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Programming Leftovers
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2026-07-17 [Older] Miroslav Vadkerti: The Dumb Git Protocol That Flooded Our Git Server
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Tony Finch ☛ Counting the days, revisited
Many years ago I wrote about how to convert Gregorian dates to Julian Day numbers or similar counts such as rata die as used in Calendrical Calculations. This algorithm is the core of C’s mktime() function that converts a broken-down date-time into linear time_t.
I recently learned from Ben Joffe that I was missing a few tricks, and my old code wasn’t as good as it could have been. Here’s a better version (using conventional not C numbering): [...]
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Python
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University of Toronto ☛ An irritating incompatible change in Python 3.14's argparse
Today I discovered that Python 3.14 contains an irritating, incompatible change to historical argparse behavior, which I can best illustrate with a little piece of code.
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Adam Johnson ☛ Python: tprof 1.3.0: now with less overhead
Back in January, I introduced tprof, a targeting profiler for Python 3.12+ that measures the time spent in specific functions, rather than your whole program. As a reminder, here’s the basic usage, specifying a target function with -t and a script to run: [...]
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Michael Stapelberg ☛ Tracking down a Zsh history data loss bug 🐞
Occasionally, I noticed that commands I knew I executed the day before were not findable in my shell history, meaning pressing Ctrl+R for backward history search yielded no results. Whenever I noticed this, my shell history file contained only very old entries, with years of newer entries missing.
The first few times this happened I just restored my shell history from my daily backup and did not bother investigating any further. But the issue kept happening.
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Open Data
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Rlang ☛ NZ and US petrol (‘gasoline’) and diesel prices by @ellis2013nz
This is another short, simple blog post building a chart I am going to be updating regularly as part of monitoring the impact of the slow-burn fuel crisis caused by the USA war with Iran.
I have a page on this website with a few charts on the fuel crisis.
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