Editing PDFs With qpdf

In my recent survey of tools for working with PDF files, qpdf stood out. It not only extracts information from PDFs, but can convert a PDF …

The New Programming

In working with a set of PDF files I needed to distinguish areas by typeface name and size. I found PDFBox, which offers very fine-grained …

Who Owns Your Dot Files

The recommended way to install or update rust is with rustup. And by default, rustup modifies your shell startup files to put itself on PATH …

Bash the Cache

If you develop executable programs you probably invoke them from one location, then install them to another for ongoing use. And the moment …

Debian JRE Package Bug

In attempting to install openjdk on Debian I ran into the following error:

Setting up openjdk-17-jre-headless:amd64 (17.0.13+11-2~deb12u1) …

Linux Jails With VNET

Look online for information about how to run a Linux jail with VNET and you’ll find very few resources. And of course some of the …

mawk Is Not awk

Today I had occasion to use mawk instead of awk with a command that read lines from standard input, manipulates them, and prints them to …

Cognitive Load

Involve junior developers in architecture reviews. They will help you to identify the mentally demanding areas.

Interesting thinking on …

fzf Plus rg

As stand-alone tools fzf and rg are very useful. And there is an example in the fzf docs showing how to toggle between fzf and rg, with the …

Locale for Sorting

Today I ran afoul of a problem that I first encountered over 20 years ago: non-portable sort.

Back in the early aughts the symptom was that …