newnix@exile.digital @architect@linuxrocks.online

The overarching theme of the past few months: "Nothing's Wrong" by System Syn from "Once Upon A Second Act".

It's really interesting watching an intern at work dive into my very anti-pythonic suite of test scripts only to later come around and realize the utility in the minimal use of objects and instead creating flexible functions that get reused throughout the test batteries.
I doubt it'll return to looking more like the code I wrote, but it's great to see someone open up to different paradigms and realize that making everything an object is either full of boilerplate or stupid hard to design

Also also, "Once Upon a Second Act", the latest album from Clint Carney/System Syn, is sublime
I need to listen to more of it to potentially describe it better, but hawt damn is it a beautifully complex heart-wrenching album

I can't believe I didn't learn about this sooner, but Clint Carney as director for Daniel Graves works phenomenally well! Now I'm going to have these wonderfully creepy videos playing back in my mind when I listen to his work.

Apparently it's a community add-on, but it still sucks. STOP DOING ALL THIS IN YOUR MAKEFILES! Create a target that does the configuration crap for you if you really need that much functionality!
https://gmsl.sourceforge.io/

That's not a joke either. Look up the documentation for GNU Make. WHY WOULD I WANT MY BUILD SYSTEM TO HAVE IT'S OWN STDLIB!?

I made my way through more of this inherited codebase and now I have to say that GNU Makefiles heavily utilizing GNU make's embedded Guile are probably in my top 10 least enjoyed files. I even like the idea of using lisp, but fuck this noise, you're just making macro assignment more difficult to understand AND creating branches in your build system for no good reason!

The POSIX Make spec isn't exactly feature-rich or user-friendly, but at least I don't have to find find your "library.mk"

Welp, it's official, my iPod running Rockbox is too small to even hold the subset of my musical collection that I've downloaded from Bandcamp since around last year when I set up this install.
Replacing this is going to hurt.

So today I found out I'm going to be a tech lead on a high priority project at work. It's probably going to take around a week to figure out the current structure and expected behavior.
I spent about an hour just walking through the CI job descriptions and am about halfway done, the scariest thing so far seems to be that the pipeline has a lot of external state that gets cleaned up assuming success with a final `make clean`. Some other easy improvements found too

I have no idea what I'm doing with the roff manual page for nxes, but now I've got most of the text replaced to say 'nxes' instead of 'es'.
Also, may have introduced some build issues that need to be fixed.

If you live in Florida, you may want to get in touch with state senator Gary Farmer to ask why he hates poor people. He's proposing SB 370, which is a massive, ineffective ban on "assault weapons" and magazines with more than 10 rounds.
Anyone who's ever been to a range or hunting can tell you it's FAR harder to actually hit a target than in the movies, and if you need to defend yourself, 10 rounds may not be enough to actually keep you safe.
As always, this hurts the poor most.

So happy to see Clint Carney back making music, I should check to see if he was able to actually make the movie he was working on back around 2015-2016. Horror's not my favorite genre, but the dude's got awesome vision, so it'd probably be a cool movie if it got made.

Hawt damn, once I get some of the essentials moved to my new place, I've got several exciting new albums to listen to! New releases from:
System Syn
Aesthetic Perfection
Rotersand
Comaduster
State of the Union
NamNamBulu
Interface
mind.in.a.box
...and probably some more by the time all that happens

For those too lazy to look it up, it's this album: https://comaduster.bandcamp.com/album/darker-matter

which is heckin fantastic and if you enjoy EBM or IDM, then you'll probably love this

I got a surprise from myself today! Totally forgot I had ordered a shirt with Comaduster's "Darker Matter" album art. Pretty awesome little treasure that's been sitting in my mailbox for far too long because I hate checking my mail.

In less frustrating news: I recently found out that I'm not the only one working on an `es(1)` fork! https://github.com/wyrun/es-shell/network/members

Only like 3 of them have actually done anything, but it was still cool to see!

While it's disgusting to see people claiming that the recent events in DC are in any way comparable to the horrific events of 9/11, what's equally disturbing is how many people seem to be cool with the idea of communication backdoors so long as it's against those bad people. It's like they never heard Snowden's whistle, or have selectively forgotten how everyone's civil liberties have been under attack in the name of "security" that never comes

I wonder why Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee thinks poor people don't deserve the ability to protect themselves. While no information appears to be available about the specifics of HR 127, there's no way the licensing requirements are going to make firearms any less expensive or time consuming to purchase. Nevermind that this approach is unlikely to solve anything, it effectively means poor people don't get the greatest equalizers of all time.