news
Programming Leftovers
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Hackaday ☛ The Y2K Bug In BSD 2.11 That Survived 2000
This can create an ‘offset excessive’ error in the log, which, as the attached patch shows, is due to the use of explicit 20th-century numbering. Although not a bug that’ll really affect anyone, it shows that Y2K bugs didn’t just hide in two-digit year fields, but also lazy shortcuts and assumptions when handling years. This will be useful information while we try to avoid society melting down once more, as the Year 2038 problem is now pretty much right around the corner.
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Rlang ☛ armadillo4r 1.0.0 is on CRAN
armadillo 1.0.0 brings enhanced sparse matrix support, reduced dependencies, and comprehensive cross-platform testing.
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Nick Moore ☛ Forest for the trees
Computer programmers love collections, never more so than when those collections can contain other collections. If your collections can contain other collections, you can build them up into a hierarchical tree structure, and everyone loves those.
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Perl / Raku
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Rakulang ☛ 2026.24 The Raku Foundation
Today, Elizabeth Mattijsen announced the formation of The Raku Foundation in a blog post A Year Later: a TRF!
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Python
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Tim Retout: In memoriam commit-email.py
I have proposed the deletion of an obsolete script, but it makes me feel complicated feelings so I’m going to try and express those. This particular script was written in 2014, but the concept goes back much further – before git was invented.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Panagiotis Vryonis ☛ A forgotten terminal trick: the host-writable status line.
VT320 allowed programs to write to a special “status line” using DECSSDT/DECSASD. Can we bring it back?
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