Posts by l8gravely

On Call: User who handled life-or-death situations struggled with the SHIFT key

Re: At least they knew about the Shift key

As a long time emacs user (40 years now!) the first thing I do on all my computers/keyboards is map CAPSLOCK to Ctrl like god intended.

Offshoots of cancelled TrueNAS Core upgrade to FreeBSD 15

my ex-$WORK got a TrueNAS HA system...

I spec'd and installed a TrueNAS Core HA system at a previous $WORK since they had champagne tastes and a beer budget and a dumpster of old data the didn't want to get rid of. It works... but like all ZFS NAS boxes, it is NOT HA in the Netapp sense, which is active/active. Failover takes quite a bit of time due to having to spin up the new active head which then has to scan and import the zpool(s) which takes time.

Kinda defeats the whole purpose of HA NAS/block storage in my mind. But... this is a possibly a good way forward for those people who like the FreeBSD base and don't want to move to TrueNAS SCALE.

A lot of datacenter networks are run by absolute clowns. Not Amazon's

Re: If you are putting your data on somebody else's server...

The problem is "Economy of Scale", it's a killer in terms of driving down costs.

Why don't you smelt your own Iron Ore for your servers? Or Refine your own silicon to make your own chips?

Because it's too damn expensive for the return!

I love running my own DC, because I'm strange and like pulling cables, racking gear, fixing hardware (i.e. swapping pieces I couldn't build myself in a lifetime of work!) etc. But I also enjoy scripting, helping my end users, dealing with the generator people and other vendors. But it costs to do it all for your self. Both in terms of people, knowledge, space, etc. AWS (who I am not a total fan of) has just managed to make economy of scale work for us, while taking their cut off the top.

running your own 1000 sq/ft datacenter with 30 racks is fun. Until one of the 10ton chillers craps out, or the power goes out and the transfer switch to the generator doesn't change over properly. Or the UPS can't take the load, or the batteries have expired and you didn't notice...

It's all stuff you can manage on your own. But economies of scale let's you spread that cost over such a large base that it becomes cheaper to use it than to not. It's a consequence of the industrial revolution that makes us all rich as kings of old today.

The balkanization of virtualization will de-throne VMware, which doesn't mind a bit

When you lose the bottom end, you lose the top end eventually

I strongly disagree with the theme of this article that "there will never be a better virtualization platform". When you lose the bottom end, or cede it, you're shooting yourself in the foot. It might not happen today, it might not happen for five years. But it will happen, because all the beginners and enthusiasts and small businesses where people learn will be exposed to KVM (or other technologies) and will happily stay there down the line. Especially as ProxMox and other vendors have all the incentive to improve their offerings to capture this large market. It might not be as lucrative, but it will still make them money.

IBM is in a lucrative niche, but it's also ceded the bottom end multiple times and look where it's ended up? Or look at DEC in the past? The bottom end is where people goto learn, experiment and build opinions on what is right and works. If you give that up... then eventually you will be sidelined.

If you're happy being a niche vendor, then that's good for you. But it isn't going to fly with the customers who only need basic virtualization and VMotion so they can run their envionment in a way that let's them move things around to replace old hardware, add in upgrades transparently, etc. That's it. 90% of the world only needs that.

And I also feel that virtualization will now explode in new directions, because the king voluntarily abdicated.

Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments

Recuring payment whaa....?

What are you talking about? I can setup recurring payments in my bank no problem. Well... the web interface is annoying, but recurring payments do show up and I can edit them no problem.

Hugging Face rebuilt a third of its infrastructure after OpenAI agents ran amok

The birth of "Ralph the Wise and Powerful", a reference to Daniel Keys Moran's "Continuing Time" series...

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

Re: Blind acceptance of "the normal"

I think it means to cut it before you cook it so it won't curl as much in the pan. I tend to cut my sausages and hotdog like foods with little slashes down the sides, across the length, so that they don't explode and also don't curl as much from cooking on one side or the other.

Icon for obvious cooking!

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

I was once rolling a full cabinet stuffed with 7 Sun V240s each with 2Gb of RAM, 4 x CPUs, etc. Was worth more than my _house_ at the time....

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

Re: Box

All H&S and OSHA (for this side of the pond) rules are written in blood. Yes they're stupid at times, but so were the people who caused the rules to be written in the first place. When I grumble about how inane they are, I try to stop and think about the poor sucker (or idiot, or both) who got hurt doing something and bite my tongue.

Re: "They were quick shocked, and offended, to discover that web hosting didn't include ISP services

I just changed our main TV and SWMBO is not happy with me because now she doesn't know how to get the weather station without blankly poking at the new remote. Sigh... this is why I won't get rid of our Tivo, she knows how to run it. And knows how to run the Roku we used to have hooked up there. Change is not something she enjoys... especially technical change.

To fix this Wi-Fi network, we'll need a crane

Check the firmware of your Access Points and make sure they're upto date. But... you don't really give enough information for anyone to help.

Does Wifi stay up all night if you leave a system running? Is this at $WORK or at $HOME? What model APs are they? How many are there? Are they in a mesh network? How are they back hauled? 2.4g or 5g wifi? What model laptops? Chipset? Vendor? Windows version? Are they upto date patch wise? Does a linux install on the same hardware show the same problem? Boot a live image from a thumb drive as a check. You'll get better diagnostics for sure...

Basically, simplify your environment and collect info.

Techie was given strict instructions not to disrupt client. Then he touched one box and the lights went out

Re: Downvote - really?

I never knew elreg kept these stats, awesome! Of course I've been here for years... but rarely post.... but when I do it's _quality_! :-)

your 197 public posts have been upvoted 1252 times and downvoted 88 times.

Matrix is quietly becoming the chat layer for governments chasing digital sovereignty

Re: I keep reading that...

I just read this review on various discord replacement tools which fits right into this article.

https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/

It's a good read. I'm part of a local linux user group with a domain, email list and now a signal group. I'm trying to make sure that we're more inclusive and offer better community than our current setup, so all this is good news.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

Re: Quite a rare sight

On a side note, I just spent an hour the other night trying to figure out why my mother-in-law's Chromebook (64bit, replaced the old 32bit one that replaced the WinXP she regularly blew up) wouldn't let her see any web sites any more. It was baffling! Finally I ended up doing the soft reset where all her settings went back to defaults, but didn't wipe her bookmarks. And viola it all started working again.

She has a positive genius for breaking computers, but she's so timid about asking for help, and so timid that she's going to break things that she doesn't even try herself.

But boy, she'd be an awesome person to have in your testing team, she just pokes at stuff and somehow, god knows how, breaks them.

Love her (and her daughter!) dearly, but she's the load stone around my family IT support neck.

Re: Quite a rare sight

My cursive is so bad (and I'm a lefty too!) that I switched back to block printing in HS (left side ponder here...) just to keep up with the teachers when taking notes. Once I had my C-64 and I could write papers and print them on my Okidata 24pin dot matrix printer, hand writing anything more than notes to myself was done and gone. Good riddence!

kneeling chair knearly knocked my knees

I tried that fad too in the 90s, got a kneeling chair and tried it. Gave it up after a few days because my knees were not happy with me. And here I am happily skiing 35+ years later without knee problems!

Techie's one ring brought darkness by shorting a server

Re: Railway power

I used to volunteer at a Trolley museum, which used 600V DC in the overheard wire to provide power. How many amps you ask? Enough to move a 20 Ton trolley filled with people... anyway, we were working on a big old railway crane and tracing cables through the slip ring at the center of the crane turntable. All the power came via the back of the crane, which has a long line with stick and hook on the end. You would shutdown the overhead line above the crane, but power it by hooking into a live segment nearby on the overhead.

Anyway, we were working on the crane in the shop and it was amazed to see 50v of leakage we would see when the switches were off on the power controller. But 50v when you need 600v to spin a motor is just nothing to think about.

Fun times playing there...

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

Re: Ah yes, 6-Sigma.

I too did a six-sigma project, around backup tapes and such process. Pity the poor engineers who had to do it around chip design, where they usually worked on one chip for six to twelve months at a time Six Sigma is for processes that generally generate LOTS of items, widgets, what haveyours. Something that you can track variation on. No clue how this works for backups or one off design flows....

Use it in the right place and it's wonderful. Try to make it work in all places... and hell breaks out.

.

NASA begins formal anomaly review after MAVEN probe lost in space

Send Bugs

There was a Maven Shattering Ka-Boom!

Help desk read irrelevant script, so techies found and fixed their own problem

Re: DIY

What? You gotta explain this because your old saying is bollocks otherwise.

User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

Facetime makes debugging so much simpler

I live a good 30 minutes away from my in-laws and my MiL is terrible at computers. She used to regularly blow up here WinXP laptop for reading email and the web until I got her a Chromebook. Best ten year investment I ever made.

But getting her to read the screen and report what it says was .... trying. I'd spent two hours on the phone, and by then the sunk cost of just not getting into the car was way way behind me. Sigh... but once she got an iPhone and learned how to do facetime, and pointing the camera at the screen.... that made a huge difference. She can still mess things up to the extent that a visist is the best answer, but quite a few times I can just see what the problem is and get her back on track.

Such a time saver to be able to see what the user sees, and what they _don't_ see because they don't think it's important.

Vendor's secret 'fix' made critical app unusable during business hours

Re: Real common when SELinux is active

I hate SELinux with an undying passion because it makes a tough job impossible. Completely impossible. The docs suck. The tools suck. The examples suck. The mentality sucks.

I'd post examples, but I've burned them out of my brain.

Rhyme is the key to set AIs free when verse outsmarts security

Reminds me a little bit of Piers Anthony's "Phaze" series with Stile winning the serf olympics and getting magic. Hey, I was a kid when I read and enjoyed these!

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

I just shutdown a VM with 1800+ days of uptime. And yes, it was up way too long and should have been patched, etc. But the end user customer doesn't like paying for support, doesn't like reboots because they tend to fire/let go/reassign the contractors/outside vendors who built the damn app, etc.

Of course the same idiots don't mind testing UPS to generator failover during the day without any notice....

Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

Since Chase had a consistent monthly spend of $1-2k, he should have just bought a couple of beefy servers and put them into a colo. Then suddenly you have saved a bunch of money over time. Now if this $40k is a large part of the sponsors monthly cost, then sure, maybe they want to make a statement to AWS about their shitty controls. And moving that spend to somehwere else might be a good idea.

But honestly, runnign your own infrastructure, when even a basic 2 cpu and 8gb of RAM VM can run you $120/month, it quickly makes sense for consistent loads to move onto your own hardware in alot of cases. But hey, the PHBs all belive that purple money (opex) is free, and that capex (red money) costs way too much, so they go with the more expensive option. Perverse incentives.

London left buffering as Hyperoptic backup link refuses to boot

Why the hell aren't they using BOTH links at once? That's the perfect test of your infrastructure, just push different clients/IP blocks down different paths, with failover when needed if one link goes down?

I was a part-time DBA. After this failover foul-up, they hired a full-time DBA

Re: Oooh. I managed to avoid that

Funnily enough I just had a Solaris 5.9 box lose a disk, but the onsite tech pulled the working disk by mistake. Oops! I had to get him to move it to another system entirely so I could fsck the damn thing and removed the broken mddev DB entries before it would reboot again. Once it did, all was well. Just took several days since he's only on site sometimes and I'm not a priority all the time. Oh well...

Techie fooled a panicked daemon and manipulated time itself to get servers in sync

Wow, there's a name I haven't heard in a while, Acopia. We tried out their NFS appliance and promptly broke it with the sheer volume of files and directories and data we had in our environment. It was a really need idea to Virtualize NFS volumes and let you migrate data transparently. But it just didn't scale well. Got to visit them at their office in the old Wang buildings, on the left side of the Pond.

AmiBrowser brings 21st century web to 20th century Amigas

Man, now I'm tempted to try and get a copy of 'MechForce' running, which was THE game for me on my Amiga 1000 or 2500 back when I had them. I loved that game, which was freeware and let you design your own Mechs and then fight them on a hex grid battlefield. If I had free time and ability to focus, I'd try to recreate it natively. There looks to be an alpha implementation in Java, which means I won't be able to help... https://sourceforge.net/projects/mechfight/

Ah... memories!

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: Anecdotally... No To BTRFS Too

I actually view the including of RAID into the filesystem to be a mis-feature. Just look at all the problems btrfs has had with their RAID5 implementation. And ZFS has had major problems with expanding or growing (or shrinking!) zpools much less filesystems due to design issues. Use MD for mirroring/RAID, LVM for logical volumes and filesystems on toip . Three layers, it's not that complicated and it gives you more flexiblity and control.

I've met Ted and even had dinner with Linus many many many moons ago as part of a group. Neither will remember me. But both were well spoken, able to take criticism, and still be graceful. Ted moreso than Linus as times. Kent is another talented programmer, he really is. But he's a total tool when you make a comment he views as against him or his code. Once he's decided the right way, it's his way come hell or high water.

Which isn't the way to collaborate with other people well.

And honestly, I've been watching the various mailing lists and Kent is getting better... but I think he burned one too many bridges and Linus is either going to make him sit out a cycle and then merge it for 6.18 and hopefully Kent will learn the lesson. Or his will just 'git rm' the entire sub-tree and purge it all for the next release. I hope it's the former, and I hope that Kent realizes this and gets his ducks in a row and all his patches and testing done so that when the NEXT merge window opens up, he can big there with a well explained patch set that's been in linux-next tree and doesn't do stupid crap like dropping major patches into release 4 or 5 of the window.

Kent's reasoning was that "I needed to post these patches because people had data corruption and this was the only way to get them working again!" which is BS. Anyone running 100tb of data on an experimental filesystem deserve to lose data and should expect to lose data. And they can god well compile their own kernel with out of tree patches to get their data back. At that point to send in a patch to disable the bad feature. Thne you can send in a second proposed patch that could either go in now to fix it, or be pushed out to the next release as a real fix.

It's about patience and an understanding of the process.

Kent; great programmerl; lousy person

I've had my own runins with Kent. I absolutely an amazed at his coding ability and focus. But he once asked for some comments on the useabily of bcachefs tools and such and I gave him my opinion, carefully noting that I was not a programmer and this is from my IT hat as a Unix SysAdmin. Boy did I get flamed for providing useless feedback that wasn't all praise and hallegleuyahs. (not going to bother spell checking that!) and so I'm a bit off on bcachefs at this time.

But I do like the ideas it has, and the scalability and no-fsck really needed, etc. It's not as fast as hoped, but honestly people have some many special cases in filesystems for directio, threading, and other hacky ways to get more performance for their special sauce which can't be changed for some reason, that I know writing a filesystem is a chore. And with all the new features people want/need, it's hard to be performant.

So yes, Kent is a prickly pear who can't/won't/hasn't yet learned how to deal with people and pushback in a graceful manner. This is his problem. It might be our loss... but it's his problem to solve.

BOFH: The trouble with, er, windows installs

Re: How many other laptops trashed with this weeks updates?

And don't you love how Win10 let you put the status bar vertically on the side of the screen, not just at the top or bottom? Now notice how Win11 has removed that wonderfully useful feature for some insane reason.... it's always a step backwards.

Tiling terminal multiplexers for the console connoisseur

Screen AND emacs works great

Once you re-configure screen to use 'Ctrl-t' instead of Ctrl-a as the screen attention prefix, it works a treat when running mulitple sessions.

I even have my screen setup to echo the screen number and hostname into the title bar of the Xterm. So I can flip between remote connections over a single putty session and manage multiple remote systems. I'm on the east coast and most of my work is on the west coast, so having ssh/putty/screen is a god-send for me.

I've tried tmux before, and while it's nice and works well, my fingers are programmed with screen shortcuts.

And this brings up what I think would be an awesome project. Basically a keybindings translator which lets your fingers do things how they like (for me, emacs movement bindings are etched in my brain, and since my terminal CLI history also supports those exact same key strokes... that's what I use everywhere).

So basically, I setup a screen+emacs+whatever bindings, and then no matter what editor, or screen management tool I'm using, they keybindings are the same. I'm also a strange duck who still reads email using 'viewmail' inside emacs. But I use mutt for more heavily trafficed mailing lists, but replying only happens in viewmail because my brain is wired for those key bindings. I need to seriously investigate changing all of mutt's bindings to match what I do for 95% of my email reading and composing.

And this is why people get so upset when vendors re-tool their GUIs and interfaces. They've invested so much muscle/visual/expectation memory into common tasks, that when things are changed (for no good reason they can see) they go ape!

And don't get me started on all these 20 year olds with transparent terminal windows with busy graphics bleeding through! How they can read that, I'll never know. But they will regret it down the line when they have to start wearing cheaters just to read the screen. Just you wait.... just you wait....

BOFH: Rerouting responsibility via firewall configs

Re: "web interface ... a back-rev browser that doesn't complain about certificate errors."

Sigh... I've just run into this, again, for some old Brocade FibreChannel switches we still use. And for a 20 year old application written in house using Oracle Forms 6 running on Solaris 5.9 on a V120 that's 20 years old. Sigh... luckily I can just quietly archive that system and application and it's data. It will never ride again.

The elusive goal of Unix – or Linux – simplicity

Re: So....in 1983......

Z-80, CP/M, 8" floppies, Magic Wand word processor, Diablo 630 daisy wheel printer, big box to hold printer to keep down the noise! Mail merge of 1000 names into form letters for mass mailings from Dad's business. Priceless!

Re: "Advocacy..."

It's also because people and companies want "the next new thing!" and "you have to upgrade because of our new X, Y or Z", when the old version works just fine. If it ain't broke, don't fix it gets more and more useful asI get older.

This past weekend I tried getting Photospring inside Docker working better (it's already pretty nice for what it does!) so I could upload photos more easily from my iPhone so I could finally sort and organize and do some facial recognition, etc. Nope, not a fucking hope to get it working. But the system I host it all on is a Debian system upgraded since version 5 (I think) piece meal over the years all the way to Debian 12. It works. I runs some reasonably bleeding edge linux kernels I self compile. It works! Until it doesn't...

I'm thinking I need to go back to basics, where I have a core systems that just provides KVM, NFS, Docker, etc. But no real user logins except for management. Then I just have various VMs which mount home directories from the core server part. I can upgrade, change, update, play with VMs to my hearts content. But the core services are just there and working and stable.

Ah... it's like a good workbench. It has to be durable, adaptable, flexible but above all solid and unmoving when you're bashing away on top of it on a project. So much so that you just forget about it mostly. Until you need to do an upgrade.

So I want a really good workbench (Debian? FreeBSD? ProxMox? ) whcih can provide good services, but not much more. The rest is all for the VMs ontop of the abstraction to play with.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

Re: The keyboard of the gods

I stil have, but don't use, a Northgate OmniKey Ultra T keywhich which I used to love. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northgate_Computer_Systems for a picture. But having a number pad which I don't use at all very much was just bad for my right wrist carpal tunnel, so I've moved to a tenkeyless CODE from www.wasdkeyboards.com, but it looks like they've died and gone the way of the dodo. Which is sad.

I need to start looking for another backlit board with really really really solid keycaps, doubleshot that let the light through. Suggestions?

Strange keyboards are the bane of IT support

So I don't like ergonomic keyboards because they're strange and my muscle memory isn't helpful. It's even worse when I plunk down at some user's desktop and they have capslock still on the home row. Sigh... the one true emacs way is to have Ctrl be way out left! But if you do have carpal tunnel syndrome, then maybe you're sitting wrong? Or you've got the mouse way too far out to the side? I've gone to 88 key ten-keyless keycord (CODE from wasdkeyboards.com) as my goto driver at both work and home. It's backlit, narrow so my mouse isn't way out to the side and it clicks and feels nice. It's got the Cherry MX Clear switches, so it's loud, but not nearly as bad as the blues.

What I wish I could find is a keyboard with the number pad and/or function keys on the LEFT side, but I'm a lefty who can't use the mouse with his left hand, but can't draw with my right hand to save myself at all.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Inverse problem, kinda ...

I turned down a job offer in '92 because they expected me to wear sport jacket and tie, though I was assured you could take off the jacket and leave it on your chair back when you got into the office, and then put it back on when you left for the day.

The real reason I didn't accept it was that I was going to install the OS on new HP-UX systems. Not unbox, not install the application. Not rack them. Just. Install. The. OS.

Which sounded like hell to me because it came on tape to be installed once you booted the base installer from CDROM or BIOS? Can't bother to remember how the described it. But it sounded like hell on earth. I got into IT because I could get my hands into all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies.

The jacket/tie was just the icing on the cake of 'nope!'

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

early CS teachers

Way back in the early 80s (late 20th century as my kids call it... sigh) my school got a new computer lab with 40 IBM PCs in 10 Severance style pods sharing a dot matrix printer. Our teacher was nice and a good history teacher, but out of his depth teaching BASIC. Three friends and I would amuse ourselves by writing completing the day's in-class assignment in as few lines as possible of BASIC, more kudos if we got it done in one line. Fun times. Usually we'd be done before he finished explaining things.

CrushFTP CEO's feisty response to VulnCheck's CVE for critical make-me-admin bug

CEO bro vibes here...

Why do I think CrushFTP's CEO is a MBA Bro Dude with a god complex? Sheesh...

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Interested in the type of 'mainframe'

I'm very glad I dodged that bullet and have had very little IBM experience my career, mostly AIX which is NOT Unix in any way, shape or form. Just from the application interface, not the management side.

Though I do have an AS/400 sitting in a corner which needs to be run every once in a while since no one can be arsed to get the data off this system and migrated to something simpler to use and maintain. This is what happens when you let go all your application support team... you end up with horrors like this. Or the 20+ year old Java Tomcat app they're trying to replace now. Sigh...

Loud printers

Back in the day at my dad's office we have Zenith H-89 and Zenith Z-100 systems running CP/M with probably 4mb of RAM. 8" or 5.25" floppies. I would do a bunch of data entry into MagicWand or PeachTree DB software (or just a flat file formatted properly, I forget which but suspect the flat file now...) and then write up the marketing letter, format it and let it all rip on a Diablo 630 daisy wheel printer. Many, was that thing loud. Made the whole office grimace when I kicked it off, so they soon got one of those stands with the hatch you could lift up to get it, but otherwise left down to muffle the noise. Came with the noise absorbing foam traingles as well to hopefully cut down the noise. Those were the days...

eBPF. It doesn't stand for anything. But it might mean bank

Re: Cost Savings

He was sent on an ORTBO...

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Re: Why are admins slow to upgrade?

I'm in this place too, but it's an old old app I wrote for a local library to allow searching of their collection of newspapers. Luckily it's a readonly DB updated from the master internal server and lives in the DMZ. Simple mysql, php, apache. Trivial. But it's on an old version of Debian, with an older version of PHP. And the date time library I use for dates (all before 1900...) is semi-broken and abandoned for newer versions of PHP. Sigh... And of course some of the PHP language stuff has changed as well, so I had to re-write some stuff to get around that.

So I'm not in a rush to replace it on my spare time. But I know it needs to move up to something newer. It's not sexy, but it works, I can spin up new versions and new interfaces to new a new DB of collections and the internal people know how to push updates to my server. Works a treat. Until it doesn't. But it's read only and in the DMZ, so it's not critical.

Too many systems don't have this mindset of keeping the production seperate from the reporting or query systems. Yes, I understand you want to be able to enter new orders and such into your production system and you need to do that. But for alot of things, have a query only system you can not care about because you can rebuild it quickly is "good enough" in alot of cases.

$16B health dept managed finances with single Excel spreadsheet. It hasn’t gone well

Re: If it aint broke

Double entry book keeping to actually track stuff properly?

Moonshot goes sideways as Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander seemingly falls over

and now empty fuel and oxidizer tanks are up high. They went with two stacked tanks, instead of Blue Ghosts four tanks arranged around the center and loiwer down.

This doesn't bode well for Starship landing on the moon either.

For example, most big (and little) cranes are spec'd to be level to within 1% or their load charts drop off precipitously. Just a little off plumb and things start looking really really bad.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: With his newfound Unix skills he typed the command...

Way back in the midst of times when sh was all you got, along with maybe csh as possible shells, there was much rejoicing when tcsh was installed and you could edit the prompt to show various things, like the current directory you were in, along with the hostname you were currently logged into. This has saved lots and lots of time and gnashing of teeth over the years...

Now days bash is all you really need anymore, it's got all the features of tcsh and none of the downsides of actually scripting in (t)csh as well. Whew.

Even modest makeup can thwart facial recognition

I ran into this recently, but in a more prosaic way. I was cooking some meet for a beef stew and the grease ended up on my glasses. Not enough to stop me from seeing stuff, but enough to stop my iPhone from being able to recognize my face. It was really wierd... and sent me down all kinds of wrong paths trying to figure out what was wrong with my phone, as opposed to me. Or more accurately, my glasses. Once I cleaned off the schmutz, all was well again.