Maybe $~FORMER_WORKPLACE means they used to work from home?
Posts by Woza
288 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2011
Marketing demanded IT add website feature that was already working
Microsoft gives your Word documents an AI co-author you didn’t ask for
Friday 24th April 2026 01:03 GMT
Re: LibreOffice.
Libre Office is great for me, as long as you stay within its ecosystem. Unfortunately I work at the interface between technical teams (all on Linux with Libre Office) and business /ops/executive teams, all still captive to MS Office. Libre Office has quirks when dealing with some layout, font choices, etc coming from MS Office. I work around this using the online version of Office via Firefox, which is a bit awkward and slow, but gets the job done and means I can keep my work desktop a Windows-free zone.
Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'
Nice try, sinners: Pope nixes idea of AI pontiff blessing netizens
UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites
Microsoft dangles $10K for hackers to hijack LLM email service
Monday 9th December 2024 22:33 GMT
Re: Dear LLM
<pedant mode>
/dev/urandom will not block, but in theory has less entropy
/dev/random depletes the entropy pool as it runs so can stall (esp on a VM) but in theory has higher entropy. You may only get a few hundred bytes out of /dev/random and then pause for tens of seconds.
I have read that the distinction vanishes in newer kernels, but haven't gone into details
</pedant mode>
Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making
BOFH: Get me a new data file or your manager finds out exactly what you think of him
IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco
The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month
Adidas grapples with $1.3B in unsold Yeezy sneakers after breaking up with Kanye West
SBOMs should be a security staple in the software supply chain
Sunday 5th March 2023 23:17 GMT
Re: "The idea of the SBOM is relatively new."
Exactly. We were maintaining an SBOM for our product since it began development circa 2010 (</whippersnapper>) and this was a required artefact when we delivered evaluation units to $US_DEFENCE_PRIME a few years later. In that case the focus was mostly on understanding licencing of the various components, but still - knowing what you're using is not a new concept.
If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion
University of Texas latest US school to ban TikTok
US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes
Team Interpol: Metaverse Police
The Metaverse is the internet no one wants
Microsoft to stop accepting checks from partners
Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America
Will optics ever replace copper interconnects? We asked this silicon photonics startup
Version 251 of systemd coming soon to a Linux distro near you
Wednesday 25th May 2022 04:59 GMT
Several months ago, I had to blow away and reinstall my laptop, and decided to give Slackware a go, based largely on your posts here. (As context, I consider myself reasonably au fait with Linux, having run Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux From Scratch and OpenSUSE in one form or another since before 2006, and fully agree with your characterisation of systemd.)
I felt at home in Slackware, it was great! But I couldn't find how to update packages. Key internet-facing packages and libraries relied on OpenSSL versions (1.0.2) that were EOL at the time, and it seemed like the way to know if something was patched was via email list. I dug myself into a waist-deep morass of dependencies trying to update and recompile packages manually to get the latest security fixes, and in the end retreated to Kubuntu where I can just run apt-get and get the updates I need.
As an experienced Slackware user, what did I miss? How do you keep things patched?
Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'
Atlassian Jira, Confluence outage persists two days on
Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it
Monday 28th March 2022 10:25 GMT
Re: Been there, done that, tipped the swear jar
Best one I saw in our code base was:
#define GO_HOME_WINDOWS_YOU_ARE_DRUNK
in code that was working around quirks of MSVC.
A different part of our code base has a function that cleans up child processes, called grim_squeaker - long ago tribute to PTerry and Death of Rats, from my younger self.
Switzerland's SWIFT data centre under guard after Russian banks excluded
Have you tried restarting? Reinstalling? Upgrading? Moving house and changing your identity?
US Navy in mad dash to salvage F-35C that fell off a carrier into South China Sea
Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*
Planning for power cuts? That's strictly for the birds
A time when cabling was not so much 'structured' than 'survival of the fittest'
Computer scientists at University of Edinburgh contemplate courses without 'Alice' and 'Bob'
Boeing 737 Max chief technical pilot charged with deceiving US aviation regulators over MCAS
Fatal Attraction: Lovely collection, really, but it does not belong anywhere near magnetic storage media
Thanks, boss. The accidental creation of a lights-out data centre – what a fun surprise
Feature bloat: Psychology boffins find people tend to add elements to solve a problem rather than take things away
The stench of progress: Sweat may power your personal tech in the not-so-distant future
Sunday 14th March 2021 03:13 GMT
I used to play cricket with a guy whose kit had red marks from shining the ball for the whole season. At the end of the season, one of the player's wives gave this guy a box of washing powder. It wasn't until later that we wondered what could happen if he was pulled over by the cops with an unmarked plastic box of white powder...
Scottish enviro bods shrug off ransomware gang's extortion attempt as 4,000 files dumped online, saying it's nothing big
Friday 22nd January 2021 21:55 GMT
Re: How long, I wonder
Disclaimer: I work for a company active in this area.
Filesystem encryption is common these days - bitlocker on Windows, or Veracrypt, or the Linux alternatives, etc. But that's not going to help if scumbags are logged into your system because they then see the same view of the files as you do, they're inside the file system.
There are also ways to do application level encryption, which is what you're suggesting. There are tools that will plug into Word, for example, and encrypt/decrypt stuff between Word and the disk. The problem is that this needs to be implemented on a per application basis - if your favourite CAD software doesn't have a plug-in for your chosen encryption software, you're short on luck. You also need to be careful with configuration - for example, ensuring temporary backup files created by the application are also encrypted.
Depending on your paranoia level, you also need to worry about swap files, which can contain unencrypted snapshots of files resident in your application's memory.
Finally, there's a kind of middle ground where you manually encrypt / decrypt files as needed - either on a per-file basis or in a container like Veracrypt. But that is less convenient for day-to-day workflow.
Like a good defragging? The latest Dev Channel Windows 10 might be for you
Notpetya, Olympics hacking, Novichok probe meddling... America throws the book at six alleged Kremlin hackers
Microsoft open-sources fuzzing tool it uses in-house to keep Windows so very secure
Up from the depths, 864 servers inside, covered in slime, it's Natick!
The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon
What a time to be alive: Floating Apple store bobs up in Singapore
A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos
Monday 24th August 2020 21:53 GMT
Re: Thinking outside the box
The Goon show called it 65 years ago:
Seagoon:
Tell me, how do we raise the pier?
Moriarty:
Oh, don't raise the pier!
Seagoon:
What then?
Moriarty:
Lower the river!
Seagoon:
Gad! Genius! Absolute genius! But, but can you do it?
Moriarty:
Sapristi yacka-backakas of course I can. My partner, the Honourable Grytpype-Thynne is the greatest water remover in the world! Follow me!
