Napoleon was, by any reasonable accounting, a genius – a military mind who rewrote the rules of European warfare, a political operator who fought his way up from being a minor league Corsican nobility to the Emperor of France and ruler of most of modern Europe before he turned 35, and a reformer whose ideas around the judicial system and the liberal order still echo today.
But none of that stopped him from making one of the dumbest decisions any leader has ever made, because he was arrogant, because he’d gotten away with so much for so long that he confused his luck for a system, and because (with the exception of Talleyrand) most of the people around him had simply stopped telling him no.
Kind: Articles
traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body
Ramble On
I love this song so much, and this version in particular is so good.
Haiku 2026-03-22
Evelyn asked me
To write another haiku
I’m a great father
Trying out posting via the “Enable Mastodon API” plugin…
Security Solution
This + a toddler = secure password generator.
Genius!
Snaplint
My team at work has been focused on snaps this year and one thing we’ve tried to do internally is establish a set of best practices for snap packaging software. Toward that end I’ve been working on a little tool I’m calling snaplint to encode those practices and verify that we’re following them.
Right now you can run snaplint against your snapcraft project directory
and it will scan the prime subdirectory for the following things:
- copyright (basically that you included
usr/share/doc/*copyright*) for
any stage-packages - developer cruft (things like header and object files or static libs
that might have made their way into your snap) - libraries (examine the ELF files in your snap and look for libraries
which aren’t used)
The next things I’m planning on adding are:
- checking for copyright info from apps/parts themselves.
- checking for mixing of incompatible licenses
I would love to hear suggestions on further improvements.
You can find the source at https://github.com/ssweeny/snaplint
And, of course if you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 or later you can try it on your own machine with:
$ snap install snaplint
$ snaplint path/to/your/project