The happy new year is here. I was conversing offline with individuals about courses a little ways back in time. And, if it’s any solace to anyone online deathly afraid of the future, keep reading?

Fun fact: Many seemingly think that I’ve used generative models to build this inert static site (hoho). How would you know the difference? And can you fully trust it?

The end of the year is around the corner. There are varied spins on “speak of the devil”. I was shown a really neat one some time ago;

“Talk of an angel and you hear his wings.”

There’s a fun and purposively perplexing novel called “His Master’s Voice”. Inside, it invents the term circular irony.

Fuzzy search is spooktastic. I’m sometimes asked, but I know nothing of AI generally. I don’t read much tech news these days, but I do speed-read headlines and peek in occasionally.

If anyone’s getting into nginx look into nginxinc/crossplane. That parser is particularly good if you’re trying to analyze or do sophisticated stuff with a huge nginx.conf. I have this one installed in my playground, here’s a quick and dirty demo:

There are a collection of poems called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I saw references to one of its four liners in a random video clip of a show. That’s unexpected.

Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain–This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

The translation on the third line is especially spiffy, and the fourth, sufficiently crafty (at least in my opinion).

I’m remembering something kind of amusing. I used to be big on portable documents until I discovered the ultra hard way how cryptic everything was underneath the hood. They’re good enough, but have any of you ever heard of the cracked WWF format (not wrestling)?

It was an encrypted portable document where the defining feature was to make printing technically impossible to save the world. Good thing it was .wwf and not .wwe. This might sound fantastical, but maybe it was really true.

I think someone asked. But is it possible to classically convert a PDF into JSON? And the answer is yes, yes you can. The feats of programming know no end (it’s out of my explanatory scope, sorry).

qpdf --json-output my.pdf my.json

I’m finally realizing that in the stack link of this post, there’s actually an entry about “grepping” the device. Everything’s a file or something. It feels comical.

Amusing yet confuzzling? If you happen to have GCC installed and it actually does this, it’s probably not gcc, but perhaps clang wrapped (or symlinked) in disguise. Operating systems and environments vary in peculiar ways.

There’s truly nothing more liberating than deleting all of your work by mistake (or having it deleted). That’s why it never hurts to have multiple distribution (and backup) strategies. A newer way is invented every day:

gcc -o delete-this-file.c

I came across an interesting site publishing social media trends. There are many countries in there, but that first link is for The Bahamas.