Blog/July 2020/Jul 17th
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< Blog | July 2020
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We’re all fine, thank you for asking!
There’s not a lot to report on the personal front. We went nowhere and did little besides work and maintain ourselves. Our gov’t here in the Land has been trying to decide whether or not to impose new restrictions because of the Chinese Virus™. Apparently we, the people, lost.
Sarah’s been reporting, almost daily, the silly/stupid/alarming behavior of some of her customers. People really are dumb, for real!
Daniela and fam. have been enjoying their local beach. It looks like Naomi has no fear of anything at all, while Gabriel is a lot more cautious. Both of them have completely mastered the semantics of “no”!
Esther spent an hour on the phone with the IRS the other day, to be informed that they can’t help her with something they’re supposed to help her with. You really think “the government” is more efficient than private industry?
And I have spent quite a lot of time trying to understand a recurring but intermittent bug with my client’s database. It turns out that I made the crucial error of using “utf8” encoding instead of “utf8mb4”. Or, rather, I did use “utf8mb4”, but instead of utf_unicode_ci collation, the database was using utf_general_ci collation. Not that anyone can explain why any of that should work for a while and then stop working, and report that a field (which is not a date field) can’t accept an “invalid datetime” of some garbage!
Why, MariaDB, just… why?
It’s not like Unicode hasn’t been around since almost forever (in computer-years). It’s not like every common operating-system in use supports UTF-8 natively. It’s not like it’s at all common to support more than one language in modern applications. Oh, sure, the default MariaDB encoding of ‘latin1’ with collation ‘latin1_swedish_ci’, works for bloody Sweden, but what about, you know, 99.9% of the rest of us?
Oh yeah: and a field that is “CHAR(5)” won’t store five Hebrew characters, because they’re encoded as ten bytes of UTF-8. So what exactly, is the use of saying “CHAR(5)”?
Why, MariaDB, just… why?
Various important bits:
- The Hodge Twins on AOC’s comment that “a world without police looks like the suburbs”.
- Apparently Linus Torvalds, the infamously non-PC originator of the “Linux” OS, isn’t immune to the PC vandalizing of tech-vocabulary. Shame!
- Bari Weiss wrote a scathing resignation letter to the NYT. The comments she’s received on Twitter only serve to confirm her POV.
- Now that they’ve come for the Hagia Sophia, are you finally going to wake up?
- Are Jews, in fact, indigenous to the Land? You know the answer, of course; but Ryan Bellerose wrote well about the topic.
- Twitter got hacked, big time.
I released 8th 20.04 this week, and so far no bug-reports! I still haven’t received the bug-fix I was hoping for, which is a concern; but I needed to get other fixes out. Now I’ll concentrate on improving efficiency, especially around “big data” kinds of usages.
Weather: ditto last week.
This shabbat we’ll work our jaws on: homemade ḥalla, zucchini soup, beef (it’s what’s for dinner!), various salatim, smoked salmon, and banana cake.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom!
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