Phil and Jeremy both turned 50 this year. They took the opportunity to write some half-century notes. Having turned 50 myself and inspired by them, I thought I would do the same. 0-10 I see the light 50 years ago in Molise, a southern region of Italy that also happens to be the smallest and less known. One year later, my brother joins the family. Our parents are from a small village in Molise heights. When I am three, my family moves to Nigeria, following my dad, who is employed in the oil field. We spend about two years there. The memories from that period are scavenged from some clips recorded by my dad at the time. A female monkey used to live in our garden. Our home was part of a walled complex. Two soldiers were guarding the entrance, night and day. The wall, I remember, was built with wooden pales, very much like those wild-west forts from the old movies. When we move back, it is for the North-Eastern part of Italy, in the Ferrara province first, and then in Ravenna. I guess there’s not a lot to say about this decade; the usual baby-son-of-a-middle-class-emigrant-family routine applies here. ...

When we talk about getting better at programming, we often talk about testing, writing reusable code, design patterns, and readability. All of those things are important. But in this blog post, I want to talk about a different way to get better at programming: learning how the systems you’re using work! This is the main way I approach getting better at programming. Once again, Julia Evans has great sensible advice up on her site. ...

Write libraries instead of services is an interesting article I read a while ago. I cannot get it off my head. In an attempt to clear up my mind, I decided to sit down and write about it. I have been writing libraries for a good part of my life. Most of my earlier dev-work resides on thousands of computers in the form of libraries. More recently, I have been writing and deploying remote services. Libraries versus Services is a topic I care about. ...

How do you add an empty directory to a Git repository? It’s a classic, and yet, I have to look it up every single time. Git does not support this out of the box: Currently the design of the Git index (staging area) only permits files to be listed, and nobody competent enough to make the change to allow empty directories has cared enough about this situation to remedy it. Directories are added automatically when adding files inside them. That is, directories never have to be added to the repository, and are not tracked on their own. You can say git add <dir> and it will add the files in there. If you really need a directory to exist in checkouts you should create a file in it. .gitignore works well for this purpose; you can leave it empty or fill in the names of files you do not expect to show up in the directory. (source) ...

If you are a grumpy old geek like me, you are probably a sucker for vintage computer games too. I don’t play games. Not anymore. I still enjoy reading about them, though. I guess it’s mostly nostalgia. I also believe that the mid-80s up to the mid-90s really was the golden age of computer games. In my book, innovation started with Infocom’s text adventures and soft-ended with Origin’s Ultima Online. After that, it’s been a constant evolution. “Harder, better, faster, stronger”, yes, but hardly a revolution. ...

I am very ignorant about the Istrian Peninsula’s history, a gap I always wanted to fill. After some research, Fulvio Tomizza’s book, Materada, surfaced as a good fit to fill this gap. It’s a semi-biographic historical novel set in the Istria of the author’s youth. Fulvio Tomizza was born in Giurizzani di Materada, Istria, in 1935. He had to go through all the torments caused in that disputed area by Fascism first (forced Italianization, cultural suppression), and then by the Second World War and the terrible events that followed: the Foibe massacres and the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus. ...

So today, I was setting up a cronjob on my trusty MacBook Pro. The goal was to backup some folders from a remote Linux server via rsync. The script is simple. It goes something like this: rsync -avz -e "ssh -i ~/.ssh/my_rsa_keyfile" myuser@myserver:remotedir/ ~/localdir/ Launched by hand, it works seamlessly. Call it from a cron job via crontab, and I get a permission denied error. I then enabled ssh -v option to gather a little intel on what was actually going on. As it turns out, the exact error was: ...

There is a secret that needs to be understood in order to write good software documentation: there isn’t one thing called documentation, there are four. They are: tutorials, how-to guides, technical reference and explanation. They represent four different purposes or functions, and require four different approaches to their creation. Understanding the implications of this will help improve most documentation - often immensely. I dig Daniele Procida’s take on writing good software documentation. It just makes sense. The system is simple, comprehensive, and, crucial, universally-applicable. The “four different functions” scheme works equally well if you are writing for a technical-savvy audience or the general public, which is excellent. The users I’m writing for are software developers, in some cases, and desktop or web application users in others. ...

I discovered you can use the “diskpart” tool to compact a VHDX. This allows you to shrink a WSL2 virtual disk file, reclaiming disk space. It appeared to work for me without any data corruption, taking the file size down from 100GB to 15GB. (source) I adore Parallels “reclaim disk space” feature. Just the other day, I got back 70GB off my Windows Guest in a breeze. I’m coming from VirtualBox, where reclaiming disk space is a significant pain. I would expect optimize-vhd to achieve the goal with WSL2, but it’s nice to know there are alternatives, like Stephen’s above ...

The Literary Hub has a great short interview with Ian McEwan. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When I was living in London at the start of my career in the mid-1970s, I became friends with Philip Roth, who took an avuncular interest in my work. Where many others thought my writing was wild and weird, he thought I wasn’t being wild enough. He once came to my apartment and spread the typescript of my first novel (The Cement Garden) over the floor. He was on his hands and knees, moving the chapters around. What he wanted was for me to be bolder, crazier. He said, “You have to write as though your parents are dead.” My parents were alive. I took that advice. ...