I’m your best friend—now give me your lunch money.
I think that line paints an accurate depiction of Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump is the bully of international affairs. Actually, he is the bully in any affair.
Screenshot from “truth social”, a social network with more lies than most
Translated: “If you guys want to play together without me, I will throw your stuff into the water—because I am your best friend!”
Who want to be friend with a sociopath? Good friends do not threaten each others. Good friends do not have to point out how good they are. Good friends do good things. Not for their own gain, but for the benefit of both.
Donald Trump says America is “the best friend that each of those two contries ever had”, and at the same time he goes over to Denmark and says: “I like your jacket (Greenland), give it to me or I will take it with force.”
Again, this is not friendship. This is not even normal.
Donald Trump is a sociopath, and the republican party is pathetic for leaving their moral values behind.
Donald Trump has been president of the United States in just a month, and the damage he has done so far is staggering. What happens “at home” in the States is one thing, but when he tries to change history and make Vladimir Putin a victim of war, a war Mr. Putin started …
For the first few weeks after the election, I refrained from checking the news. Maybe I should go back doing just that. I can do anything, except voice my worries, so I guess nothing good can come out of reading the news.
The consequences are high, and the damage that can be done in four years might be irreversible. The best we can hope fore is strong European leaders, and that America does not go to war against Europe together with Russia, in the hope to share the spoils between them.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you are Donald Trump, everything looks like real estate.
Recently, an network application, which have worked since 2017, stopped working. The application is straigh forward enough. It checks if a service is working by doing (mainly) two things:
Perform a “GET” using HTTP/1.1 to check for status 200
After a change was made to the endpoint, switching to BIG-IP from F5, the second step failed. Running the program in Visual Studio produced the following error message:
The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive.
Searching for this error message will provide you with a lot of various suggestions, mostly related to the TLS protocol.
When I upgraded the project from .Net 4.8 to .Net 8.0, it started working. One difference I saw during the debugging was the headers sent by the application.
A quick Google search on the phrase “Expect: 100-continue fails on F5” produced both an explanation and a fix. The short answer is that while the client is waiting for a “100 Continue” message, the F5 device is wating for more data.
Another year is over, and it is time to look back and review my reading habit. Last year my goal was to read 40 books. Not because I was anywhere near to reach that number in 2022, but because I happen to turn forty (years) in 2023, and I thought it would be an interesting challenge.
3 of the books I read in 2023
Now, I’m going to be honest and upfront: I did not achieve the goal of 40 books. Not even close. I ended up reading just 25 books. Meaning 25 new books. Re-reading books, blogs, and articles are not counted.
According to Goodreads, I read 9,661 pages, although I would take that with a grain of salt, and that the average book length was 386 pages. Again, grain of salt.
Looking back at last year’s post I see that I had not finished Barack Obamas brick of a book, “A Promised Land”, and this still rings true. Maybe this year I will be able to pick it up and finish it.
Of the 25 books that I did manage to finish, I would like to mention the following five that I really enjoyed reading, in no particular order.
This book is unusual in that it is narrated by death. It tells a captivating story about a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany and the following war. She also learns to read and steels a few books along the way.
Prince Harry tells his story about how it was like growing up in the royal family, sometimes referred to as “the firm”, and how ruthless the British media can be. He writes honest, as far as I can tell. In the end, as we know, he chose to leave the royal family to create and protect his own family.
Co-founder of Id Software, the company that created games such as Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D and most notably Doom and Quake, writes about his childhood years and how that formed him, and follows up with how work as affected his personal life, and how his personal life has affected his work.
This is a book with anecdotes from Mr. Feynman life, the Nobel prize winning physicist. Reading these stories, you would never have guessed that this guy worked on the Manhattan Project (the atomic bomb) during the war. He is one witty person.
I’m impressed. Really, I am. After getting tired of Windows 11, which didn’t take long to be honest, I finally got the push I needed to install Linux as my daily operating system. I first installed Ubuntu, since I have years of experience with it on the server side.
Well, that did not last. Ubuntu has introduced something called ‘Snaps’, which I did not make any effort to understand — except that it keeps crashing on my machine.
I also tested SUSE at some point, but I’m pretty sure I ditched it because I could not get the external monitors to work on it. To be fair, getting DisplayLink drivers is not as easy as it should be. This is due to the docking station I use, I guess.
Finally, I found Fedora with support for the mentioned DisplayLink. I still have to compile ‘evdi’ each time I get a kernel upgrade, but it’s a trouble I’m willing to go through for a decent setup.
What really sold me was when I installed the KDE desktop environment. I don’t understand why this is not default. It is way ahead of Gnome, which seems to be default on both Ubuntu and Fedora. Way, way ahead. It’s insane!
So, yes. Finally, after many painful years with Windows (my old desktop machine has Windows 8.1, which is still better than Windows 10), I finally have a desktop environment that works with me, and not against me. With the one exception on compiling DisplayLink drivers, but I can’t blame that on Fedora. It’s the people making DisplayLinks fault.
