punkwalrus

punkwalrus , 6 days ago

Getting in and out of those seats when you’re over 5’ 10" is like getting out of a child’s lawn chair or a beanbag chair with arthritis and an oversized backpack. So every attempt is a feat of gymnastics of extricating your sore skeleton with cramped muscles with only the back of another passenger’s chair as leverage with a low overhead to avoid. It’s like doing contortionist work while hungover. And if you’re not in the aisle seat, you gotta get 1-2 people to get up so you can pass them.

punkwalrus , 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

I worked in a job with build scripts. Developers would list what they wanted in a drop-down menu on a website, with very few “fill in the blanks.” This would create a template, which was sanity-checked.

One of the “fill in the blanks” was “home directory of user, if not default /home/username.” Some people filled it in, some didn’t. A lot of “users” might be apps with /home being “/opt/appname” “/var/www/html” or something. We checked to make sure that directory existed, if not, create, and set permissions. Easy peasy, all automated. Ran this lots of times.

Then one day, the script failed. Borked the whole box. Sometimes the VM was corrupt, so delete VM and try again. Usually worked. But this time, the build kept failing. The box went down. Wasn’t even bootable. This happened several times with this one build. So we mounted the borked drive under a new VM and checked out the logs. Just like the dessert stage of Willy Wonka chewing gum, it always failed at the last stage: making /home directories.

It would create them, then halt that it could not find bash. We looked for bash on the bad drive, and it was the usual /bin/bash shortcut to /usr/bin/bash and we were truly puzzled. I did a chroot to the drive and NOTHING worked. It just hung. That was the first clue.

The second was looking through the build script (in bash, which we didn’t write) and checking the steps. Looked it the logs. Always died at creating some user named sapadm, the user for the HANA database. Eventually, I checked the configure file, and noticed it was the only user with the odd home directory “/usr/sap.” Then it hit me: the permissions.

The script, thinking it was a home directory, did a chmod - R 755 for all directories and chmod - R 644 for all files! That meant, while creating home, it made everything under /usr not executable anymore! Holy shit, no wonder nothing worked! So we commented out that user in the config, ran the build again, and we were good! We created the sapadm by hand, and then later fixed the bug in the script.

SANITIZE YOUR DATA. Or you might turn Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry.

punkwalrus , 7 days ago

I have found that it’s like having a junior programmer assistant. It’s great for “write me python code for opening an in file from a command line argument, reading the contents into a key/value dict array, then closing the file.” It’s terrible for “write me a python code for pulling data into a redis database.”

I find it’s wrong 50% of the time for certain command line switches, Linux file structure, and aws cli.

I find it’s terrible for advanced stuff like, “using aws cli and jq, take all volumes in a vpc, and display the volume id, volume size in gb, instance id it’s attached to, private IP address of the instance, whether is a gp3 or gp2, and the vpc id in a comma separated format, sorted by volume size.”

Even worse at, “take all my gp2 volumes and make them gp3.”

punkwalrus , 9 days ago

I did too… In Chrome on Linux. I’ll check my use agent, it might be set to something else because I use it to check some stuff with developers.

punkwalrus , 12 days ago

Heyyyy! I have one of those. Still works. imgur.com/gallery/0GVWgMQ

punkwalrus , 18 days ago

As if they care about the real data…

punkwalrus , 22 days ago

I had an older cat that had broken hips that healed wrong. So when he laid down, he did this weird sploot on his belly that cats normally don’t do. One of my younger cats imprinted on him, and also did the sploot. The first cat died, the other one splooted that way the rest of her life

punkwalrus , 22 days ago

A coworker had a Corgi that detected seizures. I got to travel with him, and see how the dog operated. Vest on? Working. Wouldn’t even poop. Vest off? Go nuts! Ran around the hotel room, used bathroom on a leash outside. VERY good dog, very well trained. Didn’t bark once, which for a Corgi is impressive. Barks were for alerts only, I was told, but my coworker didn’t have a seizure while I was with him, so I didn’t see that part.

punkwalrus , 23 days ago

I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.

“Nothing we can do,” Microsoft said. “We have no gate key.”

Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, “okay,” and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.

“Oh, you mean this gate key,” said Microsoft.

Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.

punkwalrus , 24 days ago

In high school, we had a science fiction club. I was vice president in my senior year. A year after I graduated, I was hanging out with some fellow graduates and one of them said, “How come you hated Christine so much?”

“Who?”

“Christine Smith. The blonde girl?”

“The blond girl who wore all those surfer shirts?”

“Yeah. Whats so bad about her?”

“Nothing. She was always so quiet. I barely remember her.”

“Yeah, well she practically threw herself at you, and you treated her like she didn’t exist.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. We even tried to make it easy. We set her up at parties to talk to you, and you just acted like she wasn’t even there. You were so rude.”

“I literally had no idea. I totally would have dated her.”

“Yeah, well, too late. She got so depressed after you graduated, that she ended up dropping out of everything and tried to kill herself. Shes been hospitalized and her parents moved away to be with her. Like, couldn’t you gave even said hi? Just because you made vice president of the club didn’t mean you were better than her or something.”

I literally had no idea.

punkwalrus , 24 days ago

I only have one machine using Windows because I don’t want to be “left behind” in the corporate desktop world, but it’s on my “left hand monitor” while my center and right of three monitors are Kubuntu. The specs won’t let me use 11 on any of my systems. My company laptop is still Windows 10 as well because some of our security software doesn’t run on 11 yet.

If I didn’t have to work in the corporate space, I’d quit Windows in a fast second. I have been using Kubuntu as my daily driver for almost 10 years now.

punkwalrus , 26 days ago

The stupid thing is that they could have approached this in a much less dickish manner. Seriously. First, they are making money off us as it is with their demographics and the fact they are not utilizing this cash cow as before means they have gotten too greedy for their own good, or mismanaging funds which is a completely unrelated problem. Long ads, unskippable ads, expensive premium. This is the beginning of the end of something they used to offer as free, resting on their laurels as a monopoly, like the airline industry. When they are now practically forcing the cobra effect. Eventually, it will get so silly, it will go the way of the dod like Angelfire. AOL, and Geocities. Or, soon, Netflix.

I would have started it similar to Patreon, like, “by donating $1/mo, you can support artists like this,” and incentivize the publishers with monetary gain and higher search results. Nobody is gonna miss $1 or $12/year. You multiply that by millions of viewers, that’s millions of dollars on top of their demographics. Second, they could have had a 5 second bumper, similar to PBS, like “This and other find content is brought to you by Exxon and the Chubb group” or whatever. Five seconds. Front and back. Not enough to cause outrage. Skippable, but not so annoying, everyone skips.

punkwalrus , 29 days ago

The rich don’t want to impress you, they want to impress other rich people.

punkwalrus , 29 days ago

I lack that enzyme genetically. I am allergic to alcohol, and so when my stomach can’t digest beans corn, or even eggs, they sit in my intestines, start to ferment, and I am in a world of hurt.

punkwalrus , 29 days ago

It did, and I was also doing that in some of our software in a previous job. Other terms we had to stop using were black sheep, white washing, and even gorilla.

vice.com/…/we-need-to-stop-saying-blacklist-and-w…

punkwalrus , 29 days ago

Doubtful it would be a pipeline exception in Jenkins

punkwalrus , 1 month ago

I have had this happen a few times on the bus or subway, like “I don’t want people sitting next to me.”

punkwalrus , 2 months ago

I have a lot of SBCs, and have various ansible scripts that install stuff in “levels” depending on what I need.

Basic level is the “must-haves.”

python 3-minimal, chrony, openssh-server, python 3-apt, aptitude, unattended-upgrades, boxes, figlet, dialog, apt-utils, git, htop, multitail, ncdu, sysstat, vim, tree, util-linux

There’s, also “server level,” “desktop level,” and “demo level,” for when I do training.

punkwalrus , 2 months ago

A childhood friend of mine had to sign a waiver in New Zealand because her and her team were climbing down some canyon notoriously hard to get to except by rescue helicopter. She got stuck, and the rest of the team went to go get help. She paid $58,000 in 1990s money for the rescue. So it’s not just the US.