Trip report: Summer ISO C++ standards meeting (St Louis, MO, USA)
On Saturday, the ISO C++ committee completed its fourth meeting of C++26, held in St Louis, MO, USA. Our host, Bill Seymour, arranged for high-quality facilities for our six-day meeting from Monday through Saturday. We had over 180 attendees, about two-thirds in-person and the others remote via Zoom, formally representing over 20 nations. At each … Continue reading Trip report: Summer ISO C++ standards meeting (St Louis, MO, USA) →
ANZ: You typed the wrong password
Time for my monthly check on my bank accounts today. But no, my ANZ web page told me that my password was wrong. What? It's stored in the web browser. I also have it written down, so I tried that. No, wrong. Please reset. How did that happen? It's definitely not my doing. Called up and finally, after nearly a minute of announcements, I was asked the reason for my call. ?I think my password has been breached?. WRONG. Another two minutes explaining to me how to use the ANZ App to reset my password. And then I was disconnected. Nearly 3 minutes for nothing.
bhyve: out
I've already had my concerns about using bhyve instead of VirtualBox, but another thing that concerned me was how to save a running instance. Once again Google Gemini to my aid. You don't: Unfortunately, as of July 1, 2024, bhyve itself doesn't offer a built-in feature to save the state of a running virtual machine. This functionality is under development, but there's no official release yet.
20 years of wrong directions
Twenty years ago today I started this idea of saving all my RCS files in a separate hierarchy. Bad idea, and it's still biting me.
X configuration: RTFM!
More searching for answers to the .Xdefaults issue today. What does the xterm(1) man page say? Much more than it did 30 years ago. Now there are 7,758 lines, about 130 pages. When I learnt X it was 253 lines, less than 5 pages. And much of this new version describes exactly what I'm looking for: a line like xterm-r*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono refers to a name xterm-r, which is described in X(1): -name This option specifies the name under which resources for the application should be found.
Constructive translations
Google Translate is quite useful for reading labels on East Asian food, but it has its limits. Here's a particularly amusing one: Somehow Google Translate is just too eager to please.
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Last month was cold? How about this month? mysql> select year(date), min(outside_temp), avg(outside_temp), max(outside_temp) from observations where month(date) = 7 group by year(date); +------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+ | year(date) | min(outside_temp) | avg(outside_temp) | max(outside_temp) | +------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+ | 2017 | -1.8 | 8.386610996751084 | 17.2 | | 2018 | -0.5 | 8.84761882739429 | 19.7 | | 2019 | 1 | 9.319298495442224 | 18.5 | | 2020 | -0.8 | 8.394708139534231 | 16.7 | | 2021 | ...
Understanding Xdefaults
Now I have an almost functional fvwm3 configuration. How do I polish it? An obvious thing would be to move much of the specifications to the .Xdefaults file. I already have some stuff in there. For example, for xterm: xterm*Geometry: 100x50 xterm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono xterm*faceSize: 9 So I don't need to put those details in the fvwm3 config. But what about the others? Currently I have: + "hydra" Exec LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm" -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.3 -geometry 90x50+53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & + "hydra" Exec LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r" -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.3 -geometry 90x50-53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & That defines the xterm parameters for left and right xterms.
Donate somebody else's organs!
I've been planning to apply for an organ donor pass for years now, and today I found I can do it on the web. Only one minute! Well, 3. First I need to find my Medicare card and enter the details, and then enter my name in a form that the form likes (to match what's on the card). And that's it! I'm a certified organ donor! All I needed was my name, address and Medicare card number. I could do that for lots of people without them knowing. In an age where people are paranoid about security, it's amazing that I can get a spare kidney or two without the donor knowing (even before his death).