Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you invoke man after midnight it should print “gimme gimme gimme”, because of the Abba song called “Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight”. Well, he did actually put it in. A few people were amused to discover it, and we mostly forgot about it until today....

I just released FatturaElettronica .NET v3.5.0. This version adds multi-language support, all thanks to the excellent work done by Michael Mairegger. We currently support Italian and German and are ready to accept contributions for other languages. The Fattura Elettronica open-source project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices that adhere to the standard defined by the Italian Revenue Agency.

I never knew about the connection between Ray Bradbury, John Huston, and Herman Melville. Today, few people are aware that Bradbury, renowned science fiction writer, beloved fantasist, and mainstay on banned-book lists, wrote the screenplay for the 1956 John Huston adaptation of the Melville classic, which starred Gregory Peck as the iconic and obsessive Captain Ahab. Writing the screenplay was a dream come true for Bradbury, until it morphed into a waking nightmare....

Dave Rupert, reasoning on why he likes books: Books are strange objects. Chapters and chapters of coherent research and lived experiences assembled by people who wanted to put it all down in one place. Edited by actual editors who like editing. Designed— down to the weight of the paper, the typography, and the illustration on the cover— to make the experience of reading it enjoyable. Books are uncanny and impractical objects....

Today, I learned the hard way that NGINX has default buffer sizes, which can cause trouble in specific scenarios like mine.

I admit, like many of my compatriots in this last year and a half, I follow a lot more tennis than usual, and it is all the fault (or merit) of Jannick Sinner. The top-level pro tennis field appears distant, privileged, brilliant and rewarding. We appreciate the immense talent of these players and sympathize with the struggle and stress they undergo. We praise their character, determination, and mental strength. They make a lot of money, so we infer they conduct fulfilling and satisfying lives....

In the end we won because the open source community started to converge on distributed version control and we were the only ones in the hosting space that truly cared about how developers worked at all. The only ones who questioned it, approached it from first principles, tried to make it better holistically rather than just throwing more features onto something existing in order to sell it. Full story here....

At home, we haven’t done anything about it yet: we’re still 100% grid-dependant and old-fashioned, partly because it would be problematic for us as we live in an apartment building and partly because, frankly, it still seems expensive, especially with three kids studying away from home. Also, I want to avoid getting entangled in another project; my mental bandwidth is limited (and I suspect it will only worsen over time.)...

A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens. Full story here. What a great story. Teenagers who are enthusiastic about hacking and coding and have lots of fun in creative ways. It reminds me so much of my teenage years, like when assembling a fake backdoor on Lorien, my first BBS, as a honeypot to attract local hackers so I could later reach out and get to know them1....