Posts by Dennis_the_performance_dork

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: TODO

Lol, feel your pain. I am currently on Fedora 42, but around 34-35, they pissed me off. Broke my sound, so I had to poke Pulse Audio every time I wanted to use headphones. So I went to Ubuntu. Then Ubuntu pissed me off (broke my Nvidia driver and stuck me with the crappy Intel chip), so I went to Mint. Then Mint pissed me off (annoying UI updates), so I went back to Fedora. That's both the nice and awful thing about Linux. You at least get choices. Windows 11 just feels like a bad port of a phone operating system, but my clients need proprietary Windows applications. So I just have to suck it up.

Re: TODO

Millennial here, not saying I'm the norm, but I built BIND from source many, many times and configured the domains and zone files and redundancy no problem as I refused to pay a hosting service (a certain one that used to be advertised by an attractive female race car driver) the extra three bucks a month. Built my own kernel for years and years (though I've gotten lazy lately and just take what Fedora or Ubuntu gives me). Ran Slackware from before the artificial version inflation.

I've worked with whiz kid Gen Z/Y folks who knew more about the Intel instruction set than I ever will or ever want to. One of my best friends is Gen X and has taught me more about JVM debugging and performance tuning than I ever wanted to know. I know Baby Boomers who can code a Red-Black Tree in C in their sleep and a skip-list in ASM before morning coffee. It's not about age or generation. It's about interest, aptitude, education, and intellect.

Now my mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, coworkers, and everybody else who calls me for tech support, plugging in an electric tea kettle is a major engineering feat :/

Fedora 42 has the Answer, but Ubuntu's Plucky Puffin isn't far behind

Re: a quiet life

Hmm, I had no problem on Fedora 40 doing LUKS aside from a ridiculous amount of time to generate the keystore on my gimpy laptop. I've since wiped everything again and decided not to go with encryption this time. All my stuff is mirrored to Google or Dropbox anyway, and I *TOTALLY* trust their security. (Hahaha!). Of course, I was just working off a blank slate. I nuked Windows 11 from space and reset my UEFI to turn off all the garbage when I got the new laptop. I also don't dual boot anymore. That might have made it a tad easier.

I have one remaining Windoze machine, and it'll implode in October (or get air gapped so I can still play Sims and Civilization). My clients are all Windows 11, and I hate it.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

HP 4050n

I flat LOVE my printer. Yes, it's almost 30 years old, has wonky JetDirect stuff going on, the Windows driver is a pile of burning dog doo, but I can just send jobs from the Windows world through my Fedora machine as PCL to the CUPS driver which works awesomely. I've replaced all the rollers twice and the fuser once. But it prints 20 ppm, costs next to nothing to print -- 30 bucks for a remanufactured toner that gets 10k pages. It, like my nearly 20 year old truck, works, is comprehensible, and doesn't feel the need to call out to HP's mothership every time the toner gets low.

Users call on Microsoft to update Outlook's friendly name feature

The Olden Days

I have a solution to kill all phishing attacks. . . we go back to Pine or Elm from the command prompt. Maybe even just cat out your /var/mail/spool directly.

Got a link? Sure, it'll just show up as text you can't do anything with until you copy/paste it elsewhere. Embedded MIME items, nope. Sneaky "Friendly" names, nope. Tracking cookies, HA!

The quest to make things easy has made things unsafe. Microsoft, Google, Apple, et al are all trying to make us sleepy mouth breathers who don't know what we're doing and don't need to because they've given us AI assistants and simple UI and happy starshine friendly magic -- unfortunately magic that doesn't work and often backfires.

Kaspersky says Uncle Sam snubbed proposal to open up its code for third-party review

Gonna miss them

Not gonna get into the geopolitics side of things, but I am definitely going to miss Kaspersky. They were the first that I recall to make AV solutions for Linux -- back in my Slackware days, had it on the mail server to protect those Doze users who liked to click things they shouldn't in the POP3/Microsoft Outlook Express/Eudora times. Haven't used it in two decades, but I still think fondly of how many times it saved me going to someone's office to fix a virus because they clicked an email they should have known not to.

3 decades of computing, I've never had a virus. Don't have AV software on my machine -- don't need it, locked down Fedora. I have to sudo to pick my nose, but the number of "house calls" Kaspersky saved me back in the late 90s/early 00s . . .I thank them dearly.

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Victims of our success

I agree to a large extent, but I think you missed the elephant in the room. Linux and OSS are EASY now. You don't have to build your own kernel, don't have to tune the tulip driver to get your network card to work, don't have to stare at weird system calls in C just to get things going. I started on Slackware, ./configure, make config, make, make install. And pray it worked.

Now, Fedora and Ubuntu magically update with RPM and DEB. Need a database? Postgress and Maria are on par with Oracle and DB2. Need an office suite to do spreadsheets and documents? LIbre is imho better than MS Office. The tool chain I use to build software works 100% better on my Fedora laptop than on my Windoze desktop, despite the desktop having much more capability. Video codecs and web browsers all work fine. It's just, well, as I said, Easy! I'm doing an update on Fedora right now, and it's easier than the last time I updated Windows.

So what's the incentive, other than just intellectual curiosity, to go in and tweak things, maybe throw a patch out or do a git pull? Then you have personalities who like, enjoy even, belittling and berating new contributors rather than supporting them and helping them along the OSS path. And then you have Canonical and Big Purple Hat making it so super convenient. . .

We did OSS development back in the day because we had to, and it was small. Now it's big and corporate.

Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit

Re: Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration

Feels . . . all the feels. I mostly worked with a team in China, India, and occasionally California as an East Coast USA guy. They pulled this on us at my former employer even back before the pandemic. Gotta be in the office at least 3 days a week, swipe that badge, or you're getting in trouble.

Going into the office was a social experience -- "Sally's" birthday party, team lunches, listening to "Mr. Important Executive" talk about why NoSQL Blockchain AI in Containers with an Agile Methodology would save the universe, two hour talk with way too much PowerPoint (which, of course, Mr. Important Executive could not figure out how to work) because I didn't want Mr. Important Executive to think I wasn't interested. There's also mandatory meetings and scrums and stand-ups, and somehow, I got on like four teams worth of them. Then, of course, you have to go to Happy Hour with said executive's little cronies after all that excitement about virtualized hybrid cloud microservice architecture.

Most days in the office, I'd get maybe, if I'm generous, an hour of actual work completed.

Then, we switched to a "Hot-desk" open plan environment where you don't have your own space. So now I spent that hour I was actually productive a day looking for a free desk, setting my laptop up, figuring out where to go to the bathroom, getting a locker like I was in high school, etc. instead of actually getting anything done.

I might be an outlier. Maybe most folks can code or spin up a bunch of VMs or analyze a bunch of performance metrics while eating cake at "Sally's" birthday party. My best ever manager did once tell me, "Dennis, you're unmanageable. I just point you at stuff and say go." I can accept that.

Then I get to go home, eat a bite, and start my work day with my teams in China and India, and then I'd get some actual work done. If I had a family, children, other responsibilities, that wouldn't be happening.

Super super glad I'm no longer doing that type of work. Now I freelance consult. I make less money, less reliably, but I get more done and spend less time on the garbage bits. Funny how they start to value your efforts more when they're paying you by the billable hour. . . "Sally's" birthday party would have cost a hundred dollars for me to attend.

El Reg reforms the Quid-A-Day Nosh Posse

"Westerners prefer cheap posturing to actual awareness of the reasons people are poor."

That's kind of the point of exercises like this -- to raise awareness. Is it flawed? Yup. Does it gloss over details of cost of living/exchange rates/lifestyles? Absolutely. But I just downed an energy drink that costs, accounting for common currency exchanges, the wages that millions of people will take home today for a long hard day of labor.

It's a challenge -- a game of sorts like football or tennis -- but with the goal of raising money for a good charity doing good work rather than lining a corporate/celebrity bottom line. Knock it if you want, but if you're not willing to try it before you knock it, at least donate to Malaria No More.

And if you have some better solution for global poverty awareness, by all means. . . we're waiting.

Re: Moral dilemma

Rule in the past has been pro-rota. A cheap scale will let you apportion the salt/pepper/flour/oil/etc. that would normally be bought over a longer period. Check out the last couple of years, and you'll see how they cut down portions of things that we all have in our cupboards into what's for the week. Pretty sensible as engineers at El Reg should be expected to be and are.

Re: Any other 5 Eyes El Reg readers forming vulture teams?

Seems that they took my card for a 50 GBP donation. Best wishes Vulture Central on your quid a day! Going to try to recruit some here across the secession pond ;) Make Simon write more BoFH articles and Verity do more too, even if she still uses Delphi intentionally :)

Re: Day in Day Out

I don't think you've followed this over the last 2 years. People fail on a 5 day run of what other people have to live with day in and day out their entire lives, and those who make it end up delirious, hungry, grumpy, and all sorts of awful with crazy weight loss. It's kind of like the Oxfam hunger banquet here in the States -- not really designed to live in poverty but just to give a short term idea of how difficult it is and raise some funds.

1.22 of my favored beers would eat my whole week's funding (on the 1.50 of USD vs 1 GBP). If some martyr wants to abstain from all beer or decent food for a year for charity, I'd happily contribute a good sum to charity. If not and they're willing to go a few days (in really idealized ways since utilities don't count to the sum), I'm glad to help out those who have to live that life every day.

I don't think anybody's saying that it's possible to live on a quid (or a buck-fiddy) a day in a happy way in any of the targeted countries. I doubt anyone in the readership of the vulture rag has to worry about that. Even here in the weird old USA, even the worst off get plenty to eat for the most part. But 1.2 billion people in the world have to eat on 1 pound/1.48 dollars a day. Experiencing similar hardship, even in a limited way, is informative to people who never have to worry about having an ale or two and having food for the next few weeks.

Living as the "other half" do, even if it's limited and brief, is always informative. If some funds can be raised to fight disease, homelessness, environmental devastation, and hunger in the process, what's wrong with that? I don't think that any sensible person is saying that it's reasonable in any 1st world country that you can live comfortably on that sum as some sort of "poverty is not an issue in developed countries because well paid/fed tech professionals can live on third world rations for a week once a year" statement.

If you don't see the point, join the challenge and see how you feel after 5-7 days of living on the equivalent of a GBP a day with no cheating and try to extrapolate how that would work for the rest of your life. It's kind of like biking/walking everywhere for a week. Nobody's saying that's sensible, but it's informative.

Any other 5 Eyes El Reg readers forming vulture teams?

Noticed that they had a separate selection for each of the US, UK, AU, NZ, and CA. I've followed the quid-a-day for the last 2 years, and it looks, um . . . *challenging* It doesn't look like the US version has Malaria No More as an option for donations (despite there being a US branch https://www.malarianomore.org/). Any other readers/contributors from Vulture West or Vulture South up for the challenge? Maybe even some cross continental rivalry?

If not, any idea how confused the system will get if I try to contribute my strange US dollars with no picture of the queen to Malaria No More UK in support of my brave Reg correspondents and their soon to be lentil heavy diets?