today's howtos
-
Day 87: mask properties
There are a bunch of properties you can use to adjust the styling of the mask.
-
Day 86: the initial-letter property
The property takes two arguments. The first one defines the size of the initial letter in terms of how many lines it occupies. The optional second argument defines the number of lines the initial letter should sink. If it's omitted, it equals the initial letter size.
-
The Best Time to Own a Domain Was 20 Years Ago; The Second Best Time Is Today
That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
-
CSS Named Colors: Groups, Palettes, Facts, & Fun
This page contains everything I've ever wanted when working with CSS named colors: groups, palettes, favorites, factoids and more.
-
A few small differences
The main RFCs for mDNS appear to be RFC-6762 and RFC-6763 and to support them in full requires breaking changes to my library. The first are a bunch of flags, defined in RFC-6762 and it affects pretty much the entire codebase. The first deals with “Questions Requesting Unicast Responses.” Most flags are defined in the header section, but for this, it's “the top bit in the class field of a DNS question as the unicast-response bit.” And because mDNS specifically allows multiple questions, it's seems like it could be set per-question, and not per the request as a whole, as the RFC states: “[w]hen this bit is set in a question, it indicates that the querier is willing to accept unicast replies in response to this specific query, as well as the usual multicast responses.” To me, that says, “each resource record needs a flag for a unicast reponse.” The other bit the “outdated cache entry” bit. which again applies to individual resource records and not to the request as a whole. And again, to me, that says, “each resoure record needs a flag to invalidate previously cached values.”
-
International domain names: where does https://meßagefactory.ca lead you?
Today, in theory, you can use any Unicode character you like as part of a domain name, including emojis. Whether that is wise is something else.
What does the standard says? Given a domain name, we should identify its labels. They are normally separated by dots (.) into labels: www.microsoft.com has three labels. But you may also use other Unicode characters as separators ( ., ．, 。, ｡). Each label is further processed. If it is all ASCII, then it is left as is. Otherwise, we must convert it to an ASCII code called “punycode” after doing the following according to RFC 3454: [...]
-
I should always make a checklist for anything complicated
Today I did some work on the disk setup of my home desktop and I got shot in the foot, because when you remove disks from Linux software RAID arrays and then reboot, the boot process may reassemble those RAID arrays using the disks you removed (or even just one disk), instead of the actual live disks in the RAID array. There are a number of reasons that this happened to me, but one of them is that I didn't make a checklist for what I was doing and instead did it on the fly.
-
Count magical bunnies with LibreOffice Calc
I love working with spreadsheets, and my favorite spreadsheet application is LibreOffice Calc. A spreadsheet is a grid of cells where each column is represented by letters and rows are numbered. You can perform all kinds of calculations using a spreadsheet. If you can perform a calculation based on other values, you can do that in a spreadsheet.
Here I illustrate how to use the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet to perform a particular calculation called the Fibonacci Sequence. Fibonacci Sequence numbers pop up everywhere in mathematics and the sciences and are often used to model a simple population growth.