tgp's comments | WingNews

tgp | 7 months ago | on: "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit

The ID card also has this amazing function where you can log in to sites using the card without revealing your identity, and even merging the databases from two sites does not allow two users to be identified as the same natural person: https://www.personalausweisportal.de/Webs/PA/EN/business/tec...

I have never seen a website offering login using this function, though ;-)

tgp | 3 years ago | on: Craziest thing I ever used SQLite for: partial file deduplication (2022)

The other day I found out that not only ZFS and Btrfs have a dedup feature, but also XFS (which I use on my home partition) supports a feature called reflinks aka block sharing. So I threw duperemove at ~/.virtualenvs and ~/.cache/bazel and freed up a good 15GB of disk space. Good stuff.

tgp | 5 years ago | on: Why we decided for and against Ubuntu Core

I would have loved to see a comparison of Ubuntu Core against openSUSE MicroOS (https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:MicroOS), I wonder whether it would be up for the task they had in mind.

"In other words openSUSE MicroOS is an operating system you don't have to worry about. It's designed for but not limited to container hosts and edge devices.

...

- Read-only root filesystem to avoid accidental modifications of the OS

- Transactional Updates leveraging btrfs snapshots to apply updates without interfering with the running system

- health-checker to verify the OS is operational after updates. Automatically rolls back in case of trouble.

..."

tgp | 6 years ago | on: Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

When a Western newspaper writes in the English language for a Western audience, isn't the most important thing to make articles clear and easy to understand? I understand that it's also important to respect the culture and language and the background of the person that you write about, but I guess unless you really want to have the Japanese characters in your English newspaper, it's a trade-off.

I live in Japan, my children are half-Japanese (with my foreign family name), but I have to say it'd be weird to see an article that writes about, say, "Tom Smith and his daughter Smith Hanako". Similarly, reading a Japanese text, seeing "トム・スミスと娘のスミス花子" (tomu sumisu to musume no sumisu hanako) would feel weirdly inconsistent.

tgp | 7 years ago | on: Static site generators need less rigid content APIs

Yes, Lektor is great. The outstanding features are the admin interface which allows even non-technical people to create and edit content, and the content models which allow to work nicely with structured data.

For example, in the past I have built a multilingual media database with Lektor, where items could be, say, books or movies, and depending on the content type I could enter a "number of pages" (int) or "duration" (time) or "author" (selection from a list of "person"-typed contents), and the admin interface would be auto-generated. I haven't seen a similar functionality in other SSGs.

Downside: For large sites rebuilding takes very, very long...

tgp | 7 years ago | on: Japan's most valuable startup aims to teach factory robots to think

Note that Preferred Networks is always looking for top talent in our offices in Tokyo and Berkeley: https://www.preferred-networks.jp/en/job

tgp | 8 years ago | on: Don’t Use Markdown for Documentation (2016)

Markdown is fine for small snippets, READMEs, Github comments etc., but I don't think it's suitable for a longer document such as software documentation. After thinking about that problem and exploring options for a while I have come to believe that some lightweight markup that can be converted to DocBook may be the way to go. I have blogged about such a pipeline here: https://nablux.net/tgp/weblog/2017/04/02/lightweight-semanti...