Imogen Kinsman imogenkinsman

Give me back my sanity

One of the many things I do for my group at work is to take care of automating as many things as possible. It usually brings me a lot of satisfaction, mostly because I get a kick out of making people's lives easier.

But sometimes, maybe too often, I end up in drawn-out struggles with machines and programs. And sometimes, these struggles bring me to the edge of despair, so much so that I regularly consider living on a computer-less island growing vegetables for a living.

This is the story of how I had to install Pandoc in a CentOS 6 Docker container. But more generally, this is the story of how I think computing is inherently broken, how programmers (myself included) tend to think that their way is the way, how we're ultimately replicating what most of us think is wrong with society, building upon layers and layers of (best-case scenario) obscure and/or weak foundations.

*I would like to extend my gratitude to Google, StackOverflow, GitHub issues but mostly, the people who make the

i3 Window Manager Cheat Sheet

$mod refers to the modifier key (alt by default)

General

startx i3 start i3 from command line
$mod+<Enter> open a terminal
$mod+d open dmenu (text based program launcher)
$mod+r resize mode ( or to leave resize mode)
$mod+shift+e exit i3

When should you use DateTime and when should you use Time?

It's a common misconception that [William Shakespeare][1] and [Miguel de Cervantes][2] died on the same day in history - so much so that UNESCO named April 23 as [World Book Day because of this fact][3]. However because England hadn't yet adopted [Gregorian Calendar Reform][4] (and wouldn't until [1752][5]) their deaths are actually 10 days apart. Since Ruby's Time class implements a [proleptic Gregorian calendar][6] and has no concept of calendar reform then there's no way to express this. This is where DateTime steps in:

>> shakespeare = DateTime.iso8601('1616-04-23', Date::ENGLAND)
=> Tue, 23 Apr 1616 00:00:00 +0000
>> cervantes = DateTime.iso8601('1616-04-23', Date::ITALY)
=> Sat, 23 Apr 1616 00:00:00 +0000

This is my first Arch install and I keep forgetting or using unsafe pacman commands, so I made a thing.

Arch's philosophy is to be modular, give you control over everything, and allow you to shoot yourself in the foot every other day until you run out of toes.

This guide is meant to be used as a quick reference and prioritizes safe, sane defaults, but you should read the pacman docs first. They're a quick read, and will save you some pain later.

Pacman and Aur

Pacman only works with official repos - unofficial repos are listed in aur, the Arch Linux Repository. It's common to use yay, a wrapper that allows you to easily use both aur and the official repository:

	= Arch Linux step-by-step installation =
	= http://blog.fabio.mancinelli.me/2012/12/28/Arch_Linux_on_BTRFS.html =


	== Boot the installation CD ==

	== Create partition ==

	cfdisk /dev/sda
	* Create a partition with code 8300 (Linux)

	from thespian.actors import *
	from datetime import datetime, timedelta
	from logging import getLogger, basicConfig, DEBUG
	from random import randint

	basicConfig(level=DEBUG)
	log = getLogger(__name__)


	class Postman(Actor):