• 47 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • ono@lemmy.catoProgramming@programming.devSo You Think You Know Git? - FOSDEM 2024
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    10 months ago

    Mercurial has comparable features (though maybe not obvious to someone accustomed to git) without the usability problems that still plague git nearly two decades later. Hg’s interface was made with humans in mind. Git’s was made to cut you.

    (And it has cut so very many people that it’s consistently among the most popular topics in Q&A forums, and has even inspired comics.)

    Thankfully, git’s early cross-platform shortcomings were eventually fixed, so that’s at least some progress. I hope its UI and docs eventually get some love, too.




  • ono@lemmy.catoProgramming@programming.devCodeberg.org Opinions?
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    10 months ago

    The interface is the best I know of, a lot like pre-Microsoft github. Especially important to me is that It doesn’t intercept my browser’s built-in shortcuts like github now does, or require javascript or bury things under submenus like gitlab does.

    The promise of federation is appealing, too.

    I plan to use it for new public projects, and might even move my old ones over.


  • ono@lemmy.catoProgramming@programming.devStrings do too many things
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    10 months ago

    disallow list of known bad email providers.

    Imagine giving someone your phone number, and having them say you have to get a different one because they don’t like some of the digits in it.

    I have seen this nonsense more times than I care to remember. Please don’t build systems this way.

    If you’re trying to do bot detection or the like, use a different approach. Blacklisting email addresses based on domain or any other pattern does a poor job of it and creates an awful user experience.

    (And if it prevents people from using spam-fighting tools like forwarding services, then it’s directly user-hostile, and makes the world a worse place.)


  • ono@lemmy.catoProgramming@programming.devStrings do too many things
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    10 months ago

    Checking MX in your application means you needlessly fail on transient outages, like when a DNS server is rebooting or a net link hiccups. When it happens, the error flag your app puts on the user’s email address is likely to confuse or frustrate them, will definitely waste their time, and may drive them away and/or generate support calls.

    Also, MX records are not required. Edit to clarify: So checking MX in your application means you fail 100% of the time on some perfectly valid email domains. Good luck to the users and support staff who have to troubleshoot that, because there’s nothing wrong with the email address or domain; the problem is your application doing something it should not.

    Better to just hand the verification message off to your mail server, which knows how to handle these things. You can flag the address if your outgoing mail server refuses to accept it.


  • ono@lemmy.catoProgramming@programming.devStrings do too many things
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    11 months ago

    By the way, please don’t write regex to try to validate email addresses. Seriously.

    Amen.

    There are libraries for that; some of them are even good.

    Spoiler alert: Few of them are good, and those few are so simple that you might as well not use a library.

    The only way to correctly validate an email address is to send a message to it, and verify that it arrived.








  • This outcome is welcome progress, but I get the sense that it’s only a drop in the bucket.

    Bullying and intimidating people in other countries who openly contradict the CCP’s narrative seems widespread these days. From the news reports of unofficial Chinese “police stations” in North America, to youtube footage of US students speaking in support of an independent Hong Kong while Chinese students aggressively maneuver within inches of their faces while shouting threats, to the story in this post.

    I hope this is a sign that we are finally taking action to stop it.


  • Or by people formerly paying for their internet service with money that should have been going toward food or heat.

    Losing the $30 monthly discount could force families to choose between broadband and other necessities,

    Exactly.

    It’s also important to note that some ISPs created a low-cost service plan specifically for ACP. (It’s reasonable to assume this was possible in part because ACP handled income verification and eliminated the costs of individual billing and credit card payments.) That plan will likely disappear if ACP goes away, leaving poor people stuck paying a bill much higher than the program ever paid.




  • Your current approach of talking raw SMTP is likely to be more hassle than is worthwhile, and since the days of permissive SMTP servers are long gone, might not work at all.

    Since you appear to be using an Debian-based Linux distro, I suggest this approach:

    • If you don’t specifically need exim, consider replacing it with the lightweight dma package (DragonFly Mail Agent): apt install dma
    • Configure dma (or exim) to use your ISP’s SMTP server as a smart host. (Or the Gmail SMTP server if your ISP doesn’t provide one.)
    • Use the /usr/sbin/sendmail command (which comes with dma or exim) to send messages from your scripting language of choice.

    If you prefer to receive messages as SMS, note that most major mobile carriers maintain an email-to-sms gateway for this purpose. Some web searches will probably lead you to the one for your carrier. They usually accept email at an address like 123456789@sms-gateway.example.com