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Athena's blog

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Note 1 from 2026-07-27

When you tell a computer to do something, the computer should either do it, or it should tell you why it did not do it. If what happens is neither of these, there has been an engineering failure.

Note 1 from 2026-07-11

Occasionally I get really melancholy about spaceflight. I feel like we've mostly gone backwards this century. I'll see a picture of a Space Shuttle in a museum and despite all the realities I'm aware of I'll still want to tell her I'm sorry, you deserve to fly.

Note 1 from 2026-07-10

According to its latest release notes, the QBE compiler backend now has support for shared libraries on most targets. Hopefully, this means the Hare programming language will get this support too soon, which would resolve one of my major gripes with it.

Note 1 from 2026-07-06

I have enough projects I do not need to suddenly learn to solder and write Z80 assembly to build an RC2014 memex that is a deeply impractical proposition.

Note 1 from 2026-07-05

Mildly interesting metrological fact: The lost, could-have-been metric unit of time, the duration equal to one half the period of a pendulum of length one metre in standard gravity, is extremely close to the second: It's about 1.0032 seconds.

Note 2 from 2026-07-04

Annoying telephony people by insisting on calling PBXes "phone servers."

Note 1 from 2026-07-04

Oh, Panasonic is Matsushita. I… didn't know that before today. Huh.

Note 1 from 2026-06-30

Username: Enter your account name in this box. Password: Enter your password in this box. For security, the password characters will be replaced by dots. Remember me: This check box has no effect.

Note 1 from 2026-06-09

One of my life goals is to someday forget how US Customary units work.

Note 1 from 2026-05-24

The char type

Note 1 from 2026-04-03

No-context quote from continued thoughts related to my body-customization blog series: I don't want to have to be prepared to recognize what a DC bus undervolt feels like.

Note 1 from 2026-03-15

Nanoraptor's story Binary Star and its original inspiration have finally persuaded me that we all need to get over how it sounds silly and get used to saying gibibyte.

Note 1 from 2026-03-14

As a hopefully-final update to my last body customization post, an online acquaintance of mine, Gwen, has persuaded me that hyperchitinized living tissue would be superior to keratin on aesthetic grounds, and due to its ability to grow and heal it would mostly or entirely avoid the need to molt. I think this would also allow more complex shapes, potentially bringing back the full humanoid ear with…

More body customization details

I wanted to add some more details on top of my post about customizing my body into a pseudo-bug-thing, so here I go.

If I could completely customize my body…

This is a pretty unusual post, I know. But the question came up in an in-person conversation of what you would do if you could completely customize your body, and I talked for a while, so now I want to write it down. And if I'm going to write it down I may as well post it.

Note 2 from 2026-02-25

Blogging software where you can post through SMTP and read comments through IMAP.

Note 1 from 2026-02-25

After comparing a few CalDAV/CardDAV servers I think I've decided on Radicale, probably run through WSGI. Any reasons not to use it?

Note 1 from 2026-02-24

At one point Kontact was functional for me but Akonadi has somehow managed to degrade over time (it's now a roll of the dice whether I can successfully check or send email) and it has finally reached the point that I switch to Thunderbird again.

Note 1 from 2026-02-13

Might teach myself Joomla! as a bit.

Note 1 from 2026-01-25

Had a brief scare with my server hestia that reminded me to create a fallback FDE keyphrase in case I ever need to read it over the phone to someone sitting at the console so that I don't have to change and re-memorize the main keyphrase. So now I've done that.

Note 1 from 2025-11-24

I can't speak for other authors but I write the kinds of things I want to read so if you want to steal one of my ideas please do so and then send me a link to your version so I can read it. (If you want to use my characters or settings or whatever then we should probably talk but ideas deserve to be free.)

Note 1 from 2025-11-23

I've published some new supplemental content for my Unity setting. If you haven't previously, read Unity: Hello World first. The new stuff is a collection of encyclopedia articles from the in-universe Human Interstellar Encyclopedia and will probably not work as well without the context from the intro story.

Note 1 from 2025-11-19

Saw Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, and it is quite possibly the best of all versions of the story, including the book. Outstanding. Top three movies of the year for sure.

Note 1 from 2025-10-30

As a teaser for my upcoming superhero story, Skyhawke, I'm releasing a blank version of a made-up government form from the Federal Bureau of Extraordinary Affairs that you can fill out in your browser (though you can't save it so I guess you just have to take a screenshot). Maybe it kind of works as a very wonky sort of character sheet. On second thought, no, not really. FBEA paperwork isn't even…

Note 1 from 2025-10-06

All too often mobile-first ends up meaning desktop-second. Too much convergent software (especially Web-based software) is designed for mobile devices and then as an afterthought they make some of the popup menus turn into toolbars or something. Desktop systems have some fundamental differences; menu bars let you give the user lots of options in a consistent way, and there are many cases where…

Note 1 from 2025-10-04

A month is a standard month or a calendar month. A standard month is 30 standard days. A standard day is 86,400 SI seconds. A calendar month is any month in any year as defined by the UTC time system, and consists of between 28 and 31 calendar days. A calendar day is either 86,399, 86,400, or 86,401 seconds, according to whether a leap second is defined to occur on that day in the UTC time system.

Note 1 from 2025-09-14

The phrase solid-state drive is very weird. A drive is a piece of machinery that makes something move, and a solid-state device by definition has no moving parts. And it's also weird to call them disks because, well, there's not a circular thing in there?

Note 1 from 2025-09-05

There's manual memory management (malloc()), and then there's manual memory management (sbrk()).

Note 2 from 2025-09-04

I've made many false promises of blog posts. The two I posted today were both ones I said I intended to write, and got an enthusiastic reply about, and then didn't actually write. But now I finally have.

How I comment regular expressions

Regular expressions have a reputation for being a write-only language. That is, you can write a regular expression, but once it's been written it's very difficult to read it and figure out how it works or how to change it. I believe this is mostly down to the extreme terseness of the regular expression language, and the solution is, at least in part, the same as the solution for other kinds of…

How I back up my computers

I have four computers that I use personally on a regular basis: A laptop (spock), a home server (hestia), and a VPS (picard), all running various Linux distributions; and a smartphone (alm-ios-04), unfortunately an Apple iPhone (if a miracle occurs, it may someday be replaced by my Librem 5, scotty). I need to back up these computers so I don't lose their contents in the event of some kind of…

Note 1 from 2025-09-04

Here's a simple acid test for your Web site: Open your network inspector, find the throttling option, and set it to the slowest possible speed. Clear your cache, then browse around your site.

Note 1 from 2025-09-03

Excited to see the release of RFC 9787 and RFC 9788 which, if widely adopted, could lead to cryptographically-protected email becoming useful for the first time.

Note 1 from 2025-09-01

The MNT Reform Next looks very nice but... I already have a laptop. The most environmentally-friendly computer is the one you already own. And even if I needed a replacement, buying a new computer creates demand for manufacturing of new computers, when I could get a used one instead. Oh, well.

Note 2 from 2025-08-30

I'm data-modeling a directory in SQLite as a sort of experiment, and I've started to develop a habit of making tiny little one-to-many without rowid tables for properties like phone numbers and email addresses. I sort of get why LDAP is the way it is a little more now. Not remotely all the way, of course.

Note 1 from 2025-08-30

I've started writing SQL with lowercase keywords and it seems largely fine this way. How do people feel about this?

Note 1 from 2025-08-28

Every time I add a full name field to a table I stop, go read Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, and then seriously consider factoring name into its own table.

Note 3 from 2025-08-27

I should really figure out how to customize my locale to get en-US but with metric measurements without having to pretend to be Swedish for measurement purposes only.

Note 2 from 2025-08-27

I'm not sure but I think the problem with Akonadi earlier today was locale-related, somehow. The new version must be more sensitive to locale issues. Qt applications have spewed warnings about the locale for some time but only today did I realize that the locale was incorrectly set using utf8 instead of utf-8. I fixed that and installed the new packages again and this time it all seems to be…

Note 1 from 2025-08-27

Hmmm something wrong with Void's packages for Akonadi I think... Upgraded, Kontact took forever to launch and then after it did it complained that Akonadi wasn't running even though it was.

Note 1 from 2025-08-21

One of my main reasons for rejecting Rust libraries has become questionable ownership models. If you talk about an object that contains all the other things and I pass around handles to the things inside of it instead of owning the things myself and passing around borrowed references I am turning around and running the other way. (Because that means you have just reinvented unchecked pointers, is…

Note 1 from 2025-08-18

I was just thinking about the zlib format and remembered Chris Ferdinandi's post about gzip's inefficiency on small files, which led me to wonder how much lower the floor of useful sizes to compress would be if the Web had used Content-Encoding: zlib instead of Content-Encoding: gzip as standard.

Note 1 from 2025-08-17

Apparently the original IBM Personal Computer design team considered the 68000 as CPU but rejected it over concerns it might not be production-ready soon enough. What a world that would have been.

Note 1 from 2025-08-16

As a pedant, I love when a fellow pedant says something like, Technically spiders aren't bugs, they're arachnids, because then I get to come back with something like, They said bug, not insect, a bug is any small terrestrial arthropod, and annoy everyone even more.

Note 1 from 2025-08-13

Apparently on RISC-V a word is 32 bits, even on 64-bit machines.

Note 2 from 2025-08-08

Huh, apparently cPanel and WHM are still a thing.

Note 1 from 2025-08-08

I'm gluing notify-send to some of my little scripts that otherwise run silently. Hopefully it will make me spend less brain-power wondering did it actually finish.

Note 1 from 2025-07-22

Some Captain Planet villain has convinced this razor manufacturer to sell their detachable razor cartridges attached to handles in four-packs, exclusively.

Note 2 from 2025-07-13

You say you're an engineer? Okay, here's a constraint for you: Your initialization budget is 200 ms. Make it work.

Note 1 from 2025-07-13

Talk to me about how advanced computers have gotten when you can make one that goes from cold off to desktop in <1 sec.