bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦

Software developer, entrepreneur, former government regulator, current government advisor, amateur scientist.  https://berthub.eu/

Website: https://berthub.eu/
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6317-0670
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bert-hubert-b05452/

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bert_hubert_at_fosstodon.org@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2025-05-13 08:42:06 UTC

As I type away into the void, hoping to achieve something, I sometimes wonder if it is worth it. Do people read this stuff? There are now 222 articles on https://berthub.eu/articles/ and sometimes one of these gets read really well. But what about the "back catalog"? Turns out that a lot of traffic is in fact coming from the 200 older pieces:
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/499/615/087/350/437/original/ef2a27f9c669685a.png

2025-05-07 07:34:20 UTC

Everyone agrees something needs to be done about our total dependence on US clouds. But what? And who should do it? Ample words have been written on the 'why', and we also have a lot of text on our values and that *someone* should do *something*. Here I elaborate on an earlier suggestion with a coherent strategy that is concrete enough to disagree with. This reads well with the latest Euro-Stack letter also: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/a-coherent-non-us-cloud-strategy/

2025-05-02 18:27:42 UTC

Quick note on giving talks. It is not enough to have great content. Expectations are low. When you start off, quickly establish some kind of bond with your audience. Once that is in place, your listeners will give your presentation a decent chance: https://berthub.eu/draft-klad-tijdelijk-draft/but-first-connect-with-your-audience.html

2025-05-01 05:38:47 UTC

I just read Microsoft's post on how much they love Europe & that they are not the same as Donald Trump. As far as I can tell there is nothing new in there, no new/useful protections, no guarantees. It rehashes already debunked things like the "Microsoft Lock Box". The story mostly serves as a reminder of how worried we should all be about basing our governments & societies in companies far away under questionable legal regimes: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2025/04/30/european-digital-commitments/

2025-04-29 11:11:23 UTC

If I wanted to leave fosstodon.org, where should I go? I need a very boring server with no surprising moderators causing upheaval..

2025-04-29 08:59:24 UTC

In 15 minutes Europe will hopefully launch its next climate satellite. The launch can however only be watched via YouTube since we apparently can’t do that ourselves and have to put our government info next to the antivax promo. https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/ESA_Web_TV

2025-04-27 07:11:22 UTC

“Going to the cloud” can mean renting services/servers that you could get from anywhere. There’s little lock-in. The same four words “going to the cloud” might also mean locking your operations to a specific cloud provider, forever. This difference vital, yet often ignored: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/beware-cloud-is-part-of-the-software/

2025-04-12 19:59:17 UTC

"Going to the cloud' can mean anything from renting a VM, deploying containers, or building on top of advanced (hyperscaler) cloud services (queues, buckets, customer IAM etc). Is there a good term to describe the latter development style, going all in on cloud services? I've used 'cloud native' before but the meaning of that is not clear or useful. Better suggestions very welcome!

2025-04-02 09:35:11 UTC

With great fanfare the #NeoNephos foundation was announced just now over at #Kubecon. It is not that easy to figure out that this means, but it appears to be about Kubernetes-like infrastructure, which I rank as 'step 3' on the cloud scale, where AWS/Google/Azure are at 5.
https://neonephos.org/2025/03/31/the-linux-foundation-announces-the-launch-of-neonephos-to-advance-digital-autonomy-in-europe/ - and some projects are here https://neonephos.org/projects/ - further reading on the kinds of clouds: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/

2025-04-01 19:01:28 UTC

Very sad to learn that Dave Täht has passed away. Dave was one of the driving forces fighting bufferbloat. His work is likely saving whole years of latency every hour around the world. Some loving words can be found here: https://libreqos.io/2025/04/01/in-loving-memory-of-dave/ - his good fight will not be forgotten!

2025-03-30 09:27:12 UTC

The good news is: we made it out of winter without depleting European gas storage sites! The bad news, we'll need to refill ~twice as much gas as past years to refill to healthy levels. Every new heat pump, solar panel and wind turbine will help us reach that goal more easily:
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/250/662/467/075/085/original/e0647141ceb710c5.png

2025-03-29 09:11:32 UTC

Doing some work on my unreleased yet widely used availability & performance monitoring thing Simplomon. https://codeberg.org/berthubert/simplomon
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/244/934/989/987/945/original/b2c76f83b569d030.png
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/244/938/948/710/817/original/abef079bf6c6a7e8.png

2025-03-25 07:00:51 UTC

Me, being subtle.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/221/776/629/339/567/original/2aac5391e54c611e.png

2025-03-18 16:29:20 UTC

Massive result in Dutch parliament just now. They passed 10 separate motions to enhance digital resilience, run more of our own servers & reduce dependency on US cloud technology.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/dutch-parliament-calls-end-reliance-us-software-2025-03-18/

2025-03-18 14:51:20 UTC

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the pain is more 'AWS Cognito'. The market is not Kubernetes.

2025-03-15 16:50:10 UTC

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maybe not the best example (for me), but perhaps I know too much. I'm not putting that much stock in security barriers I can't see. The history is not that great. https://www.techradar.com/pro/amazon-pauses-usd1bn-microsoft-365-rollout-following-russian-security-concerns

2025-03-15 16:33:36 UTC

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well, I did not mean to endorse AWS etc, but I am pretty fed up with linguistic tricks used by at best "container" providers that they are in the same business as AWS/GCP etc.

2025-03-15 16:16:07 UTC

No matter how much you want it, you can't use a clever definition of "cloud native" to pretend that you compete with the AWS/Azure/Google stack. And please don't try to fool people with a wonky definition, it will backfire eventually. "There is no cloud just other people's computers" means you don't understand what modern developers are doing with clouds. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/

2025-03-14 11:34:11 UTC

We talk a lot about our enormous dependence on American clouds, but what exactly are we talking about? And is Europe equally dependent on all types of cloud? This article is aimed at policy makers, but it may also provide some clarity about the broader landscape to actual cloud users. The six levels of cloud:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/

2025-03-11 14:07:36 UTC

With a quote by me. Very happy to see this problem getting traction outside of tech circles: https://www.politico.eu/article/push-for-eurostack-as-eu-us-tech-tensions-grow/

2025-03-09 12:15:42 UTC

Back when COVID-19 hit, savvy observers were aware this was going to be Bad, even as we were surrounded by people who assumed this would not be a big deal. I vividly remember doing last minute shopping with folks thronging around bowls of free food. I knew then not to get anywhere near that. I get the same feeling now. We cling to normalcy but the world is heading to a crazy situation at a rapid clip. Yet our thinking is not yet there. "Surely this will pass?"

2025-03-09 10:26:20 UTC

For the people speculating about "jailbreaking" the F35 so you could fly it without US support. The thing is so maintenance heavy it won't fly after a week if you stop supplying it proprietary parts and loving US vendor help. The software is only a tiny thing relatively speaking. This goes for a lot of high-end military kit.

2025-03-09 10:19:28 UTC

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it falls out of the sky after a week of no maintenance using proprietary parts. So it doesn't matter. It is lost.

2025-03-03 09:54:27 UTC

A reminder, no matter how hard you try, there are things you can't *meaningfully* explain to people who do not (yet) have the background to understand it. There is only so much gap you can bridge in a single attempt. Some things truly require education and a lot of time. Here Feynman (in pain I think) explains the limits of explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8

2025-03-02 17:27:46 UTC

The article below (and the Dutch version) received over 100k real visitors. Apparently this does interest us. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

2025-03-02 14:29:48 UTC

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some places do get some answers over UDP, which is what makes it all so hard to understand. The source port number also appears to matter somehow.

2025-03-01 22:50:09 UTC

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- back up your computer, we're going to need it!
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/089/614/769/188/877/original/1e8f52707c7a7784.png

2025-03-01 09:04:07 UTC

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you fell for it sadly. The reality is not like that. Sanctions mean stuff will stop working just the same. And belief in legal firewalls at this stage is a bit naive.

2025-02-28 21:26:13 UTC

Many European governments are in the process of moving most of their INTERNAL communication to US controlled servers, in full view of the US intelligence apparatus. The political situation in the USA is however not going to get any less scary. Any (forced) migrations over summer might no longer be very wise. https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/26/europe_has_second_thoughts_about/

2025-02-26 10:14:28 UTC

Regarding previous post, I have more sharing links available if you need them.

2025-02-24 19:06:16 UTC

A Dutch government department (not sensitive) has deeplinked an image from my website on their (apparently) autoreloading intranet page. It is a good thing I'm a responsible person (ahum). Here is the number of hits/minute, clearly showing the lunch break, and that far fewer people work on Friday, and that most visits are in the morning. This is a GREAT example of how much data you leak by putting external content on your (government) web page.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/060/420/401/843/961/original/e7c9c532df5216a1.png

2025-02-23 19:50:32 UTC

If you send me a Microsoft Teams link to talk about your open source policies, I'll respond with a Signal meeting link. And if you find it hard to install additional software to meet with me, I feel exactly the same way.

2025-02-23 11:53:22 UTC

It is very hard to accept, but it is no longer safe to move EU governments & societies to US clouds. Not only is it dangerous to do so, it is also likely flat out illegal in the near feature. We're trading convenience for utter dependence on a mad king. It should stop.
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

2025-02-23 09:41:49 UTC

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via hoger onderwijs persbureau in veel universiteitsbladen: https://www.cursor.tue.nl/achtergrond/2025/februari/week-3/waarom-mag-chatgpt-reclame-maken-bij-surf/

2025-02-22 21:35:02 UTC

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yes. The code out there has rarely or never seen really strange data. I do know there are heuristics in there that start with GPS. Ublox fundamentally changes its behaviour also if you tell it not to use GPS.

2025-02-22 20:40:45 UTC

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I've tried in many places to raise the issue of 'fuzzing' GNSS receivers how they'd react to truly odd data coming from one constellation. Most places did not quite understand the question. Many seemed to assume this would not happen/not be a problem. Only one (important) place assured me they had looked into it.

2025-02-19 20:37:24 UTC

The legality (not wisdom) of putting European private data on US clouds hinges on the availability of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Trump neutered this board, and the European parliament has taken notice & asked the European Commission what they think:
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/032/467/413/708/900/original/f36b37e474c43380.png

2025-02-16 09:19:14 UTC

A good day to re-read George Orwell's review of Bertrand Russel's book 'Power'.
"Underlying this is the idea that common sense always wins in the end. And yet the peculiar horror of the present moment is that we cannot be sure that this is so"
https://www.lehman.edu/faculty/rcarey/BRSQ/06may.orwell.htm
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/012/817/492/933/918/original/f3b9583f0a2c2cb7.png

2025-02-09 15:13:05 UTC

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perhaps reconsider that you need to be sure your outgoing email is actually OK before you can complain rightfully that it ends up in the spam folder.

2025-02-09 13:46:44 UTC

I'm no fan of the email oligopoly of Google, Microsoft and Apple. But if you care about how Gmail feels about your email, I highly recommend enabling Google Postmaster Tools for your domain. This tells you how often people flag your email as spam, if your encryption is enabled, if your DKIM/DMARC is working & more.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/974/229/717/399/463/original/e09f155592c29b71.png

2025-02-03 13:14:57 UTC

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I showed you an independent legal analysis. Do you also have a link to one that backs up your claims? That would be mighty interesting. And novel btw.

2025-02-03 12:44:51 UTC

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I recommend reading https://www.ncsc.nl/binaries/ncsc/documenten/publicaties/2022/augustus/16/cloud-act-memo/Cloud+Act+Memo+Final.pdf before continuing to opine on the security of EU data on Microsoft servers.

2025-02-02 13:38:29 UTC

In Dutch, but translation works well. My call for the Dutch government to retain at least a core IT/communication/email/file capability that is independent of US clouds. Named after the iconic Radio Kootwijk which we built in response to the English cutting off our communications with Indonesia in 1916: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/mailen-en-communiceren-zonder-musk-en-trump-cloud-kootwijk/

2025-02-01 21:25:35 UTC

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(looks like this is not happening for now btw, taken out of the agenda and proposal)

2025-01-30 16:10:17 UTC

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The SQLite FTS5 people feel the same way, and offer a mode where your index becomes *way* smaller ('contentless tables'), but it is quite the hassle. You also lose some functionality. In this case my code would've become a lot more tricker and I would have saved operators 120 euros. Or their far bigger cloud spend to get the same. So probably worth it. 2/2

2025-01-30 16:07:08 UTC

Today I doubled the memory in a server to 64GB and everything is so much better now. This cost me 120 euros. This is for a full text index on >150GB of documents, and the index is 17GB. But it still feels like cheating to use that much RAM. However, if you can solve your problem for 120 euros that is also a big win. 1/

2025-01-29 16:43:12 UTC

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For how this works, developers are always worried no one is yet running their latest versions. You do them a great favour by deploying and trusting their latest and greatest. It helps everyone gain confidence in the new versions. And on the flip side, it is a lot of work for a developer to try to investigate your issue in years old releases. So everything is just Way better if first reproduce on something recent.

2025-01-29 16:38:38 UTC

A pro-tip from the field - if you want to report a problem to an open source project, it helps TREMENDOUSLY if you can reproduce the issue with a very recent release of their work. In other news, my parliamentary data monitor https://opentk.nl/ is now running on a two week old SQLite version.

2025-01-29 08:32:28 UTC

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.. Hopefully this will then prompt actual projects in many of the niches we mention, but EuroStack is not a development project in itself. It's an opinion campaign and everyone is welcome to join." https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7270923211142262784?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7270923211142262784%2C7289300319555993602%29&replyUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A7270923211142262784%2C7289631793245265922%29&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287289300319555993602%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7270923211142262784%29&dashReplyUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A%287289631793245265922%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7270923211142262784%29

2025-01-29 08:31:01 UTC

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.. hat channels actual investments (funds, public procurement etc) at all levels of the stack. It's a way to raise the attention of the European leadership and counter the idea that regulation (while important) is sufficient to bridge the gap that we have with US and China, or that they can continue to buy Microsoft and Google products while repeating their plans for digital sovereignty. ..

2025-01-29 08:30:24 UTC

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From one of the people that helped writing the pitch "EuroStack is "vaporware" in the sense that is not software or anything practical (nor an organization), it is not a technical project but rather an umbrella term and campaign to promote the idea that no European alternatives will emerge without a coordinated strategy and industrial policy ..

2025-01-28 08:00:14 UTC

Always good to go to the source - even on modest hardware you can use Ollama to run different versions of DeepSeek-R1. It sure is long winded in its thinking! This is the 70b version:
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/904/920/928/636/308/original/b208a40fc4dce82f.png

2025-01-27 19:35:57 UTC

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We might have hoped for more immediate breakthroughs, and people were surely expecting those. These days we are working on 'pangenomes' which incorporate all human DNA variation, and these may in fact hold more 'smoking gun' results than the "universal genome" created by the HGP. But because we would not have gotten where we are today without first doing "a" HGP, it has by definition been a success. /end

2025-01-27 19:33:29 UTC

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yes hello, I do know a bit. The human genome project can now be reproduced in a single week. We now have a depth and breadth of DNA knowledge of all kinds of human beings the original project never dreamed of. But to get to where we are today the HGP had to happen first. One of the main discoveries may have been that our genome is far more nuanced and complicated than people thought. There is no chance we would not have done the project. It was inevitable. 1/

2025-01-27 08:22:17 UTC

Interestingly, one person captured by big tech found that Microsoft was perfectly in their rights to POST to you "since we could have no proof a user wasn't behind initiating that POST". Another reader wanted Microsoft to be prosecuted for hacking. Others chimed in how this explained their subscribe/unsubscribe links being weird lately: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/shifting-cyber-norms-microsoft-post/

2025-01-26 19:42:57 UTC

"The second advantage of WAL-mode is that writers do not block readers and readers to do not block writers. This is mostly true" - coming to you live from the part where this is not true. #sqlite3 https://sqlite.org/wal.html

2025-01-25 12:39:45 UTC

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Another favorite is London Calling by The Clash. It is about a nuclear winter dystopia. Not about how great London is. There is even a conference called London Calling. https://nanoporetech.com/about/events/conferences/lc24

2025-01-25 12:37:13 UTC

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Every Breath You Take by The Police perhaps. Often played at weddings. It is about stalking and surveillance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Breath_You_Take

2025-01-25 12:24:52 UTC

Amount of energy left in Europe's gas storages. We should not get a cold February. Usually this linear prognosis is quite pessimistic late January since the weather improves in February and March. Best be hoping this is true this year as well. Data from GIE Europe. https://www.gie.eu/
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/888/965/282/868/379/original/68e08bc6eb1980c0.png

2025-01-25 11:36:21 UTC

@npub1cj7…nq3s - I promised to take a better look at the #EuroStack but initially I could find no detail. Now there is a new (brief) document that looks very urgent but I haven't yet studied it: https://euro-stack.eu/a-pitch-paper/

2025-01-23 15:56:33 UTC

"So how long have you been into cyber" - apparently since October 1989. I must have been insufferable if I read this correctly! Using the PowerC compiler no less! http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/878/483/024/662/490/original/59128f981f5aa6e1.jpg

2025-01-23 12:05:01 UTC

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I wonder what your thoughts are on the above - Microsoft running JavaScript on links found in email & sending out POSTs, and where this might be heading.

2025-01-23 11:50:33 UTC

Yesterday a user told me they couldn't log in to my parliamentary monitoring site. On investigating, I found that Microsoft email security was logging in on behalf of my user by executing a POST. This broke the single-use sign-on link. Executing POSTs is usually considered unacceptable, and in this way Microsoft again transgresses an important norm. Here's how to deal with the specific POST problem & what might be done about these transgressions in general:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/shifting-cyber-norms-microsoft-post/

2025-01-22 23:53:32 UTC

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a neat trick is to use Math.random() and get it to POST the result. The Google crawler at least for ages always returned the same random number. Could also try the time perhaps.

2025-01-22 21:59:39 UTC

The GPS augmented landing system in Europe appears to be degraded tonight. Only the parts in red are working well if I understand it correctly. Second image is what this normally looks like. https://egnos.gsc-europa.eu/aviation-portal/aviation-dashboard
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/874/238/641/140/834/original/c7c6a448fecae2d0.png
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/874/246/860/504/711/original/9b4bd23afee5b4e7.png

2025-01-22 19:34:11 UTC

So I send out login links in emails. If the user clicks on the link, JavaScript in that webpage will *POST* to a URL to log in. The login token works only *once*. I now have a user that tells me they can't log in. From the logs, I see a Microsoft IP address POSTing that login link. Is some kind of MS email security product executing JavaScript and POSTING things? Is this a known phenomenon? I've now made this a login *button* which the user has to click again. I hope it helps.

2025-01-21 21:19:23 UTC

George #Orwell’s 1940 review of Mein Kampf is an astounding read. It is very educational to study primary literature from just before historical events. In here we read that up to 1939 Hitler was regarded rather favorably by many, for reasons we might recognize today. Frightening: https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein-kampf/

2025-01-20 19:36:28 UTC

Wishing all my American friends strength today & for the future. Please hang in there!

2025-01-19 22:08:58 UTC

So I run this parliamentary monitoring site, and most bots are welcome to trawl it. I spent a lot of (OCR) time making those documents accessible, so have at it. But what really gets my goat is if you try to anonymously crawl the whole site while pretending (badly) to be a normal internet user. As we used to say on usenet *plonk*.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/857/294/548/932/062/original/42a9def3a132697d.png

2025-01-19 16:25:17 UTC

Also for your mental health, I recommend never reading the source code for the various implementations of mktime() and strptime(). The authors really try their best, but on reading that, you worry how anything ever works. https://github.com/bminor/glibc/blob/master/time/mktime.c
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/855/943/400/422/277/original/4b2b402e88072ece.png

2025-01-19 15:15:28 UTC

So how hard could it be to convert `Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07` in UTC into a UNIX epoch time_t timestamp, in C or C++? Quite hard. Many things that you'd think would work actually don't. Here I present solutions (with running code), and a little tour through 'struct tm', 'time_t', 'mktime' and 'strptime':
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-to-get-a-unix-epoch-from-a-utc-date-time-string/

2025-01-18 20:11:25 UTC

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I have vague memories of this happening to me too. And that it was standard compliant also. But only vague memories. Tried godbolt yet on different compilers?

2025-01-18 16:07:26 UTC

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This is indeed good stuff. C++ will eventually get there with https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/expected#Example

2025-01-18 16:01:32 UTC

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I have finally found an up to date standard that covers mktime(), https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/mktime.html - and in it we learn that on error mktime returns the valid timestamp -1 (which happened in 1969 UTC). To detect if this was an actual error, callers must set tm.tm_wday to -1, and check if after a call it is still -1. In that case, an error happened.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/850/192/144/307/666/original/1c15d7e3b7b24759.png

2025-01-18 13:09:48 UTC

https://howardhinnant.github.io/date/tz.html is GLORIOUS if you need to do something with time and timezones in C++. I think this library is now also part of C++20 but it looks like my compiler is not yet up to date. But you can use tz.h standalone already.

2025-01-18 11:48:58 UTC

My life has improved appreciably since I found out you can block people on LinkedIn. And I do so easily if you repeatedly foul up my posts with nonsense comments. Recommended.

2025-01-17 21:58:45 UTC

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"In Dublin's official timezone data, for example, tm_isdst is zero in their summer and one in their winter, the opposite of the norm, but not on RHEL, which "normalizes" the data. If you lived in Dublin and used Fedora, and made an invalid assumption about tm_isdst values, you would not be on time for tea." - from https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/brief-history-mktime

2025-01-17 20:00:18 UTC

After studying the strptime timezone %Z situation for a bit, I have concluded that both time and computers were a mistake.

2025-01-17 18:58:47 UTC

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Here is a sample on the most excellent godbolt site. Try changing CET around to things and see what happens (nothing): https://godbolt.org/z/ssY7x5b7E

2025-01-17 17:12:18 UTC

Does anyone know how to best parse "Fri, 17 Jan 2025 06:07:07 GMT" using POSIX functions to get the right UNIX epoch timestamp? I've only found very ugly solutions so far. Please do read man strptime(3) carefully before responding with ideas that you think might work (%z does not).

2025-01-04 12:44:26 UTC

Just recovering from a helpful user who launched a web security scanner at my site and found 5 "issues", none of which were a security issue. But by opening public security tickets you cause a lot of work for a project, since we can't just close those & people start to worry if you ignore them. Please think twice before opening security issues if you aren't sure what they mean & you just copied them from a random site. Feel free to send an email before raising the alarm.

2024-12-14 14:14:43 UTC

Doing a (brief) presentation Monday on long term software development (>10 years). Things you regret in year 8. I'd love to hear things you found out and wished you'd done differently. Or conversely, what worked out really well. Will turn this into a public presentation & blog post. To kick it off: PLEASE KEEP YOUR CODE AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE.

2024-12-14 10:31:40 UTC

Anyone ever heard about this EU sponsored cloud initiative #SIMPL? https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/simpl#1712822729753-2 - can I try or download this stuff? https://cast4all.com/en/simpl-platform-overview/

2024-12-08 21:38:56 UTC

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Sakurai was on the 'to evaluate' list already, added Weinberg. Enough people have now mentioned Sakurai that it likely is indeed a big deal of a book.

2024-12-05 15:07:02 UTC

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I can do the second one. COREPER decides on the agenda for the Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting. COREPER determines if a vote on a subject would be likely be successful, in which case it is put on the agenda. Otherwise the item might at best be "discussed". COREPER really is a preparatory thing, but also a gatekeeper. JHA meeting on CSAR is on 12th of December.

2024-12-02 21:45:57 UTC

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mijn artikel liet open wie het zou moeten doen en noemde specifiek dat overheden het er moeilijk mee zouden hebben. Dus kan het niet concreet maken nu. Helaas.

2024-12-02 11:40:57 UTC

Maybe fun to know - using #MS365 means that the US government has bulk access to your data, which matters if you are a government yourself. Supporters of Microsoft will tell you you can easily use "double key encryption" to protect your MS365 data against US government snooping. This is how easily you can do that. Hint, it involves GitHub and compiling code: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/purview/double-key-encryption-setup

2024-12-01 14:59:53 UTC

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I read it, it did not really work for me and I don't know who'd benefit from it today, since the state of the art has likely advanced somewhat.

2024-12-01 10:09:20 UTC

I've started a page listing for many fields (physics, computing, biology, history..) the most Totemic Books. The ones that are central to the field, the books you wished you had learned about earlier. The work no one in a field can do without. Please send me your suggestions so we can share the love more broadly! https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/totemic-books-for-many-fields/

2024-11-28 08:39:15 UTC

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ow! I’m sure your contributions were useful, thanks for your work there!

2024-11-27 16:36:30 UTC

Finally reading the Draghi report. This stuff is not for the faint of heart. "Never in the past has the scale of our countries appeared so small and inadequate relative to the size of the challenges." https://commission.europa.eu/topics/strengthening-european-competitiveness/eu-competitiveness-looking-ahead_en#paragraph_47059

2024-11-27 13:50:54 UTC

Some wizened acquaintances of mine are at risk of this: "When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all." - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/

2024-11-27 09:18:47 UTC

Earlier post, but in recent talks I'm encountering more and more organizations that are losing their last technical people. You can outsource a lot, but most places have a core thing that they should really own. And once your own technical department is no longer viable, you are hosed. The longer story: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/your-tech-my-tech/

2024-11-24 18:38:33 UTC

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very very impressive!

2024-11-24 17:34:43 UTC

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don't take it too seriously, but
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/539/132/832/508/306/original/b2dfc9308b0a3f97.png

2024-11-24 17:28:11 UTC

I made a to-scale picture of American and European cloud players, but you may have to squint a bit.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/539/104/818/422/430/original/d70e950f540e4010.png

2024-11-24 13:22:54 UTC

If you are of a certain age.. #wordperfect51
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/538/138/102/754/294/original/993264b63008e144.png
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/538/138/679/676/456/original/c564ac7b5fce6b5b.png

2024-11-23 21:54:08 UTC

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https://github.com/berthubert/gazproject/blob/main/gazmon-lite.py here is the code that makes the plot. It is not too great but perhaps a useful start!

2024-11-23 21:43:21 UTC

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Here is how you can retrieve the data from GIE.eu https://paste.debian.net/1336575/ - you don't get more official data than this.

2024-11-23 21:29:50 UTC

A blast from the past - I used to make a lot of plots of European natural gas usage & imports. This eventually became hard to do, but I've restarted plotting the energy content of gas storage sites in Europe, which are rumored to be emptying faster than before. This appears to be true. The line extends until the 20th of April 2025, which is the usual start of filling season.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/534/388/572/720/020/original/d871822a58f54a51.png