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Category Archives: rant
Installing old Oracle JDKs in Travis-CI
We’ve been here before, but Oracle keeps being a pain in everyone’s rear end. This time, we want to keep testing against version 7 of the JDK with Travis CI.
Daylight savings in NSW, Australia
I can never understand why daylight savings is a thing, nor if it is useful to anyone. So I made a survey to understand this better.
Would all of you mind taking this survey and circulating the link around? https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/38CMMQM
Managing locally-built packages without wrecking the system, with stow(8)
It is bad practice to use make install. Period.
Why? Because it installs files everywhere on your system—if you’re lucky, only in /usr/local—with no guaranteed way to cleanly remove them afterwards.
Yet, sometimes, there is no other option, for example if some software is not packaged for your Unix of choice and you don’t have time to do it yourself. There are some easy and rather straightforward ways around it, which I usually recommend to beginners.
It happened again today. So I recommended the use of /opt/PKG-VER as an installation prefix and stow(8) to make the software seamlessly available to the rest of the system. Nothing fancy or novel, but I thought I’d share the summary email in the hope it would help others.
Dear Google, why don’t I receive emails to Google Groups I subscribed to?
TLDR: I do, they just don’t get delivered to the right inbox… If you want to avoid that, make sure you don’t use the Send email as option with non-GMail addresses in the Accounts and Import settings, as well as the Alternate Email Addresses in the general Account settings.
Unecessary encryption in WD MyBook Essential enclosures
Beware: some Western Digital MyBook Essential disk enclosures do some encryption in hardware (in the USB bridge, it seems). It doesn’t appear to be configurable, and renders the disk data inaccessible when used in any other way.
+ is a valid character in an email address!
I like my mailbox organised. And I like things to be automated. Fortunately, email systems support aliases for their users, so more than one email address reaches the same person. This allows for automatic filtering depending on which address the message was sent to.
What’s even better is that these systems can match a pattern to make generic aliases (e.g., user-REPLACEME@example.net for user user@example.net). This way, you can create valid email addresses on the fly, without having to tinker with anything (e.g., user-gascompany@example.net for the gas company to contact the user).
Now, dash (-) is not the most common character used for that purpose. The plus character (+) is more commonly seen. Notably, but not alone, GMail supports it. If you have an account there, try sending an email to YOURUSERNAME+test@gmail.com.
And this is where my problem is. Once again, I was happily filling in a form requesting my email address, put in an address with a + in it, and got it rejected because it “contain[ed] invalid characters.” It really annoys me that some people who call themselves professionals in IT-related fields do not seem to be able to understand a standard properly, if they have been looking for it, at least…