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Cake day: February 19th, 2024

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  • amazon on kindle is very convienient. But I don’t want to support jeff bezozs, which is why I like piracy. Also amazon makes it really easy to pirate. You just send the pirated copy to you kindle email-adress, and amazon uploads the pirated ebook to your kindle. I have done this for about 10 years, and I like to image, that Jeff sheds a single tear each time I do this.

    On the other hand there are many public libraries with a steam-like service. e.g. you pay your regular library fee (2€ iirc) and you can download all the books you want to your e-reader. The catch is, that you can only keep a certain number of digital copies at the same time for some reason. The other down side is, that the initial setup takes some time (but I guess that depends on the library? idk it was >5 years ago when I did some research in that direction).

    If someone knows more about the public-library-ebook-service, please let us know.





  • the linux-file-deletion is used as a example for good software design. It has a very simple interface with little room for error while doing exactly what the caller intended.

    In John Ousterhout’s “software design philosophy” a chapter is called “define errors out of existence”. In windows “delete” is defined as “the file is gone from the HDD”. So it must wait for all processes to release that file. In Linux “unlink” is defined as “the file can’t be accessed anymore”. So the file is gone from the filesystem immediately and existing file-handles from other processes will life on.

    The trade-off here is: “more errors for the caller of delete” vs “more errors due to filehandles to dead files”. And as it turns out, the former creates issues for both developers and for users, while the later creates virtually no errors in practice.