I couldn’t find a decent holiday for today, but we can all prepare for Intersex Awareness Day, tomorrow. I talked about this briefly when discussing gender, but an unknown number of people start their lives with a doctor deciding to perform unnecessary surgery, because he doesn’t like the shape of a baby’s genitals. Did the doctors choose the right model for genitals? Not always.

Intersex flag

So, this is awareness of how intersex people are treated, not trying to root out intersex individuals.

Let’s deal with some bugs.

INTERN

Work on INTERN was delayed as I tried to figure out why I was having trouble un-watching files that should be ignored. Ultimately, I decided to switch the logic around, so that if there’s an ignore file, only files that aren’t ignored get watched. That seems to work.

There’s now also the start of a search feature. I return possible hits from the index, but do not (yet) rank, organize, or return those results.

Otherwise, I didn’t get much done, here, aside from committing my test client.

Entropy Arbitrage

I updated the scripts that maintain this blog, including finally giving up on text substitution that works everywhere except my script.

now="${now/#*(0)/}"

According to everything that I’ve read and my tests on the command line, the above code should delete all leading zeroes in the value of $now. I can’t get it to work, though, so when I use $now in an arithmetic expression, there’s a decent chance that it’ll interpret the value as base-8—it’s an old UNIX convention—meaning that any numbers with an 8 or 9 digit are invalid.

So, that script has reverted to using sed, which is what I used before a static analyzer recommended the modern version.

Ham Newsletter

An embarrassing typo in the main Ham Newsletter creation script is gone. I must have fixed it locally for the last issue of the newsletter and forgotten to commit it.

Library Updates

The server for Fýlakas Onomáton fell out of date, so I let Dependabot update it.

Artificial Stupidity

On Saturday, I got off the waiting list for GitHub Copilot and so spent some time experimenting with it. Expect a post about the results soon.

Next

This week, I’ll focus on getting INTERN’s search into shape. As mentioned, I currently return my index rows, but need to organize and present that information. Knowing that a stem was present in a file isn’t necessarily useful.

Credits: The header image is the Intersex Pride Flag by Morgan Carpenter and AnonMoos, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.