With the bitter cold this week, along with the snow and Ice the last time I’ve ridden anywhere is last Sunday. Probably the longest I’ve been off the road since I got my bicycle, and maybe I should have ridden in yesterday, my birthday but it still was pretty cold and icy. Tomorrow I’ll need to bundle up ride to the store to grocery shop, and maybe go to Walmart for some other supplies. I’m hoping next week I can ride at least a few more days into work, via Corning’s Hill. Once the snow melts off the rail trail, there should be enough light to ride both ways to work.
What is the history of #! Interpreter first line in scripts?
The #! sequence, commonly called the shebang, was introduced by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Laboratories in January 1980. It was added to the Unix kernel to allow scripts to be executed directly as commands, making them behave more like regular executable programs.
Origin and Purpose
Before the shebang, executing a script in early Unix required explicitly calling the interpreter (e.g., sh script.sh). The operating system’s exec() system call could only run compiled binaries, which started with specific “magic number” bytes that the kernel recognized as machine instructions.
Dennis Ritchie changed the system so that the kernel would check the first two bytes of a file. If the bytes were CPU instructions, it would execute the file as a binary program.
If the bytes were the ASCII characters #! (hexadecimal 0x23 0x21), the kernel would read the rest of the line to find the path to an interpreter program. The kernel would then run that interpreter, passing the script’s filename as an argument.
This mechanism brought several key benefits:
Uniformity: Scripts could be executed uniformly like any other command, rather than only being runnable from within a shell.
Clarity in monitoring: Tools like ps (process status) would show the script’s actual name and interpreter, rather than just sh, aiding system monitoring and accounting.
Flexibility: It allowed for the use of various interpreters (e.g., sh, csh, perl, python, bash) without ambiguity, making the system more flexible.
Portability: It specified the intended interpreter within the script itself, ensuring it ran with the correct environment regardless of the user’s default shell.
Super Doubts About the Big Fords 🛻
I keep reading about the downsides of owning an heavy duty-pickup truck, unless of course you are towing regularly as part of your business. The often listed reasons for not buying a HD truck are as follows:
- They cost a lot of money, especially compared to small sedans and SUVs used by the car commuters
- They cost a lot of money to repair and maintain, as the parts are and more expensive
- They aren’t as simple as even basic HD trucks these days are packed full of sensors and technology
- They use a lot of fuel, though not as bad you might think
- They are big, difficult to drive and park
- They have a rough ride with solid front axles
Probably the thing that bites into me about buying a Ford SuperDuty is the cost. It’s a lot of money, when there are much cheaper and smaller vehicles out there. Depending on how to look at it the truck will fall in or be slightly above the recommended amount for my income, though not by much. I should still have enough cash that I should be able to cover all reasonable emergencies without touching investments. Still it’s a lot of money for something I’m going to literally throw away in a little over a decade or a decade and a half. It not that I can’t afford a SuperDuty, but I try to be very frugal on all other parts of my life. I don’t eat out or party, I don’t take expensive vacations, I keep my heat at 50 degrees all winter and take my mountain bike or city bus to work. I don’t drive many miles. And I bitch about when it rains or extremely cold because I have to pay the bus fare but I can find money to buy a Ford F-350. I sit in the cold and darkness and stay home, just so I can have a nice truck soon enough to be trash once again, and I can’t even burn it.
Then there is the issue of fuel consumption. Based on Internet reports of real-world SuperDuty fuel economy, it’s pretty much what I get from my lifted Silverado 1500 right now on the highway at least. Not that my Silverado was at all good in city or on the trail when it came to fuel use. Truth is I don’t care that much, as I am not planning on commuting in a SuperDuty, and if it costs a few bucks when I’m traveling it’s not the end of the world. I’d rather have a truck that I am comfortable in and can spend more time in the wilderness without having to drive to town. What’s another $250 in fuel on a great summer vacation?
But I do think a lot about the messaging driving such a big truck makes. Sorry about your broken penis, dude. You must have a pretty mighty payment on such a big truck. When I bring the Big Ford home, the landlord is going to see the big truck and figure he must be loaded to afford such a nice truck, so he should raise the rent on my dilapidated apartment. When I take it out Pine Bush hikes, I am going to more glares and stares from environmentalists when they see my enormous truck. The truck will cost more then what many of my staff people I oversee make in a whole year. Certainly not going to be something I show off to my more liberal friends, the Prisus and hybrid drivers. It’s really hard to show up to a climate rally in an ginormous Ford F-350 extended cab with a long bed and camper shell, even if it’s not lifted yet and I promise myself I won’t do more then a leveling kit and maybe 35s or 37s.
And it’s just those Big Fords are big. Even with backup cameras, they’re going to be a bitch to park anywhere in the city or thereabouts. It will be difficult when I have to drive in traffic, whether it’s stuck in a jam on the Thruway or those few times I have a legitimate reason to drive downtown or to work. Not that I plan to give up busing and biking it to work most days. The laundromat will be a challenge, as will parking lots, though I actually prefer to park fair away and walk, because it’s good for health and avoid risk of getting hit in the parking or hitting other cars. But on the other hand, I’ve driven a lifted truck for 10 years now, and had a full-size, though not HD truck for 14 1/2 years. Yet it’s not fun in city, narrow truck trails and campsites, even if it’s great on the open road. I can only imagine how shit the ride is going to be rough truck trails with the solid front axle and heavy-duty rear shocks, though I’m not sure how it compared to rough worn out shocks and flexing frame of the Silverado.
Nothing from nothing leaves nothing! 🌡️
I’m old enough to remember when cold weather was a windchill advisory, but then the government decided being explicit was too confusing for our simple brains and we needed to be dazzled with more bullshit much like the blown engines the government is requiring on non-HD pickups.
As that Billy Preston song goes, it’s another zero degree morning but this morning with a good steady wind 🌬️ so I’ll be riding the bus to work with all the colored and poor people on the pogey but at least it will be warm when I’m looking at random videos of overly large, fuel drinking pickup trucks ⛽ with the Godzilla engine. 🚍 Hopefully next week will be warm enough I can ride into work. 🚲 It’s going to be bad enough tomorrow when I ride to Wally World or if I’m not brave enough in the cold, down to Hannaford to get my weekly staple of apples 🍏 and random plastic crap for the landfill because I can’t have a fire 🔥 because I don’t own a ginormous F-350 truck with a camper shell yet.
They fixed the bathroom 🚽 at work, so it no longer is gag worthy with sewer gas. 👃 That was good it was pretty awful by Wednesday when it finally got fixed, I think the last time was there to take a crap at eating all that fiber in my pancakes, 💩 I’d rather have been climbing in a silo full of rotten silage. It’s was so gross. But now it’s much fresher. 🥞 🍏 More homemade apple pancakes this morning with carrots. 🥕 Last night for my birthday 🎂 I had some of the kidney beans I cooked up yesterday morning, along with onions and the remaining chicken and rice soup and some cornmeal. Basic buck good.
Other then that it just was a Thursday. ❄️ Cold and I walked laps for a while in the Empire Plaza, 👣 before catching the local home. Just the usual homeless bums hanging around in the back hallways of the Plaza pushing wheelchairs and grocery carts full of random debris, and the bus was held up in traffic again both on the way in and home. Had to sprint over to the shuttle 🚀 but I made it in time. Today I might head in and catch the earlier bus just because I have a few things to get done and I assume I’ll have meetings in the afternoon downtown. Tomorrow, I need to finish figuring out what books I want on Hoopla to read in February, read up on new magazines. Maybe I’ll visit my parents this weekend, depends on the weather and their avaliablity. 👪 Other then that it’s just another winter weekend.
Huntersland
Almost heaven, John Denver’s Take Me Home sung on the radio as I headed down to High Point in Huntersland this evening. I’ve always wanted to find some place safe to stop along the road and take pictures, but that was not to be. But I captured it on my dash board camera.
I’ve always loved Appalachia, the hills, the mountains, the farms dug outside of the mountains. I love the remoteness and the freedom of people who live tucked into the mountains with no nearby neighbors. I’ve always loved the land and wildness of the area.
People flock to the Adirondacks and Catskills for remoteness. But I always crave the remoteness of the hills around Huntersland, and so many other places like it. It’s almost a world independent of the big city – probably the nearest big town in Schoharie, or actually more accurately, Cobelskill.
I’ve always told myself I’d some day like to live in a place in the mountains like this – off the beaten track – but not in New York. Like many, I could list the open burning ban and the SAFE Act as top reasons, but really living in Upstate NY, a Rural New Yorker, is one indignity after another. $5,000 a year property taxes are just offensive when many people in other states pay a tenth of that, pistol permits and the Sullivan Act, no un-permitted open carry even in the woods, no places to ride ATVs on most public lands, among other things that most people in other states gets to enjoy.
I can celebrate this beautiful, wild land, while condemning our state’s government. But I realize our state’s Appalachian beauty, is not an exception but a rule. Pennsylvania has many remarkable lands and much better laws and lower taxes. I’ve spent much time in the Pennsylvania Wilds, but I’ve also heard that Ohiopyle area of state in Green County is quite beautiful. Not to mention many of the areas in the center part of state. And so many other states too.
While I feel such bitterness towards the state, I do love the land and it’s beauty. It’s government maybe draconian and take care of these people poorly, but they don’t live a life of natural poverty, even if they struggle to make ends meet. And while I don’t intent this essay to be a rant about state government – we all live in the system we chose to live under – I do have conflicted feelings about this beautiful area.
Landfilling human poop 💩
My office in Menands is down the street from the North Albany Sewage Treatment Plant, which processes about 83 Olympic swimming pools worth of water each day, reducing harmful pathogens and nutrient load before taking dumping much of Colonie, Menands and North Albany’s waste water in the Hudson River. It’s also home to one of state’s remaining sewage sludge incinerators, where they use natural gas to dry and burn off the solids separated out of waste water process, both generated on-site and trucked in 6-days a week from sewage treatment plants across the county and beyond. It wastes energy and produces carbon emissions, but greatly reduces the amount of sewage sludge ash that is currently disposed of in City of Albany Landfill in the Albany Pine Bush.
Lately there has been a push towards more composting of sewage sludge, but that has not been without problems. We live in a chemical-rich society, and wastewater not only often contains treated industrial effluent but also landfill effluent, the remains of pots and pans washed off, soaps and chemicals used in cleaning, and so forth. And it all get mixed in with the poop and pee, that is itself can contain the byproducts of pharmaceuticals. Most notable is the problem with PFOAs which have caused all kinds of issues for farms in Maine when they’ve been detected in farm field soils. Probably PCBs would be an equal problem, had they not been phased out what is going on 50 years ago now.
The thing about it is landfilling and incinerating might reduce immediate human exposure to the toxic compounds in sewage sludge, it hardly makes the problem going forward. And its a terrible waste of nutrient value and only increases climate emissions. I know whenever I can I will pee outdoors, and don’t think twice about digging a cat hole and using my bucket shitter up in the woods. I tihnk that’s a vastly more sustainable option. I really don’t love the idea of septic tanks either and capturing all those solids and having to have them pumped every few years. Yes, there is some biological degradation both in a septic system and a waste water digestion, but you’re still disposing rather utilizing nature’s fertilizer.
43rd Birthdays and Time 🎂🎈⌛️
“This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes. When you think about it, that’s a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?” – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig
Birthdays are kind of weird time when you look both backwards and forward in your life. Twelve years until I’m 55 years old, which seems so old in the sense that some people retire at the age, and it’s the earliest you can be considered a senior citizen. But it’s a close as January 2014, which at least in my mind doesn’t seem very long ago. I can remember 2014 just like it was yesterday, working out in the field in Madison County, camping up that beautiful spring day at Duck Pond and getting bumped on the expressway that summer. Age 55 seems so old now, but then again when I was 31 years old, the idea of being 43 years old seemed far off.
Thing were simpler back in 2014, but then again, we will soon enough look at these days as the good ol’ days. My successes, my triumphs and tribulations will seem like small little bumps in road compared to world that is ahead. While there is much I can estimate and predict, many surprises are inevitably ahead. But I do believe in many ways I’m on the right track and the best is yet to come. Things are better now, but they’ll only be better in the future.
So many things will change in the coming years. Will I buy a truck? Will it be a big Ford SuperDuty? Or something totally different, but it’s amazing to think whatever I choose I’ll have it most likely well into my 50s, beyond when my parents are gone. Where will I be in 12 years? Will I buy a house, or take over my parents homestead? Will I stay in New York, work out my career in the Assembly building tens of thousands of data frames and other little scripts to build the next generation of data? Will I make it out to Michigan and West Virginia this year? Or will I do something different? How close will be I towards owning that off-grid homestead? Or will my mind change in the mean-time and buy that 20-year old Honda and the plastic house in suburbs?
“Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday’s vision of the future.”
— Richard Corliss
