Posts by Joe W 1924 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Aug 2018
The only time I really f'd up a Debian (now Devuan) system so much it was easier to reinstall from scratch was when I tried to install pipewire. What a mess (for me). I'll give it a try maybe... next year. Or the year after. And I'll mess up my kids' laptop first ;)
My problem was that I could not install pipewire and configure it to run as a daemon and support my bluetooth headphones. The original (i.e. what came with my Devuan installation) just works. Maybe I will get that external DAC/ADC box at one point in time and then I'll need to give it another shot. Though my next project is building a phono preamp to go into my 30 years old amp (I could build the original one, I have the schematics and board layout, but I'll stick with the Elliott sound-au.com one (I need to change some stuff around so it can go into the amp the way the manufacturer intended) - and for that I need to get my home lab (re-)started...
Waay back, when mandatory service was still a thing in the country I grew up, I was in the engineering unit (whatever the correct term for a part of a company is), as a weapons specialist. The car guys were in the same buildings complex as other car guys from other companies, and they did fix a lot of stuff, even down to rewiring stuff, light body work, engines being pulled apart. Some of the "real" soldiers (i.e. not the drafted kids) were real wizards in fixing stuff. But that was a quarter of a century ago...
And don't skimp on the over hours payment.
It is literally as simple as that, as long as you treat your staff with the respect they deserve and make your company a place they like to be at. If I hate the place (first, why would I still be there) I won't really enjoy doing maintenance at night, and no small amount of money will motivate me.
Working on an open powered up machine is high risk, I had a mate drop a network card onto his machine's mainboard once, grateful it was not a production environment and he was just showing off hotplugging.
The card was fried, the rest of the system survived, surprisingly.
Yeah, try to avoid it.
"The friction introduced in the conversion of human reasoning into a rigid expression of logic is where the learning and development of computational thinking occurs."
We all hate legalese, or at least most of us do. Consider this just another way to cast human reasoning into a rigid expression of logic (when done correctly). I actually know a guy who did exactly that as a thesis for his law degree, mapping legal language to mathematic logical expressions to build a "reasoning machine". Lawyers have also obviously been doing obfuscated code longer than we did.
I work for a company that writing pretty critical code. No, not lives-at-stake-level but livelihoods-at-stake-level. My mind boggles at your statement.
Stop telling me (and the world in general) "I don't need to write a precise specification". This is just plain wrong - and dangerous. Same thing with testing edge cases or actually documenting your code. And unless your code has almost zero impact, these three things, however much we all like to avoid them[1], have to be done in a professional environment.
Unpopular thing to tell people, but tough shit. Suck it up.
[1] Yeah, I have been guilty as charged on all three points in the past. We all have. Why else would all those memes exist with "my code is self documenting" et cetera?
I thought that was sort of the definition ofbeing in the Holy Roman Catholic Church? Yeah, I know about history, having three popes in parallel at one point and all that. Still, if you say the pope is wrong he has the power to excommunicate you, right? I know this is no longer a real problem, you are not considered fair game, they are not going to confiscate all your stuff (unless you are really powerful, then you can just tell them to f**k themselves, take the catholics stuff, outlaw them, create a new church, claim yourself to be head of that).
I don't really know, not my club as well... (though the new dude sounds interesting, at least he p**ses off the right people :D )
Yeah.... nah.
Cloud is just... meh, nothing really new.
It's a machine that sits somewhere else. Ok, it is a VM sitting somewhere else. Actually, you run a container on a VM somewhere else. The container contains an OS (well, parts of it, close enough) and your workload. It can talk to other containers using e.g. a network stack.
What is new (well, newer) is spliting things into simple chunks, microservices (actually nothing really new), and you no longer have to care about how the VM really is configured, because that's the provider's problem. Having stuff inside containers, iff set up correctly, can help spinning up new instances on demand (and this is pretty awesome and actually the new thing) without too much hassle. When I was still doing scientific computing on actual clusters this was more difficult (and thanks to your overhead depending on how work was split - core -> cpu -> node -> unit) it likely still is, should you want just raw power). Unless you have your workload actually split into microservices - rather than the meso-services I see - there is only limited benefit from running the stuff off-prem on somebody else's computer.
Now we need to explain to senior manglement that there is no benefit for the company (yeah, the customers will benefit, hopefully) if we are the (mandated, because Gubmint) cloud, i.e. we still need the datacentre. And thanks to SNTM (stupidity of non-technical managers) this is... hard work. Getting this stack to work as intended is also indeed something for the bright lads and lasses, though many a greybeard has more clue than the new and so-green-they-need-mowing kids.
I wonder.... since Devuan is Debian without the overly complex $(deleted because I don't want to swear and start a flame war thread) systemd - I am pretty sure most if not all packages from Debian should be available on Devuan as well. But then: maybe not, if systemd is too deeply embedded into it (and then I want to ask why). Other than that: Yes.
And maybe I should get a typewriter. Less hassle than the laptop and printer dance I currently have to do (the wife's windows laptops don't support WPA 3 and no matter which hardware I use for WPA 2 at the moment it seems awefully unstable, and of course I need her to be allowed to print, and I have not set up a real print server (yet), nor connected the printer to the other network via a different method - but then maybe I should finally set up the print server on some small SBC, a Pi 1 or somesuch).
.... make them turn down the power.
We all would benefit if we set up our WiFi to cover our own place, and not more. Seriously. I do not need to see all WiFi-Networks in the whole f'ing building from my place. If we all turn down the transmission power of the AP by 15% things will improve for everybody. I also know that y'all will have the tendency to slowly creep up with the power of your own network, so all others will do that as well....
That echoes my thoughts. I'm not a touch typist, need to look down more often than I like to admit, but I'm improving. Still, while I do have a backlit keyboard, and I actually turn on the light in some cases, I apparently don't really need it, as experiments show.
So: stop caring about colour of keyboards and outside apperance, the question is: can you work with it, does it behave agreeably? And what you are looking for likely varies depending on context. Maybe I would like a colourful keyboard at home, just because it is fun (I don't, personally), maybe I want a clicky one to drive my colleagues nuts at work (I don't, I value my health, the nice young colleague I share the office with could likely break my arm withour breaking a sweat).
Ehm....
the US costomary gallon (3.7 L) is almost 20% smaller than the Imperial gallon (4.5 L)
Yes, L for litre, I find this preferable over the lower case l, becasue it makes it easier to distinguish between l and I (and 1 depending on the font).
---> I'm ok with the small glasses, called a "Stange", I'll rather have two of those. No need to go full Norther European (Cologne, Dusseldorf) though, and have only 0.2 L glasses, more like beer shots.
Yup. Plain machine learning. I'm not saying it has not progressed, but similar to "cloud"[1] it is per se nothing new. One of the senior devs in my group has quite a good historical knowledge because he actually was there.
But putting another 2800 sattelites in orbit? I'm not really sure this is such a great idea. I cannot read the feed linked in the article, so I don't know how high they will orbit, but it will likely be LEO, right? That's full enough already without a bunch of rocket kids spewing their sateculate all over the night sky. And ground based astronomers will get the short end of the stick, as the night sky is now filled up with fast moving lights. Shucks.
[1] And now we have to explain management that the fluffy term "cloud" means we have to buy the hardware - because we are actually the full service provider to [redacted branches of administration] and will provide those services, not actually consume them. So we will still need our datacentres.
We had a "professional" (pro in ... herding cattle?) named John or Clint (or one of the other cowboys). Charged external consultants rates.
Did not know about the type "date" or "datetime". The guy converted all dates to strings.
Lots of dynamic SQL just pasting unsanitised input together.
Views using views using views "views all the way down"
DB had no keys. At all.
DB had no index. At all.
And some colleagues still treat his code as gospel. I woudl like to do some "maintenance" using a stake and holy water. And on the data base as well.
(and I'm not even a good programmer, or a DB expert or formally trained in these things, or.... but I can still see these things
I actually and honestly prefer Fortran 95 or R)
I need one of these to numb the pain --->
Thankfully I'm now responsible for other parts of the project.
So that's Bing written off as a basis of privacy-respecting search engines.
It will no longer produce reliable or sensible results. I hate it when the search engine returns "oh, do you mean $(thisunrelatedthing)" when searhcing e.g. for an error message or well, just anything.
No. I meant what I wrote. Or it tries to summarise things originally written in $(languageIknow) in $(anotherlanguageIknow) and... fails, because it does not understand it. At all. And don't get me started on the ML translated "documentation" on the Microsoft homepage, they are bad enough when they are just autogenerated in English, but the translations are really brain dead.
They are "search" engines, and no longer "find" engines. The only reason to push subpar ML products is to show shareholders that the mangelment did not fritter away the money on the emperor's new LLM. As WTYP said "happy friendship day" to them.
The keyboard is fluff and a bit of fun. This is ElReg, get used to it (or maybe it's not the publication for you, which is ok - there's so many things I don't read because I don't like the style).
The technical bit is about the upcoming kernel release which is coming along nicely. Valid criticism would be: what is new in that kernel version? Is there something that will be nicer to have?
Looked at the oldest BOFH-story on ElReg. The PFY is in it. The story dates from 2000
Which is 25 years ago.
Which makes me feel old (I might be old, but there's no reason to actually _feel_ old, innit?)
Edit: found it.
http://www.bofharchive.com/1996/bastard96-03.html
1996.
The PFY could have been in his twenties then. Now he is thirty years older (yeah, time does not work that way in stories, I know).
Also: all websites of all universities at the moment.
What I need: where is the building I need to go to? Where can I get a coffee if I'm early? How do I get there? Where is the department of $(fieldofinterest)?
What I get: "oooh, we are so great, the greatest university, look at the shiny pictures of our students, and by the way, we won a prize for (whatever) - now scroll down to even get shown a menue..."
Also: the president says he is above the law (ok, a judge he appointed said that, ffs) and openly wonders whether he has to follow the constitution, judges are arrested, checks and balances are removed. People are grabbed from the streets for wearing the wrong clothes and deported to a forced labour camp, without any judicial oversight, no trial, nothing.
This does not look good.
I would like to go back to the USA at one point, I have friends there, there's still places I would like to see, there's places I would like to show to my kids - but not under the current conditions. Canada is nice as well, and we could do worse than visiting e.g. Victoria, spend a while in the national parks there. Or spend a couple of weeks in Scandinavia.
Norway is a socialist state, from an US perspective even communist (even most right wing parties in Europe would be considered progressive in the US...). So - nah.
Socialism or socialism influenced systems are not dead - we are moving ever more far away from that ideal, but basic things - like pensions, health care, unemployment benefits etc. we still have.
Oh, and looking from the outside: Trump has either no clue what he does or he wants to screw the US citizens (at least those that are not filthy rich). The checks and balances have been all but dismantled, the whole thing is heading in a direction we saw about 100 years ago in Europe as well. (then they - ok, probably we - blew up a munitions ship and destroyed our tower).
but... well... Barbiebots... nah, I'm good.
If they don't have SMGs in their, ehm, rack (like Iszi fantasiezed about in a Sunday Supplement episode) it's just... vaguely girly shaped for no reason other than just to lure in the fat sweaty nerds. I'm not saying they don't do that successfully (form follows function, et c.), I'm just doubting the neccessity. It's again that, as described in Coupling, all technical progress was made by males to look at females butts, be they real or in this case made of metal and plastics.
Make them more Dalek shaped! That's what we really want! Not Cylons with boobs.
I only play DwarfFortress (I was part of many a merry community fort, back then, 15 years ago) and Widelands... no time for more games. I have a (valid, licensed) Win11 partition on my laptop, never booted into that. I have not used a Windows machine at home for the better part of three decades, after I stopped gaming that much. I used to like linux because it was fun tinkering with the system. Now I use Linux because it's no fun having to tinker with the system.
Work: yeah, stuck with Win11. Don't like it, for most actual work (coding and data analysis) I have a bunch of Linux machines I can dial into, other things are unfortunately Win only. OTOH, much like the much hated Win8 I can work with the system (or around it), one gets used to stuff, it's only work and I'm not the sysadmin. Especially as a COF (crusty old fart) that I am I have seen and used so many computer systems that it's all just... meh... not worth the effort to hate the stuff. Don't know why we all seem to love to do it. Too much effort, not good for my heart and mood, and I'd rather play "Forest Shuffle" or butcher some wood, carve one of the adorable "One-by" figurines by Doug Linker or do some gardening.
Or have one of these --->
(next round is mine)
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