shipmates writes a lot of small state files that other processes read. Voyage plans and state, tracker files. Each of them has to be replaced atomically, so a reader sees the old file or the new one and never half of each. Each also has to be replaced durably. When the function returns success, a power cut doesn’t take it back. Every Unix programmer knows the recipe for that. It doesn’t work on Windows, and the reasons are more interesting than “Windows is different”.

I pulled a 1 TB NVMe out of an old Windows box, dropped it in a USB enclosure and plugged it in. Windows showed nothing. No drive letter, no “initialize this disk” prompt, nothing in Explorer. Disk Management listed it as Invalid. The enclosure’s booklet said to “bring the disk online”, which silently did nothing. The data was completely intact. Windows was refusing on policy grounds, not because anything was broken. Getting it back meant going around the Windows…

One of the first things that broke when I started building PHP on Windows with static-php-cli (SPC) wasn’t PHP at all. It was unpacking the source tarballs. libxml2, xz and a couple of others would die partway through extraction with:

I’ve been building ephemerd, a daemon that runs self-hosted GitHub Actions runners with a fresh environment per job. On a Windows host, Windows jobs run in Hyper-V isolated containers. Linux jobs still need a Linux kernel from somewhere. The obvious answer on Windows in 2026 is WSL2, and that’s what I used first. It worked great from my terminal and fell over the moment ephemerd became a real Windows service.

go-proxmox has had a CloudInit() helper since 2023. It builds a small nocloud ISO in Go, uploads it to Proxmox and mounts it on the VM as a CD-ROM. It’s always worked fine for Linux guests. It has never worked for Windows guests running cloudbase-init. The reason is a filesystem extension from 1995 called Joliet.

Editing the hosts file sounds like the most boring problem in software. Read a text file, add a line, write it back. Then you find out your binary is being shelled out to from a Ruby Vagrant plugin on a Windows laptop with UAC prompts. Your library is being called in a loop by ddev. And every hosts file you parse was hand-edited by somebody at some point. I’ve been maintaining goodhosts for a few years now. I just spent a chunk of the fall and the holidays on it, so here’s what that…