Tag: Rant

Nix / NixOS misconceptions

Sunday, Aug 6, 2023

I’ve been using Nix for a year now. It’s been going fairly well, by the way. Here are some misconceptions I’ve had to overcome to become a more productive Nixer. False: You can’t deploy Nix software to Docker or Kubernetes False. If you can push to a docker registry such as docker.io, you can deploy to Docker or Kubernetes using Nix. You can use dockerTools.buildImage to build a docker image from Nix.

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Racket frustrates me

Friday, Jun 16, 2023

Sorry if I upset any of the nice Racket folks out there. It’s time for a little reality check. First, repeat after me: Coding is a tool to get stuff done. If you let your programming language impact your productivity, you are not in charge, the technology is calling the shots. Why would I use Racket today? Do I want to iterate every 18 hours waiting for the pkgs.

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You want sudo -i or su -

Sunday, Feb 14, 2021

You want to use sudo -i or su - to log into root. sudo su anything is superfluous, because you probably should be using sudo -i or sudo -s, which are roughly equivalent, depending if you want to simulate a login (su - or sudo -i) or not (su or sudo -s).1 When to use su -? You want to log into root using the root password. Typically you must be in the wheel group (check your PAM configuration).

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The Danger of fuzzy matching over one's PATH

Friday, Aug 2, 2019

Awhile back I noticed my personal mnt/ directory, my (empty) personal tmp/ directory, and a few symbolic links disappeared from my home directory. I only noticed because I use unison1 to synchronize my desktop and laptop homedirs. The actual amount of removed directories and symbolic links were staggering, and it costed me five minutes of extra effort to search through the unison UI to ignore files I don’t want to synchronize.

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GNU C Style

Sunday, Jan 13, 2019

No. Do not use it please! There are far easier-to-read and easier-to-use styles for C! 1 Indentation Style on Wikipedia ↩︎

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