Excursions avatar

Excursions

This always used to drive me nuts when different people used different varients of flag (-r Or -R) for achieving same result.

is there some good reason why recursive cp takes -R whereas recursive scp takes -r?

It was until I decided I had to get more information on why and headed out to POSIX manual.

If the -r option was specified, the behavior is implementation-defined.

If the -R option was specified, the following steps shall be taken:

  • The dest_file shall be created with the same file type as source_file.

  • If source_file is a file of type FIFO, the file permission bits shall be the same as those of source_file, modified by the file creation mask of the user if the -p option was not specified. Otherwise, the permissions, owner ID, and group ID of dest_file are implementation-defined.

  • If this creation fails for any reason, cp shall write a diagnostic message to standard error, do nothing more with source_file, and go on to any remaining files.

  • If source_file is a file of type symbolic link, the pathname contained in dest_file shall be the same as the pathname contained in source_file.

  • If this fails for any reason, cp shall write a diagnostic message to standard error, do nothing more with source_file, and go on to any remaining files.

Since then, it is always -R that I (and most of the people I know) use — after all who likes the unknown behind “behaviour defined by implementation”?

It’s fascinating to think to think that anybody can replicate Facebook, “kill” them; but somebody with mass following can hit them where it hurts most - engagement. Take the engagement out and Facebook struggles for relevance.

Micro.threads Update. Refreshed user discover section to show more information for the recommended users. Can follow directly from the app, with option to open profile at Micro.blog.

Also refreshed the “Explore” section with background enhancement. Want to open this to all soon.

It was great listening to @EddieHinkle and @macgenie talk about all things IndieWeb on this episode of Micro @monday. It was nice knowing about the journey of Indiegenous too. A good listen 👍🏽

Though I agree with Sundar here, I think the sentiment is missing the core issue EU raises - “rapid innovation, wide choice and falling prices” is for a market where Google isn’t competing - handsets. However it kills competition to it’s core services.

Changing Date Format in Blot

So, in one of the recent posts on indiewebifying the blot.im site, I was faced with a roadblock.

I could not find any way to format the published date that gets displayed on the posts. The post properties exposes just , which gets the default format of MMM DD, YYYY. And I do not think it’s a valid ISO-8601 as expected by the microformats2.

Well, I had reached out to David and apparently there is a yet-to-be-documented way.

As per the official document for developers, the standard way to get the post’s publish date is with property { { date } }1. However, if so inserted, it inserts the date in a default format - MMMM DD, YYYY. Even though it is a format that displays well, it does not provide the complete information on date, up to time level. For the microformats2 dt-published time tag, it is important that the post publish date is inserted as valid ISO-8601. So to do that, just use the below code snippet instead of { { date } }.

{ { # entry } } { { # formatDate } } MM YYYY DD { { /formatDate } } ... { { / entry } }

Make sure you remove spaces in between the curly brackets (refer footnote 1). Wherever the snippet { { # | / formatDate } } is added, it would be replaced by post’s publish date in the format defined in between the tags.

In David’s own words, “any of Moment.js’ date formatting tokens work (formatDate is basically Moment.js behind the scenes)”. So you should be able to customise it completely as per your need.

  1. As clarified by David in an earlier open queries post, there is at this point no way to escape the parsing of the code references for properties that Blot uses. It ends up replacing them with the value. So adding spaces is my way to work around that limitation at this point.↩

I have been following a daily evening routine these days to refresh my user recommendations. And I have started following so many new people whose updates I was missing out on. Pretty stoked, I think I have got a working system here!