ttj - Tom Jones

Unspecified "protocols", which are not really protocols, tend to require both ends to have the same implementation, often at a similar version.  Real protocols require both ends to speak the same specified protocol.  In real life there are often grey areas, but things like TCP, HTTP, and sort of SSH fit into this category.   It can be surprising how widely-used unspecified non-protocols are.  Three examples for today: rsync, openvpn, and bitcoin.  By their nature, then, all ripe for replacement with something specified. Re VPN protocols, the ipv6 stuff is specified but rubbish, and the WireGuard thing recently added to the linux kernel appears to be unspecified, tho it's probably less coupled to the whims of openssl than openvpn is.   And I managed to get a 500 internal server error out of google's main search page in the process: "This should never happen".

My name's Tom and I work full-time in compliance.  Not as an employment.  But banks and the like just keep giving me never-ending admin tasks, in order to have access to my own property.  I don't see how economic growth could be possible under such a regime, and suspect that it's not, but here we are. One of the tasks of this kind of compliance officer is to print out screenshots, as banks love things on paper and in PDF format, which stands for "print digital format".  On Debian, not knowing better, I use GIMP for this. A reasonable default when printing an image to an A4 sheet might be to set a margin around the sheet, and then fit the image to fit the sheet within this margin, whatever comes first, height or width, subject to orientation of the sheet and aspect ratio of the image.  Without going below some minimum resolution, maybe 100 dpi. GIMP does not do that.  My screenshots, of xterms, were coming out tiny.  I looked up how to change it.  ...

The cost of postage tracks debasement ("inflation") pretty well.  This is one of the ways you knew they were lying to you during the "low inflation" era.  When they said it was 1%, stamps were "going up" by 6% (actually, the currency was going down by this amount, being debased). The Royal Mail has a nice system where a 1st class stamp is a first class stamp, and is marked as such, instead of being marked with its monetary value.  A practical effect is that one can stock up on stamps in advance, and not have to stock up on tiny-value delta stamps when the price as denominated in the debasing fiat increases.  Nothing screams "I live in an extremely backwards country" like a row of stamps on the envelope, one for 1.xx fiats, the next for 0.04 fiats, the next for 0.07 fiats, or whatever the increases were.  This doesn't happen when a first-class stamp is just a first-class stamp. As an "investment", entering a period of high debasement...

pdfimages , packaged in poppler-utils in Debian, can extract images from PDFs. Its default output format is weird.  It would be nice to have it just extract the images, in whatever format they're in, by default.  But to get this behaviour you need something like the option -all.  But even that isn't specified as "what comes in, goes out".  Instead, it is specified as:   Write  JPEG,  JPEG2000,  JBIG2, and CCITT images in their native  format. CMYK files are written as TIFF files. All  other  images  are  written as PNG files.   (I can't get blogger to remove that double spacing from the paste).  The reader is left hoping that "all other images" permitted in the PDF whatever-version format (PDF spec is a bigly moving target) are PNG.  But I wouldn't bet on it.  So some obscuro format might be getting converted to PNG still. The other gotcha is this from the SYNOPSIS and command-line usage summa...

Some time in January or February, I got the letter from the Austrian government about the vaccination mandate.  Scan of this letter is at [0]. [0] < http://republish.coulddobetter.at/2022-02.bundesregierung.impfpflicht.scan.pdf > The Austrian government does half publish it online, in PDF, which is a print format.  They do not publish it in a web format or in any semantic document format, unless the semantics are "here's a rendering for A4 paper".  It's a sad comment on the web's failure that no one thinks to publish the actual document using a web format.  The web is just used for talking about and linking to the document, not for the actual document.  The actual document is in PDF.  Watch out, I'm going emit a DOCUMENT!  So it must be in pdf, rendered for print!  Fucksake. I converted it into simple html at [1].  The idea with republish.coulddobetter.at , currently nascent, is to format-shift / mark-up published documents from whateve...

After pushing an update to a "github pages" site, it's taking around 3 minutes for the changes to appear.  This is a long time.  There is no progress meter, no indication of when it should complete, or, worse, that a change is pending at all.   It's not suitable for multiple change-view cycles.  One needs a separate way of previewing the changed content.  

It was obvious in early December, by looking at South Africa, that Omicron changed everything. During December, some countries, Austria included, put specific restrictions on travel from countries with high Omicron prevalence.  This was exactly backwards.  It should have been policy to have Omicron displace Delta as quickly as possible.  So reduce restrictions for travel from Omicron countries.  Or just remove all travel restrictions, and the greater infectivity of Omicron will do the rest.  Yes, this was all obvious at the time. If you know someone whose health was wrecked by Delta in December or January, and it was in a country with a policy of DELAYING DISPLACEMENT OF DELTA BY OMICRON, then this policy may have made the difference of which strain they got. Austria tightened restrictions on travel from Omicron countries Dec 26, way after it was obvious this was wrong and bad policy. There was some kind of police crackdown throughout January, as it was impossib...