Posts by PerlyKing 568 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2010
I think it was a finger .sig (.plan?) rather than email, but in my early days at university one of my brighter classmates discovered animated ASCII art (this was a while ago!) and added some to his .sig (and/or .plan), much to the joy of the long-suffering sysadmin :-)
It's been a while since I flew anywhere, but surely the airlines are still obliged to honour your ticket on a later flight? Inconvenient certainly but not always the end of the world.
Many years ago I was flying home on an overbooked flight and they were offering an overnight stay, next day flight plus cash for people to stay behind. It wasn't convenient for me at the time but it didn't seem like a bad deal.
Around the same era BA had an offer on their London <-> Edinburgh flights that if your flight turned out to be overbooked they'd lay on a plane just for you. Of course, that is quite expensive. A friend of mine ended up in that situation and settled for £500 cash and a later flight.
I think part of the problem here is that IT folks (and mathematicians, scientists and other experts) are used to dealing with reality, which cannot be changed or argued with. Politicians are used to dealing with perception, and with human beings who can generally be persuaded, bribed or bullied into doing what they (the politicians) want.
A disagreement between rational individuals about the colour of something can generally be resolved by looking at the thing, problem solved.
If a politician has decided that the sky being pink would benefit them, they're likely to try to bluster and bully everyone into saying that the sky is pink. It's worked in the past, and it's what they know how to do. And if it blows up in everyone's faces a year or two down the line, they've probably already made their pile and moved on to mess up something else. They just don't seem to grasp that some things affect everyone, even them!
This would indicate that the Soyuz design is a good design because that design has been flying for 60 years now. Why reinvent the wheel if something is working?
Because that's how we make progress. The trick is to not replace your current wheel until the new one is working better.
Additionally, NASA itself is reusing tried and true designs for their new Space Launch System (SLS) which will be the most powerful rocket ever. They are using the designs of the Space Shuttle rocket engines in it. Once again, if something works, why change it?
Do you know anything about the SLS that doesn't come from Boeing press releases? It will be the most powerful rocket ever if it flies, but it's unlikely to fly more than once per year, compared to nine launches so far this year for SpaceX.
Using the designs for Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) is not a plus point in this context. An SSME is an engineering marvel, and is possibly the most complex, expensive rocket engine ever made. Because it was designed to be reused many times. What is the SLS going to do? Run them for a few minutes and then dump them into the Atlantic Ocean along with its expendable first stage.
SLS is reusing "tried and true" designs in order to efficiently direct money from the US Government to Boeing and a select few others. In that sense it's working brilliantly, but in the sense of launching stuff into space they definitely need to change their approach.
In the early nineties the place I was working was a Sun shop - SPARCStations on desktops throughout (it's been downhill ever since!). We had an HP-UX workstation in for evaluation and for some reason it was running on someone's desk with the lid off, with most of the team gathered around it. One of the senior (software) engineers wandered over, said "what does this do?" and pulled something (graphics card?) out of the heart of the electrickery. The screen went black and everyone's faces went grey. Some brave soul turned the power off, reseated the card, turned the power back on and it all worked perfectly!
At least one of these to the HP engineers of yesteryear! -->
Why cheddar? I caught part of a documentary recently which asserted that cheddar was chosen by the UK government as the "cheese" part of World War Two rationing at least partially on the basis that it cuts fairly well without making wasteful crumbs. The population became used to cheese == cheddar and we're still living with the results.
The point is that if Starship works out (which it probably will, as Musk seems to have the money and determination to do it), it will drastically change the cost of putting things into orbit. And also make it easier to launch larger items - a lot of the problems with the JWST are to do with having to fold it up into a small fairing for launch and then get it to unfold itself.
Mine is plugged into a MacBook Pro running Ubuntu, connected through Citrix to a Win10 machine at work %-}
While we're talking about Model M keyboards, I turned mine over to see when it was made and it says "Date: 03-04-19". It has been in my possession since 1995 (or maybe 1996) so I can't make head or tail of this! Does anyone out there know what it means? Did an early Y2K issue truncate the year? Virtual pint for any help! -->
It's very subjective of course, but I like the feel of mine (IBM Model M "borrowed" from a server which ended up in a rack :-) more than any other keyboard I've tried in the last 30 years or so. It is too loud for a crowded office but is getting a lot more use now than it has in the last few years!
It's like using really good hand tools instead of cheap and cheerful - they both get the job done (usually) but one feels better than the other, and that makes the whole experience more enjoyable. I think it's well worth paying a premium for something that improves your life for eight hours a day or more.
This reminds me of a proto-BOFH I knew at university. Faced with a choice between working all night on a project which was due the next day, or going drinking, he spent all afternoon reading up on and experimenting with the "at" command so that he could send an email in the middle of the night begging for an extension %-}
Alright, maybe I was being a bit picky :-)
My main point was that you would have had a lot more trouble ordering pizza via your computer in 1969 than in 1999. Networking had been around for a while, but the Internet as we know it today was if not in its early days at least in its early years, and still mostly a time-wasting toy. Maybe some things never change :-D
Yeah, no. Not according to Vint Cerf, Jon Postel et al. There were networks such as ARPANET, but not the Internet.
It didn't really work for me. I "studied" latin at school until I had the chance to drop it. But I still have a vivid memory of my Latin teacher asking each of us in turn whether we knew any Latin expressions and I trotted out "timeo danaos et dona ferentes" (Asterix the Legionary). Then he made me translate it, or at least tried to.
Thank you, Goscinny, Uderzo, Bell and Hockridge!
Well, "egg-shaped" or "oval" is often misused to describe ellips{e,oid}s. Eggs are usually bigger at one end than the other, which can lead to All Sorts of Trouble ;-)
the developer has to be a DBA, security engineer, systems engineer, and programmer who understands the flows of *everything* in and out of their environment
Sounds like rubbish to me. Just because a service is, er, micro doesn't mean that it has to be developed in isolation by one person. Even if the function of each service is distinct that doesn't mean that you can't use the same security layer in each one, call on a DBA for support, and so on.
And surely "the flows of everything" becomes a lot simpler for a microservice?
As the article says, microservices are not the answer to everything but they should be understood for what they are, the same as any other tool in the box.
Definitely not Spartacus:
Can't you have paper at a similar distance to the screen?
I hadn't thought of that, but it doesn't really suit how I work. If I'm reading from paper it usually means that I'm scribbling making notes on the same piece of paper. Or (more likely) I'm fiddling with my phone.
I know what you mean, but I'd have to say you've got to roll with it: accept that you need glasses and work around that.
I didn't wear glasses at all until about ten years ago, when I started getting frequent headaches. Reading glasses cured those immediately, although they were a bit of a pain to carry around, take out of the case and then put away again, especially on my commute. I tried one of those neck chain things but didn't get on with it.
Then I needed distance glasses as well. I tried varifocals but couldn't get on with the blurry transitional areas, especially in my peripheral vision. So now I have one pair of bifocals for computer work, and another pair for everything else. And I have to change glasses every time I leave my desk. It's not ideal but better than eyestrain. All part of the fun of growing old, and on the whole better than not growing old.
I have what my (UK) optician describes as "occupational bifocals" for work: the lower section is my reading prescription which works for the keyboard and the upper section is a mid-range prescription which works for monitors.
I have to wear different glasses for walking around, driving and so on. Such is life :-/
It mostly works. Searching seems to be a bit hit and miss
A few days ago I wanted to find an email from the previous week. I knew the date and approximate time, and that it was still in my inbox. Except that it wasn't, not in Thunderbird. No problem, use the search and there it is! Except that when I tried to open the email from the results tab, there was nothing but emptiness. And of course it doesn't tell you anything useful like which folder it's in. Eventually I found the email through my phone (using K9), in the inbox where I'd thought it was in the first place!
And then there's the random order in which search results are presented by default....
There's a developer near where I live who's been trying to build on Green Belt land for years, so far unsuccessfully. One of his scams was to sell off "building plots" to the general public, without mentioning that they wouldn't be able to get planning permission to do anything. As a result, his large parcel of land now has several chunks out of the middle, the owners of which hate his guts!
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