Chris Siebenmann @cks@mastodon.social

I guess November 22nd is not terrible for Toronto's first significant snowfall of the year, but it still feels early and disconcerting. If I was communing, I probably couldn't bike tomorrow; that's definitely early and quite unusual for November.

(Usually I expect for there to be too much snow for my biking sporadically in December. Also, maybe some year I will get studded bike tires and just keep riding.)

Blog post: Grafana and the case of the infinite serial number https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/GrafanaInfiniteSerialNumber

(In which liberal parsing delivers surprising results. Sometimes.)

Today's random thought: this prolonged 'work from home in socks or bare feet' time is undoubtedly affecting the calluses on my feet, but I don't know if they're better, worse, or just different than usual.

(My calluses always change around when I shift footwear between sandals and boots and so on, and there's been some of that too.)

Wow, Toronto is being really windy today, at least in bursts. It's sometimes alarmingly intense. The bounds of heavy rain don't help either.

(Weather is nice in the abstract, in the concrete it can be something else. At least my area's power hasn't failed. Yet.)

Today while out biking I saw a (thankfully small) protest march by anti-mask, anti-shutdown people. I do not have charitable feelings, and I wonder who is behind them and their neat collection of carefully printed signs.

(I would swipe from Orwell and call them 'objectively pro-death', but he later repudiated that polemic line.)

Blog post: The problems inherent in building your own copies of software packages https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/BuildingPackagesFlaws

(tl;dr: building and maintaining a good copy of a package takes ongoing specific expertise in that package, and you only have the time to be an expert on so many of them.)

Sysadmin pro-tip: if you're using grep, especially on log files or in a pipeline (or both), always always ALWAYS use 'grep -a', not plain grep. The prize for forgetting this is periodic useless grep output of 'Binary whatever matches', when a few binary characters work their way into the logs or other input for some reason.

Looking at 'perf top' on one of our busy Linux servers is surprisingly interesting. I can't believe it took me this long to start playing around with it.

It feels like peak Toronto to look up to two ghostly raccoon faces peering in at me through the screen of an open window. They were not impressed when I asked them to shoo.

(I closed the window. I don't need raccoons deciding that the only thing in the way is a pesky screen they can easily deal with.)

The only new iOS 14 home screen widget I want is something that tells me when the next scheduled alarm is. I'd even settle for something that is just for alarms from the Clock app.

(But of course Apple now thinks your work and weekend wakeup alarms should be in Health as part of sleep tracking. Look, Apple, I wake up at different times under difference circumstances. Clock alarms are much easier to handle.)

The downside of having my own copy of the Go toolchain on five different machines is that I have a bunch of rebuilding to do every time a new minor version is released. On the positive side, the Go toolchain builds in a couple of minutes, maximum.

(Maybe I should automate the rebuilds. But there's a bunch of machine to machine variation in where I keep the source and so on.)

I haven't started up Firefox on the office machine for *months*. It is going to be so unhappy with me.

(It's not you, Firefox, it's well you know. Nothing graphical has been happening on that machine for months.)

It is the time of year where sunset happens at 5pm or earlier and I cannot say I'm enthused. At least this year I'm not biking home from work every week-day in the post 5pm dark (and cold).

Today it reached the stage of fall where I start applying moisturizer to my hands.

(40% humidity in here right now, apparently.)

Today's realization: it will probably be at least a year of working from home before we get to go back to the office on a regular basis and things become normal.

(It's already been almost eight months.)