Stanford chemists have identified and synthesized two new healing compounds in scorpion venom that are effective at killing staph and tuberculosis bacteria.
Source: Stanford researchers synthesize healing compounds in scorpion venom
When living in Mexico I kept a few specimen of the scorpion species used in this research: Diplocentrus melici. You can see photos of this species and its habitat in Disappearing claws in the dark.
On our way back from the town centre I took photos of a yellow flowers which the PlantSnap app on my iPhone 5 identified as Hypericum calycinum.
We’ve discussed a great number of topics over the past couple of years, strike one: What is open source?
Source: What is Open? Common misconceptions.
In the early afternoon I noticed a new growth on the Lady of the Night orchid I had given to my mother for mother's day. And while taking photos with my iPhone 5 I spotted another one.
I have been looking almost daily for new growths as I hope it will flower in June. And maybe we'll get lucky.
Especially the new growth to the right looks like it is going to be both a leaf and a flower stalk, as the latter grows from the former.
I recently wanted to automate building a headless Debian testing (codename “buster”) virtual machine, hosted on macOS, and it turned out to be somewhat more complicated than I expected, so I thought I’d document it here for others’ benefit.
Source: Automating Debian install in QEMU by Hugh Cole-Baker.
On our way to my aunt my mother and I encountered a beautiful and friendly cat resting on top of a garbage can. I couldn't resist to pet it which the cat enjoyed.
Using mmap in desktop applications has some serious caveats, and here's why:
writes Benjamin Schaaf in Use mmap With Care. An interesting read.
These three facts all seem eminently sensible and reasonable, right?
- Unix time is the number of seconds since 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC
- If I wait exactly one second, Unix time advances by exactly one second
- Unix time can never go backwards
False, false, false.
Curious? Read Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time by Alex Chan.
When building Net::SSLeay, a Perl module, on Ubuntu 19.04 the log
contained the following error after the build process halted prematurely.
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lz
This was fixed by installing the zlib1g-dev package as follows:
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
Developers have the power to build the web for everyone, but that power needs to be used responsibly. What matters, in the end, is building things that help and enable people.
Source: HTTP headers for the responsible developer, a great overview by Stefan Judis with many links for further reading.