Misty @misty@digipres.club

There’s a lot of really dangerous misfeatures in Windows 98, but this has to be one of my favourites. “I found an executable you might like. Is this good. Would you like to run it” is so obviously harmful in the era of the internet, but at the time seemed maybe vaguely helpful.

https://www.gamedev.net/articles/programming/general-and-gameplay-programming/the-clash-of-mobile-platforms-j2me-exen-moph-r1944/#a4

Preview of what I’m writing about in my next blog post…

So apparently Go doesn’t have a set data type in its stdlib?? When reading up on it I found this blog which suggests this nonsense instead, using a hashmap with empty anonymous structs as values. https://www.davidkaya.com/sets-in-golang/

I guess it’s not *wrong* if you don’t have sets builtin. Making the best of an awkward situation, but. What if the language just provided sets like Python, Ruby, Rust, etc.

@__Emma_Dickson Welcome!

@terebat Welcome!

It’s been a few years, but I think the -no-cpp-precomp post is still one of my best. Compiler archaeology is fun - always interesting digging through long-forgotten compiler flags in buildsystems to track down what they once meant. http://www.mistys-internet.website/blog/blog/2013/10/19/no-cpp-precomp-the-compiler-flag-that-time-forgot/

The disc is Journey to the Source by Hong Kong explorer and writer Wong How Man, and documents his journey to the source of the Yangtze river. I’m very interested in examining it, but unfortunately I’ve never seen a copy for sale. Most copies are held by Asian institutions.

Putting out a request: do you work for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries? There’s a rare CD-ROM I’m looking for for research purposes, and it appears the only copy held in North America is in that library. Any help is appreciated. https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/9910761664802121

I’m hearing reports that the current Google outage is so bad it’s caused Google to bounce emails with the status for “this address doesn’t exist”. I definitely got GitHub and Kickstarter mark my address as “undeliverable”, which.. is very bad.

So, I guess… if you use Gmail, check every website you’re registered for to see if you need to reverify your address? I definitely had to reverify those two sites.

A problem: a barely-documented CD-ROM game showed up on Mercari, but Japan’s shut down shipments to Canada now. I guess I just need to hope it’s still around when Japan Post opens back up?

So excited for the new features in Ruby 3. The writeup on the preview build has some good details. Static typing, including analysis tools! True multithreading without an interpreter lock! And of course the Ruby 3x3 performance improvements. https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2020/12/08/ruby-3-0-0-preview2-released/

Autoconf 2.70 has all the wonky patch notes you expect from a system that’s been around forever. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autotools-announce/2020-12/msg00001.html

I accidentally left the bay leaf in tonight’s dinner. I poured three bowls, so each has a 33% chance of having the bay leaf. Each bowl has a greater chance of having no bay leaf than of having a bay leaf, so I argue that, statistically, it’s more likely that no bowl has a bay leaf.

Yes this is the right time for you to tell me your favourite citation system

Someone talk me out of using MLA as my citation format for my new blog

Is it possible to override RbConfig::CONFIG values when bundle installing or gem installing? Probably not, right?