This guy was a great model. The hummer who’s claimed the front garden as his territory this year is not as happy in front of a camera.

There’s gotta be a better way. But after a horrible upgrade process for a horrible commercial open-source product, I need to see which sub-directories from the old installation are missing in the new one. Don’t ask. I’ve literally been having nightmares about this upgrade.

Anyway, given tree1 and tree2 under some common point, I want a list of directories that exist in tree1 and don’t exist in tree2.

Here was my clumsy way of solving the problem.

cd tree1
find . -type d -print | sort > ../dirs_old
cd ../tree2
find . -type d -print | sort > ../dirs_new
cd ..
comm -23 dirs_old dirs_new

[insert old man yelling at cloud meme here]

Everybody’s pissed off because things are crappy and they used to be better. I know I certainly am. But it’s not “regulations” or “wokeness” that forces me to buy a $56 part to fix the dishwasher because a 5¢ switch embedded in an un-openable assembly burned out.

When we first moved into this house twenty five years ago, there were plumbing problems I had to fix. The kitchen faucet was leaking. In those days, there was B&B Hardware, an old style hardware store. I brought the weird brass fitting from the faucet to B&B, took a number at the plumbing desk, and eventually talked with the guy there. He cast a sardonic eye on the fitting, and said “You’ve got a 1950s Moen. In the 60s they changed this to have an additional flange right here for an o-ring, and in the 70s they stopped making this style altogether. The good news is I have a compatible part.” He went up on his ladder and sorted through some boxes and found me a part. It was expensive — nearly 15 dollars. But it worked.

Well, the kitchen sink’s been redone in the interim, and the faucet replaced with a very low-end wall-mount double-handle bridge faucet which lasted about seven years before being replaced by the new (yet not parts-compatible) version. And the new one’s leaking. So I took it apart, grimaced at the cheapness of the thin metals and plastic fittings. I headed to Home Depot, since B&B is long gone. At the big box, I got a shrug from the worker. No, there aren’t parts for those. They don’t sell that model, but new kitchen faucets are on aisle 6, and washers and stuff are on aisle 11, bay 9.

When I finally found washers and o-rings on aisle 12 bay 15, they didn’t have a replacement for the cracked plastic compression retaining ring. So I bought new o-rings in the hope that screwing down the conical ring cap tightly would continue to work. I went through the self-checkout, where the scanner pulled up the wrong price for the item and the employee that came over sneered at my mask and low-key accused me of shoplifting when he saw the old, broken part I’d brought along.

Eventually, it worked out. The sink is not leaking, I have 8 more of the o-rings (potentially saving me from buying another $2.92+tax set next time, if the smog doesn’t degrade them in storage), and I can go on to do other chores.

So your site was using too much bandwidth, and you converted all those animated .gif images to .webp using the WebPShop plugin.

But how many bytes have you actually saved? The command line will tell you:

ls -l *.gif | awk '{ print $5 }' | paste -sd+ - | bc 

ls -l *.webp | awk '{ print $5 }' | paste -sd+ - | bc 

Of course, this assumes that all the files in the current directory are the images and their conversions, and there aren’t a bunch of other files with one of those extensions. If that’s not the case, you’ll need to be more specific than *.extension in the ls command.

I’ve seen this floating around the internet: “To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.” — Arthur Koestler

I haven’t been able to find the original source of the quotation.

Much more frequently, I see this similar quotation attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

This, however, I have found the source: “There’s an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine — “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”

This is from Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.

So there it is. Atwood indirectly citing Koestler.

(This posting is in no way meant to diminish Atwood’s brilliance in any way or cast any aspersions on her. It’s more a comment about the Internet and the way attributions get lost and/or mangled.)