* Posts by Roger Kynaston

909 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007

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Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Roger Kynaston

Zoot suit

Plus one for the exclamation. And the sentiment of course.

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

Roger Kynaston
Happy

Thanks for cheering me up

OK. The serious side is clear and there are clearly issues which a functioning social services could help prevent from becoming a police issue

But ... Flatulence, Whatsapp (which is part of the massive wind farm that is Meta) and the contortionist angle make this the perfect Friday read.

I almost wet myself reading it after all while SHWMBO let rip with a very loud one but didn't record it on her phone.

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

Roger Kynaston
Pint

fun is right

Lots of these -> for the Nasa boffins.

I do hope that robotic missions don't get de-prioritised in the coming years.

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Roger Kynaston

Bodies of water

Lake Huron becomes Lake Trump. Lake Erie become Lake Ivanka and so on. Not sure what Ottawa would have to say about it but they will be the 51st/52nd state of course.

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

Roger Kynaston

Re: Innosplains of daily adventures

yeah. I thought it was going to be something about MySQL.

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

Roger Kynaston
Unhappy

I'm waiting

The Artificial Idiocy bubble has to burst at some point.

I must be such an optimist.

Ransomware attack forces Brit high school to shut doors

Roger Kynaston

OU tutorials

In person tutorials are a rare thing for this OU student. They use Adobe Connect. I expect that little event from 2020-22 accelerated the move but it probably saves the beancounters in Milton Keynes a fortune even if Adobe do fleece them for the Connect license.

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Roger Kynaston

DNFTT

As a principle I totally agree. Though I think that the troll above merits El Reg to bring back FOTW. The trouble is that the trolls have now taken over and they feed themselves. I don't know what the solution is to the serious problem my flippant observation has made.

BOFH: Forecasting and the fine art of desktop upgrades

Roger Kynaston

Missed a trick

Much as I love the Yeltzinger cypher, Simon should have stuck a Schrodinger and crypto in there as well.

Cracking episode though.

Eight things that should not have happened last year, but did

Roger Kynaston

Oracle. Again.

There will be a slew of scandals with failed projects again. They will do something else terrible with Java again. They wil be Oracle again.

Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays

Roger Kynaston
Coat

nominitive determinism

Steve Stich. I really, really hope he says a stich in time saves nine!

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Roger Kynaston

milion upvotes

It may be decades old but it is still briliant. The Admiral just wet herself.

Mysterious outbreak with high fatality rate in the DRC could imperil tech supply chains

Roger Kynaston

Hi Vlad

Enjoying a tea and chinwag with Bashar?

Panic at the Cisco tech, thanks to ancient IOS syntax helper that outsmarted itself

Roger Kynaston

Informix

Informix! Informix! They've all got it Informix

For non brits google Carry on films.

My contact with that database from hell was an ancient Solaris system running husing repairs and it used raw disk allocation rather than block storage.

We can't make this stuff up: Palantir, Anduril form fellowship for AI adventures

Roger Kynaston

Will the next generation go all Harry Potter

Startups called Quidditch and Dumbledore?

We can clone you wholesale: Boffins build ML agents that respond like specific people

Roger Kynaston
Facepalm

so ...

We will have 1000 AI BOFH in the systems team and another 1000 PFY on the helldesk.

I know I am a grumpy old git who has been in this business too long but AI (or the bits of it that get all the news) is determined to eat itself. I know that teams where I work are hoping to develop LLMs that are super good at spotting pre-cancerous cell development and I can imagine that scanning pictures of the cosmos to find planets will also be well served by these toys but not the crap that MS, Google et al seem to be interested in.

With the talking to dead people bit I think of Rimmer so another poor use case.

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Roger Kynaston

not hardware but similar

In a job I wrote a script to automate patching of the RH boxes (all VMs). The bit I thought was clever was that I included a powershell script with powercli to take automatic snapshots with a date stamped name. Then another job would look for those snapshots four days later and delete them. My colleagues then started using those scripts when they were working on boxes outside the patch process so as not to have to remember to delete the snapshots before the VMware guy got all snotty about them.

Initially I was a bit annoyed but then started doing the same thing myself.

Intel: Our finances are in the toilet, we're laying off 15K, but the free coffee is back!

Roger Kynaston

Re: Is it decent?

Better go to Spain then. "Da me un cafe con leche" works at any time there.

I'm mainly glad I don't work for Intel or similar though.

The sad tale of the Alpha massacre

Roger Kynaston

Ooh the memories (twice)

Though I am less of a Gandalf than a non-scottish Rab C Nesbitt.

The first one was on a Sun box. As a greenhorn I had followed some instructions to put /usr and /opt as well as /var in different disk slices. The time came to construct the data partitions on the attached array and I entered newfs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s3 rather than /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s3 and I watche /usr disappear. Thankfully it wasnt in production so the three days of rebuilding was just a good learning experience for me.

The second was a good few years later and the Local Authority I worked for had adopted this new fangled Linux for some 'non-critical' stuff. This particular toy (even on vmware by then) did all the interface file transfers between systems so was clearly non-critical </sarc>. Anyway, for some reason I needed to put some files into a directory in /etc. It arrived as a tarball and without thinking I let tar xvf destroy the whole of /etc. It was remarkable how long it took to fall in a heap but I still had days of desperately trying to get it to a state where I could get the restore software to talk to the backup server before finding out the backups had not been working (it really was a self inflicted perfect storm). As I remember there was little come back as manglement didn't really know what I did and nothing too critical like the benefits BACS file still went properly.

Russian court fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Roger Kynaston
Happy

Obligatory HHTG reference

I am sure that our friends in Moscow are aiming to get enough money together to aquire one Trigantic Pu or 3 Ningis.

"From this it easy to deduce that the Galactic Central Bank is bunk"

BOFH: The Boss pulled the plug on our AI, so we pulled the pin on him

Roger Kynaston
Happy

Re: Sun (and printers)

Ooh the memories! My first proper sysadmin gig was at a now defunct uni and they used to redesign the registration form every year. Bear in mind it was multi-part carbon and had to be printed on a huge dot-matrix jobby. Persuading it to print the form properly took up most of August!

I do miss Sun but not that.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Roger Kynaston
Coat

Re: Regomized as "Clark"?

The ticket must have been put in the Lois Lane though.

NASA switches off Voyager 2 plasma instrument to stretch out juice

Roger Kynaston
Thumb Up

As ever, seriously cool

I wonder if money could be found to send a probe specifically to investigate space beyond the heliosphere. New Horizons reached Pluto much more quickly so I should think they could load up a ship with cool toys to check stuff out and even get there in 20 or so years.

I also wonder if these things will outlast this 59 year old.

Elon's latest X-periment: Blocked users can still stalk your public tweets

Roger Kynaston

moron alert

Others here have pointed out that the best thing to do is to delete your account. As far as I can tell, never having used it, is that the only users left are polical journos and politicos. If everyone did this then the problems assiciated with his latest brain fart - blocking in this case - would go away.

Amazon CEO wants his staff back in the office full time

Roger Kynaston
Go

lucky escape

A couple of years ago I got into a discussion about working at the tat bazarr/bit barn but it didn't go anywhere.

I'm glad it didn't come to fruition.

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

Roger Kynaston

Re: Ouch!!!

I don't know if MS always asking are you sure is better than the UNIX/LIinux assumption that you know what you are doing.

My colleague and I gave a list of user accounts on a Solaris system that hadn't been used in an arbitrary time - I think 90 days - to a deparment admin and she duly deleted all the old accounts. The trouble was that we had failed to a grep -v on low uid accounts and she removed the sys account. It took my colleague 5 days to get the system back up and running!

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Roger Kynaston
Coat

Re: Of course tea makes things work better

Yeah, but asking Eddie (I have called my test HPC cluster Eddie) to make a cup will cause it to crash.

-->

Ditto as I am on leave in a few hours.

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

Roger Kynaston

I want my £10

You are both Elon Musk and Donald Trump and I claim my two £5!

Roger Kynaston

A request

Could you revert to the admirable policy of referring to the orange thing as "A Florida businessman"? It really summed him up so well.

Anaconda puts the squeeze on data scientists now deemed to be terms-of-service violators

Roger Kynaston

probably daft question

Is mamba an Anaconda product?

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Roger Kynaston
Coat

musk cult

The downvote is strong with this one!

Delta Air Lines dials up Microsoft's legal nemesis over CrowdStrike losses

Roger Kynaston

Re: Missing elephants

Quite right. Too much rapid typing going on.

Roger Kynaston
Meh

Missing elephants

Another of Boies Schiller's clients was one Darl MacBride, one time CEO of SCO. He also represented Victoria Giuffre agains the Prince once known as Andrew if I remember correclty.

Customer bricked a phone – and threatened to brick techie's face with it

Roger Kynaston
Coat

early case

Was it a case of RAAC being used?

Sorry, had to be done.

SAP system gives UK tax collector a £750B headache as clock ticks on support

Roger Kynaston
Flame

Oracle - hell no!

The update seems to suggest that they aren't going to give Larry any more of my taxes but I really hope they don't. They should talk to colleagues in Birmingham about that.

Anothing thing I wonder. Could there be a group of medium sized advanced economies with a roughy similar geographical location who could cooperate on procuring/designing a system that would deal with their, likely, similar issues of collecting their dues from a recalcitrant citizinry?

Icon because the Fartarse!

You're not hallucinating: Generative AI is helping IBM's mainframes grow

Roger Kynaston

Re: Love It

A while back, I wrote a spoof press release announcing the advent of blancmange compute - more substantial than the rather thin cloud compute. I'll try and dig it out and refine it.

Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Roger Kynaston
Pint

DNS

It's DNS, it is always DNS.

I bet someone forgot to put the trailing . on a CNAME

-> because lots of microsofties are going to need one soon.

Forget feet and inches, latest UK units of measurement are thinking bigger

Roger Kynaston
Happy

Hah!

I was worried that the Reg Standards Secretariat had been retired.

Not a Genius move: Resurrecting war hero Alan Turing as your 'chief AI officer'

Roger Kynaston
Mushroom

Failed turing test

Whether the Turing test is a valid measure or not these tosspots have demostrated a complete lack of any intelligence at all. Lots of better people have shown their stupidity. More silly vally bollocks

BOFH: Smells like Teams spirit

Roger Kynaston

I was wondering that too

He got a brief reference at the beginning. Presumably the sd card he was installed on got shredded.

Teams hell is a good subject as I wait for the weekly tickets meeting to kick off.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Roger Kynaston

Ho hum

Purveyor of bovine excrement talks utter bovine excrement.

I suppose even he will run out of money if al his toys start losing serious money. I can't imagine SpaceX being able to subsidise the other toys.

BOFH: The new Boss, Aiman, is suspiciously good – for now

Roger Kynaston
Go

But but ...

How can you defenestrate him with a cattle prod?

Great episode though.

404 Day celebrates the internet's most infamous no-show

Roger Kynaston

Re: Grot

Ah yes. I also remember the genuine second had chandlery in Lymington - Yachtgrot. Something that ebay did for I suppose.

Lenovo scores deal to build supercomputer at UK's Hartree Center

Roger Kynaston
Coat

Shiny new toy

I'm glad that things like this are being built here in Blighty. But I can't help thinking that the Science and Technologies Facilities Council should have named itself the Science and Technologies Facilities Unit.

Sorry, it had to be done!

BOFH: So you want more boardroom tech that no one knows how to use

Roger Kynaston
Pint

Re: The best weapon when dealing with idiots is… another idiot

Plus one and one of these -> for the Cabin Pressure reference.

Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so

Roger Kynaston
Coat

Anyone else encounter Simian?

We were forever having to monkey around with it!

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Roger Kynaston
Happy

They migrated to Apple

And they ran so hot that everything melted.

I couldn't squeeze a raspberry pi crap joke in though.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Roger Kynaston

Re: Perspective (OT as well)

Many years ago before I ascended to the heady heights of systems administrator I had a job driving taxis in Taunton where Debenhams had their data processing facility. A daily job was for one of us to go round to their place with a van at four AM and pick upreams of fandfold paper for transport to the head office on Oxford St. Goodness knows what happened to it but I struggled to imagine the eighties equivalient of the C-suite wading through it all.

They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut

Roger Kynaston
Pint

scrumpy memories

Back in the late eighties I drove a taxi in Taunton. There were a couple of 'cider' pubs near the market where the farmers would drink the profits. One was notorious as it would refuse to serve its cider to what they termed foreigners. The other gained some notoreity when another driver came on the radio to tell us that the wall spearating the lounge from the bar wasn't there any more because someone had been thrown through it.

Happy days even if said anecdote has nothing to do with the original story!

Obvious icon and I will be having my last Red Strip of this visit to the In Laws in a few hours while waiting at NMIA.

FAA gives Boeing 90 days to fix serious safety shortcomings found in report

Roger Kynaston
Pint

Re: So they need a name change, really

Reminds me of the old black joke skydivers used to tell each other. "If you are going in grab the grass so you don't bounce!"

Icon since I expect that Boing senior manglement are drinking a lot of it.

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