I use a bunch of email addresses; you should too. Here’s the mutt config that works nicely: alternates "main(\\+[^@]+)?@randomstring.org" alternates "main(\\-[^@]+)?@randomstring.org" alternates "foobar@baz.com" alternates "foo@bazab.org" // more alternates that don't fit patterns go here set from="mainaccount@randomstring.org" set realname="Human Readable Name" set reverse_name The first block (…
A bank is a business, but it is a highly regulated business with an obligation to serve customers fairly. Herein I propose a basic test of banking ethics. Take $1000. Put half into the lowest tier of checking accounts, and half into the lowest tier of savings accounts. Wait five years. Is there more than $1000? This is the minimum acceptable behavior. A bank that charges fees for not making them…
The key to avoiding spyware is to not use any of the things that bring it in. I bought a new tablet as a media consumption device: books, comics, music (control, mostly) and random web stuff. Priority went to screen size and resolution, then RAM, then “whatever” – I don’t care especially about CPU or GPU performance, connectivity beyond wifi, or special features. Books come from my own library…
This essay began as an attempt to explain Progression Fantasy and LitRPG. That topic wandered off into the woods and may be glimpsed through the bright autumnal foliage later on. You are likely familiar with the book industry’s marketing separation of fiction books into overarching categories called ‘genres’ (pronounced as though you are three cocktails into the party and have forgotten the two…
We watched the first three episodes of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy before rejecting it as Not For Us, primarily on the basis of the writing. (And the set dressing – what were you people thinking? Glare-and-darkness does not make a comfortable working environment or viewing experience. And the FX – do you even know how lens flares work? They are not necessary in every shot. But mostly the plot,…
Words are defined so that we can communicate effectively. The actual usage of a word gives it meaning, and thus the meaning may change over time. “Fascism” used to be nationalist, militarist, racist, authoritarian government with cult-leader worship. Now, I think, “fascism” means advocacy of a capitalist corporate-plutocratic authoritarian structure. Rather than “the blood is the land” mythology,…
Excessive chaos produces a desire for order. The desire for order is both good and evil: cooperation is good, dictatorship is evil. Everything not trivial is complex. Excessive order produces a desire for chaos. The desire for chaos is both good and evil: self-determinism is good, denying responsibility is evil. Nothing is purely one or the other. Improving things is not futile, but it can be…
Whenever a system attempts to predict what a user of the system will want or do next or means, the failure case generates the most noticeable immediate problems. The author(s) will notice them and attempt to fix those problems. The success case may or may not generate a long-term problem. Systems in which this applies: autocorrect. Grammar checkers. LLMs. CPU branch predictors. There are others.…
An extract from George O. Smith’s short story QRM INTERPLANETARY (1942), the first of his works about a space station set up to relay radio messages between Earth, Mars and Venus: On Monday, Francis Burbank sent around a communique removing the option of free messages for the personnel. On Tuesday, he remanded the years-long custom of permitting the supply ships to carry, free, packages from…
People are very fond of the Shirley argument. The Shirley argument goes like this: “Surely the people who implement this law will do common-sense things to avoid ridiculous results!” The Shirley argument is always wrong, usually because of non-systematic yet surprisingly pervasive discrimination… and sometimes because of systematic and intentional discrimination. And occasionally because people…
Given that: No copyright can be claimed on work created by an LLM Many open source projects require contributors to sign a release of some form - a certificate of origin or license agreement - that states that the contribution is copyrighted to the contributor and can be transferred to the project Many – all? – commercial software projects claim that their work is copyrighted. Therefore: No…
I have a morning routine which would have seemed awfully complicated to the teenaged me, and is probably ridiculously streamlined to the me reading this entry in 2036. One step of it involves recording a number in a spreadsheet.
It has been over 1111 days since we switched from Oracle’s database to Postgresql at work. I have been happy about the switch for every single one of those days. No regrets at all. Changing your core database is a huge proposition, especially when the one you have is not broken. It’s also a huge amount of work. [Workplace] has been built on Oracle for more than twenty years. Why did we do it?
(This entry is now on its third revision. Not much has changed.) This is going to be a big one. Here follows a [hopefully factual] comparison and [hopefully useful] subjective review of N terminal emulators. The following three constraints will be in effect:
No, this isn’t an usurper hijacking the blog. It just occurred to me that this was a good place to put it.
I am good at making ice cream. I am also rather experimental, so not everything is a big hit. These flavors work very well: multiple vanillas Irish whisky dark chocolate chocolate orange chocolate whisky Mexican chocolate multispicecream (allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, cayenne) peanut butter peanut butter caramel peanut butter with cayenne peach peach with cayenne plum sorbet coconut cherry Nutmeg is…
This is how I’m dealing with music playback in the house as of July 2025. My goals are reasonably high-quality music at a long-term reasonable price, while avoiding paid streaming services.
Since you’re interested in not breaking things, you should be running Debian Stable. Debian makes several kinds of package changes available:
Every complex problem is a dependency management problem. The only robust solutions are the simplest things which can work, created by people who fully understand the problem and have to work with the system regularly. But the fastest temporary fix for any specific problem is to add a complex layer without fixing the underlying problem. And every layer reduces your ability to understand the…
I had assumed that when certbot does an http authentication of a domain name as part of getting Let’s Encrypt to issue or renew a cert, it would do so by touching the appropriately named file in http://domain.name.tld/.well-known/acme-challenge , waiting for the challenge to resolve, and then deleting it. And sure, that’s what it does with --webroot . And I assumed that if you passed it --nginx ,…
When 3 of 4 disks in a ZFS pool die at the same time, it is not the disks. It’s the controller that is feeding them. (Note for later: move a disk to a different controller. This could have been survived completely if half of each mirror were on different controllers.) What do you call a household with a backup SAS/SATA controller stashed in the box marked “more disk stuff”? Mine. -30-
Hey academics! Your papers, thesis, dissertation, project – whatever – is based on data, right? No data, nothing to talk about. So every paper should have a data management section. It should be quite straightforward and easy to fill out, assuming that you were doing things well to begin with. (Hint: make it easy to fill out.) Data was stored prior to processing at this facility with the following…
Start with an Android phone with sufficient storage capability and a decent DAC/headphone amplifier. Built-in is great; otherwise, find something that works and doesn’t suck up too much power. Add IEMs of choice, for less than $50, or cans that are reasonably efficient. It stops being so portable if you have 800g cans and a 500g battery-powered amp to drive them. Install F-Droid, and use that to…
When the Let’s Encrypt certbot says it failed and it was probably a firewall issue – yes, it’s probably a firewall issue. On your side. On port 80. -30-
Specifically, a wiki which uses a non-database backend. I like Dokuwiki for this, but anything which basically saves in text files is fine. (Why? Because you don’t need to bring up the database and/or fix the web server to grep for the page you need right now.) …
There is a new software technology. It has a bunch of boosters. There are some companies formed around the idea that they will make a lot of money by providing the technology. Then they go out and try to convince other people that they should use the technology – and by extension, pay them for it. If not them, then one of their competitors, but preferably them. That’s marketing…
New paper: LLMs don’t do formal reasoning. Well, of course. LLMs don’t do informal reasoning, either. Humans are great at pattern recognition. We even recognize faces in clouds and tree trunks. We recognize wheelbarrows, bears and crabs and archers in the stars. We make things that have meaning, and we communicate through speech and text and art. LLMs are great pattern-generators. They are…
The Linux kernel doesn’t consider routing to be a separate process, so it can eat lots of CPU capacity and still be at a load average of 0. Load averages are calculated as the number of running and uninterruptible processes, sampled every 5 seconds, and then displayed as an exponentially decaying average, optionally per core (or SMT “core”). A process actively computing stuff is counted the same…
Self: you have managed to make some cert renewals dependent on IPv6 connectivity through to the main server. This is not bad, but it is odd. -30-
Many organizations claim to be following Agile in some way. The vast majority are wrong, and most of them should not be Agile anyway. You will recall that the Agile Manifesto, in total, is this set of four guidelines and an interpretation: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation…
Repeat the following metaphor until you internalize it: Security is the skin of an organization, IT infrastructure is the bones. Everything else is the digestive system or the nervous system. Breaking the skin is a bad idea. It needs to be done for certain specific reasons, but all of those holes need good defense systems including real-time sensors and reflexes. Repeatedly stressing parts makes…
A nominally 8-wide LEGO Speed Champions vehicle is actually 8.5 studs wide, due to the overhang of the wheel arches. Said arches are 4 studs long. The space between them can reasonably range from 6 studs (very short) to 9 studs (very long) and is typically 7 studs long; sometimes 8. The rear overhang is generally 1 to 2 studs long. The front overhang is 1 to 4 studs long. This gives an overall…
Here is the Agile Manifesto: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items…
There’s a game which you have probably played in some form, possibly not even knowing that it was a game. It goes like this: an author writes fiction, and the reader comes across an interesting element and asks how it works, in-universe. And people come up with answers…
About two weeks ago I decided to use parts from a suddenly unused desktop to upgrade the living room media server. The initial plan was to keep the disks, power supply and case of the media server, and use the motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card from the desktop. Things did not go to plan, of course…
In the spirit of the Joel Scale for software dev, I propose an initial version of a scale for IT and operations folks.
My RSI prevention strategy involves change: I use three different keyboards, four or five pointing devices, and move around to different places. On my main desktop, I mostly use a thumb trackball, with a mouse in second place and a drawing pad in distant third. On Friday the trackball died in a peculiar way.
I have almost 30 years of professional experience as a sysadmin. Failure is inevitable. Hardware will fail, software will be discovered to have flaws, reconfiguration will be mistaken. The antidote is to have reliable recovery mechanisms: everything will eventually break or need to be changed, so in turn you need to be able to recover back to a stable position, so you can try again. Recovery…
My two most common issues in not posting to this blog:
In May of 2022, I made a few predictions about US politics Here’s the meat: Assuming that the opinion is issued substantially as-is, I will make some predictions about 2023. ‘Red’ states will pass laws restricting basic civil rights... Corporations that rely on high-skill workers will not be able to hire them in those states. Those corporations will move out of the red states.
I had thought that ‘pareidolia’ referred exclusively to the human tendency to see human faces everywhere – any time you see two dots or circles and a line below them, boom :) it’s a face. It can be triggered by rocks, clouds, shadows, uneven browning on a tortilla or a pancake. It turns out, though, that pareidolia covers any kind of overactive pattern matching. Humans look for meaningful patterns…
If your Debian system is suddenly very slow to login – like, 25 to 90 seconds of apparent inactivity on every new ssh – it’s not DNS. Check to see if your elogind or systemd/logind is actually running. Look for a log entry in auth.log along the lines of dbus-daemon[4501]: [system] Failed to activate service 'org.freedesktop.login1' right after an SSH attempt. If so, restart the daemon. -30-
Some people play Wordle to get their brains moving in the morning. I find one of Linked-In’s incredibly stupid “AI”-driven “articles” where they limit you to 750 characters of commentary (times 5-7 article segments) and write a cohesive answer to the whole thing in one block. Herewith: “How Do You Work With Other IT Departments To Manage Security Risks” Either your company understands that…
This is what I would like you to know about my mother: She didn’t like what people were doing to the world; she found some ways she could be effective at making things better; she did them. It is not required of us that we fix the world, but it is required that we try to leave it better than when we came into it. Mom succeeded.
In the spirit of underkill home network and overkill home network
If a service is being provided by an LLM, one of the following cases applies:
I’m going to tell you the secret (it’s not a secret) to building reliable, operable, debuggable infrastructure. This is going to be terse, but hopefully understandable to someone with just a little experience.
Let’s take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn’t have access to ~every book ever written. – holmesworcester at Hacker News -30-
Previously: In the office, my desktop feeds an Apple USB-C DAC ($9, no sale needed) to an optoisolator to a NAD 712 stereo receiver. I bought the NAD in 1998, new, no discount. It has a 1/4” headphone jack which automatically disconnects the speaker connections – a pair of Paradigm Monitor 3 Mark 3s. The usual headphones are Superlux 688b, Truthear Zeros, TRN V90s, or occasionally Sennheiser…
If you have some sort of data or power cable that you tend to plug and unplug frequently, consider putting a sacrificial extender cable in between. The cost of replacing a jack on a motherboard or other fixed device is pretty high; the cost of replacing a plug on a device is often similar to the cost of the device in the first place. For a headphone connection, for example, you can get a 6”…