sheeplog

Checking (macOS) Mach Service Availability with Swift

Testing for mach ports is useful if you have an app that talks to an XPC service, agent or daemon and you’d like to check for availability of the endpoint before pulling out an entire NSXPCConnection. This would, for example, allow you to show a progress indicator while the app waits to pull data over XPC into the UI.

Zitat des Tages

Wenn eine kleine elitäre Minderheit der oberen Bildungs- und Einkommensschichten der Gesellschaft der großen Mehrheit der Andersdenkenden ihre Werte durch Belehrungen oder Verbote aufzwingt, kann das wohl als eine Art Diktatur gewertet werden.

– Manfred Güllner, Chef Forsa, in Junge Freiheit (Archiv)

integrate google/osv-scanner into drone ci pipeline

in my drone ci pipeline i use the following step to run google’s osv-scanner and send an email if vulnerabilities have been found.

1. CoronApril

Virologen haben entdeckt: Vom wichsen bekommt man Corona!

Malen nach Zahlen

Weltweit 800.000 Infizierte. Knapp 40.000 Tote. 11.000 Corona-Tote allein in Italien. Innerhalb von zwei Wochen steigt die Anzahl COVID-19-positiv Getesteter von 1.000 auf 23.000. Zur Zeit sind es 60.000.

FactoryGirl? FactoryBot? The Gender War Is On.

FactoryGirl was a ruby gem to help test automation. It followed the SemVer approach to release versioning and scheduling. At least until version 4.8.2 in which they replaced all occurrences of [Gg]irl with [Bb]ot. They then yanked version 4.8.2 off of rubygems and renamed the entire library to factory_bot.

Quote of the Day

History is a set of lies agreed upon.
— Napoléon, Voltaire, Phillips and others

FreeBSD: /usr/local/lib/libpkg.so.3: Undefined symbol "utimensat"

TL;DR
Fix your pkgng repo url to prevent pkg from installing incompatible binaries, e.g. http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/release_2 for x.2.

Waiting for tax cuts

While all these people seem to be outraged about Trump in one way or another he seems to be on track implementing the things he promised.

pip: install package into home directory - always

TL;DR
Don’t use sudo pip install <package-name> like everybody on the internet tells you to. Use pip install --user <package-name>. To omit --user, create a pip.conf as outlined below.

Meinungshoheit

Wer weniger etablierte Medien konsumiert, sich für Kommentarspalten nicht zu fein ist und aktuelle gesellschafts-politische Diskurse an der Basis verfolgt, dem muss die wachsende Diskrepanz zwischen herrschender und niederer Meinung gerade zu ins Auge stechen.

The Panama Shepherd

When @Snowden dropped the #panamaPapers hash tag I was excited and turned to Spiegel Online to find out what it is about.

Chemtrails are not contrails

Vor einiger Zeit sah ich mit einigen eher intelligenten Freunden (mit akademischem Hintergrund) eine Pseudo-Dokumentation, welche einen Rundschlag gegen einige Verschwörungstheorien machte. Ich erinnere mich noch sehr gut als einer der Protagonisten im Film mit kräftig deutschem Akzent das Wort “Chemtrails” in den Mund nahm und alle in Gelächter (auch ich, “Kehmträyls” hört sich gut an) ausbrachen und komisch guckten, als das Thema tatsächlich noch beleuchtet wurde.

Quote of the Day

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
— Mark Twain

Followup: EU data protection

After reading my previous post on data privacy in the EU you may need some convincing because I didn’t give any solid proof for the allegations. It also focussed on German law so, I’ll use this post to connect the two.

Nineteen Eighty Smart TV

A short and good read is the privacy policy of Samsung’s SmartTV line.

"Data privacy regulations in the EU are among the strictest"

That’s what I read everywhere. Especially Germany is said to, by law, offer immunity to government interception of private data. But it appears that outsiders (and insiders, sadly) are unable or unwilling to cut right down to the truth.

Denn die Mark war eine starke Währung

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing zur Geburt des Euros:

A few numbers

Looking at the following graph and assuming the quantity of military spending correlates with its quality, I guess sheep would agree that Russia surely is the most evil threat to world peace these days.

Chrome ftw!

Chrome supported device emulation for a while now but it was always rather simple in terms of functionallity. Version 38 has this:

Quote of the day

The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.

Facebook Liberation

The other day I tried to log into my Facebook account which I only used for the German Facebook page for Cocktailicious.

Quote of the day

To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.

Es grenzt ja an Selbstmord, wenn man Kollegen kritisiert

Der erste Post in deutsch. Ich habe lange darauf gewartet und nun endlich den richtigen Impuls. Dank an Frau Krone-Schmalz.

Judge died

I just discovered to much of my surprise that John Judge of COPA died 3 weeks ago.
A very reasonable researcher and speaker, I discovered his work only a year ago. So without further ado let me honor his legacy by just letting him speak.

To be OSCE or not to be OSCE

Following the latest event in Ukraine, the abduction of “OSCE observers”, I just finished reading an interview with Webster Tarpley conducted by Iranian Press TV.

This is not a technical problem

If not for NanoBSD already, I almost fell in serious love with Poul-Henning Kamp.

Who are you?

Damn, I love that man. Not because of, how other accomplices like to say, his populistic views but because he's darn right.

It's an Outrage!

Somebody just spoke what he thinks is the truth and the Internet is about to explode.

Bullshit Mainstreaming

Finally, gender mainstreaming and related commits, pull requests and discussions have found their way into the software community. It may very well have been there since don’t-know-don’t-care but at least an uproar is audible.

How to interview

50 Years

Half a century ago, today, what happened? Huh? Right. Kennedy was shot. I’m not the let’s-be-silent-for-a-minute kind. Rather, I like pushing sheep around.

Reverse-proxy a Rails app with Apache

Recently I had to make one part of a Rails app available via a path of another Apache vhost.
The Rails app is running at http://app.example.com/engine-name and has to be accessible at http://www.example.com/app.

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