Here is the question:

How much infrastructure do we need when ALL 8 million vehicles (and buses and trucks!) in the Netherlands go electric? The answer will surprise you: we could get to 100% electric transportation in the Netherlands, just by converting the 4000 existing gast stations to fast charging stations which have an average of 14 fast chargers.

article then plays with numbers a bit: Kilometers driven, electricity used, number of chargepoints, charging rates.

Berliner Sparkasse Onlinebanking FAQ :

Why do I get the message ‘mobile device, can’t perform smsTAN money transfer’ when using my Desktop computer.

A possible cause is the display resolution. Your computer is being detected as a mobile device by our online banking system. smsTAN is not working from a mobile device.

Solution: Change the display resolution

So 1920x1080 does work, but 1080x1920 doesn’t.

Today is a weird day. First thing is a friend asking about help with community management. And next thing is Fefe reiterating his longstanding fallacy (Rant in German ) that programmers are able to do anything just because they are able to do one thing (here: Community Management). The TL;DR is that he rants against non-programmers showing interest into programming projects because they like the software, thereby ruining everything by not being programmers.

»Yay for discounts, aber die Einstellung vom Köhntopp finde ich ja eigentlich ziemlich vermessen und ekelhaft.«

Back in the day at university, there used to be a group of people who went to the Cinema every week on Thursday. We were sometimes six, sometimes more like ten people, but at the core it was a pretty stable group. Ticket sales started one week before and we are pretty consistently getting our tickets pretty much the hour ticket sales started.

The history of serialize() and unserialize() in PHP begins with Boris Erdmann and me, and we have to go 20 years back in time. This is the day of the prerelease versions of PHP 3, some time in 1998 .

Boris and I were working on code for a management system for employee education for German Telekom. The front side is a web shop that sells classes and courses, the back end is a complex structure that manages attendance, keeps track of a line manager approval hierarchy and provides alternative dates for overfull classes. In order to manage authentication, shopping carts and other internal state, we needed something that allowed us to go from a stateless system to a stateful thing, securely. The result was PHPLIB , and especially the code in session.inc .

So you are running systems in production and you want to collect data from your systems. You need to build a monitoring system. That won’t work and it won’t scale. So please stop for a moment, and think. What kind of monitoring do you want do build? I know at least three different types of monitoring system, and they have very different objectives, and consequently designs.

Three types of Monitoring Systems

The first and most important system you want to have is checking for incidents. This Type 1 monitoring is basically a transactional monitoring system:

There is an interesting article by Brendan Gregg out there, about the actual data that goes into the Load Average metrics of Linux. The article has a few funnily contrasting lines. Brendan Gregg states

Load averages are an industry-critical metric – my company spends millions auto-scaling cloud instances based on them and other metrics […]

but in the article we find Matthias Urlichs saying

The point of “load average” is to arrive at a number relating how busy the system is from a human point of view.

Evaluating the Changing Causes of Photovoltaics Cost Reduction

Why is PV Solar Energy getting cheaper and cheaper?

We find that increased module efficiency was the leading low-level cause of cost reduction in 1980-2001, contributing almost 30% of the cost decline. The most important high-level mechanism was R&D in these earlier stages of the technology. After 2001, scale economies became a more significant cause of cost reduction, approaching R&D in importance. Policies that stimulate market growth have played a key role in enabling the cost reduction in PV, through privately-funded R&D and economies of scale, and to a lesser extent learning-by-doing

Our World in Data has a very nice long read with many interactive visualisations giving context to CO2.

We begin with exploring CO2 cumulative (how much CO2 did each nation produce over its industrial history), scaling it to annual emission and then scaling it by population, too. We also learn about CO2 produced vs. CO2 in the atmosphere, which is a delayed system.

The second part then deals with CO2 and industrialisation: Emission vs. Properity, vs. Growth, and also with CO2 from trade and transport, and from meat production. As always with Our World in Data, the article concludes with Definitions, Methods and pointers to raw data sources.

So some people, companies even, have guidelines that describe how to write shell scripts , or even unit tests for shell scripts , as if “UNIX Shell” was a programming language.

That’s wrong.

“Modern Shells” are based on a language that has been written without a formal language specification. The source looked like this , because somebody didn’t like C and wanted Algol, abusing the preprocessor . The original functionality and language rules had to be reverse engineered from that source, and original shell has a lot of weird rules and quirks :