are Katakana and Hiragana characters equivalent?

    I dunno, as a long-time Unix and Linux user, I haven’t tried these things, but it seems odd to me to build a set of character equivalences into the filesystem code, unless you’re going to do do all of them. (But then, they’re idiosyncratic and may conflict between languages, like how ö is its letter in the Swedish alphabet.)


  • This is madness, but since this is a hobby project and not a production server, there is a way:

    • Shrink the filesystems on the existing disks to free up as much space as possible, and shrink their partitions.
    • Add a new partition to each of the three disks, and make a RAID5 volume from those partitions.
    • Move as many files as possible to the new RAID5 volume to free up space in the old filesystems.
    • Shrink the old filesystems/partitions again.
    • Expand each RAID component partition one at a time by removing it from the array, resizing it into the empty space, and re-adding it to the array, giving plenty of time for the array to rebuild.
    • Move files, shrink the old partitions, and expand the new array partitions as many times as needed until all the files are moved.

    This could take several days to accomplish, because of the RAID5 rebuild times. The less free space, the more iterations and the longer it will take.



  • I feel this in my soul, except about Windows. I’ve got a handful of machines at work that refuse to update to Windows 10 22H2. They give an error code during the compatibility check. Googling that error code returns dozens of forum posts with hundreds of users and “Microsoft support agents” chiming in. They give the same list of suggestions—that don’t work—to fix it. Nobody can say what the error code means, or what the compatibility check checks. The official Microsoft fix is to reinstall.

    I don’t want to reinstall. The suite of software these computers run would take several hours to reinstall.

    This is typical of my experience with Windows. (I’m a Unix/Linux guy.) I look up how to do something in Windows, and with the official Microsoft documentation, one of three things inevitably happens:

    1. I follow the steps and click the things, and it still doesn’t work.
    2. I can’t follow the steps because one of the things to click is greyed out for some reason.
    3. I can’t follow the steps because the documentation refers to an older edition, and Microsoft has removed one of the things to click.

    One time, when trying to get Excel to run a mail merge, I ran into all three problems in three attempts.

    The same happens with 3rd party sites. They never say the edition of Windows to which their guide refers, and the feature is deprecated or gone. (Most recently it was about getting a Windows 10 start menu behavior back on 11.)

    Oh, and since Windows is mainstream, a lot of the information is in the form of AI vomit, and covered in ads and dark patterns.




  • This question has really got me thinking about the old days! I thought that it was looking into Debian Linux when trying to repurpose some old IBM PS/2 machines at work, because there were rumors of patchsets for the Linux kernel to support the MicroChannel Architecture bus and ESDI drives. But now I remember that it was actually GeekGadgets, a Unix environment for Amiga based around the ixemul.library. That’s where I first read the GPL, and admired its legal Jiu-Jitsu of using copyright laws to ensure freedom.

    I’ve never been a Windows user on my own machines as a result. I just went from Amiga, to FreeBSD, to Ubuntu.