A hat tip to Buzz Aldrin, the first sysadmin on the moon.
“I was kind of the systems guy in the LM…”
“Though named ‘Lunar Module Pilots,’ they performed as system managers…”
From “Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight”, a highly recommended book if you’re at all interested in the Apollo program.
Things that have landed me in dependency hell during the last 30 days when I tried to install them:
I was ok about it all, really, until I read this:
Decoupling Server Development from the OS
…and now that I’ve become convinced that this doesn’t really need to be the state of things, I end up in a table-pounding rage each time I see something like:
/usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /usr/lib/libssl.so when searching for -lssl
or
symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgio-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_thread_gettime
From the registration page of an outsourced travel company:
Password invalid. Non-alphanumeric characters required: 1.
Use any of the following: !,@,-, or .
Oooh, I get to pick from ALL THOSE? How ever will I chose?
(A co-worker reports that, contrary to the options provided, ‘#’ works. Idiots.)
It’s System Administrator Appreciation Day!
It’s time for the yrealy reading of the Monkeybagel Document. Every word is true.
On a lighter note, it’s not uncommon to see comments like this about Obama:
also Barry you need to start dressing less like a 35-year-old midlevel IT supervisor
My first thought? “Hey, what are you talking about, he dresses just like me…. oh.” (I do not, however, have as cute a butt as he does. Vote for Obama! He’s got a cute butt! And can sink 3-pointers on the first try.)
I may be starting to Fear the Google due to their ability to do Tremendous Evil if they so choose, but there’s one thing they get right: If something is Beta, they don’t force it on you.
Then there’s LinkedIn. They added a useless “newsreader” in the middle of your home page that you can’t move or remove. So I sent ‘em mail. (I write letters…)
How do I get rid of that “Targeted” News junk on my homepage?
And they respond:
Hi Luke,
Thanks for contacting LinkedIn Customer Support. I apologize but you can not remove this feature at this timer. News is still in Beta Testing and can not be removed. We apologize for the inconvenience- and want to take this opportunity to thank you for being a valued member of our LinkedIn Community.
Thank you for using LinkedIn!
I’m a fan of LinkedIn, don’t get me wrong, and I don’t begrudge them trying to make some use of the eyeballs they’ve captured, but…
“Any feature that can’t be turned off is a bug.”
Ok, so we all know what a Geek Code is, right? This is Sabrina:
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GU d- s---: a----- C+@ U? P? L? E? W+ N? o? K- w--- O? M+ V? PS>+++ PE Y?
PGP? t? 5? X? R+ tv+ b++++(--) DI? D? G? e-- h! !r !z?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
From this page, I can tell that she’s very short, under 9 years old, likes computers, etc., etc.
I’ve been thinking that there’s a need to track when various events in a baby’s life happens and where a kid is developmentally at a point in time. Something like:
-----BEGIN BABY CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
B34 T20 b- w++ t++ r->+ s-- d- v-
------END BABY CODE BLOCK------
…would mean that at 34 months, she’s got 20 teeth, doesn’t breastfeed anymore, walks and runs, talks in complete sentences and knows verb tenses, doesn’t yet read but is getting there, sleeps very poorly, isn’t yet potty trained and watches too much TV.
If this existed, you could get a snapshot of a kid each month and watch their progress through the months. Perhaps I’ll come up with something in my copious spare time.
<merzy> I first logged into a unix box on an account of my own... hurm, exactly 20 years ago this month, actually.
*boggle*
University of Delaware. Basement lab with horrible florescent lights. Summer program for young minority engineers. The clunk of walking over raised floor in the lab. Old Wyse52 terminals. Tech support for confused students at the next terminal. Line printers and greenbar paper. Thumbing through the linear feet of printout (!) of the man pages and finding the section on games. nethack. Teaching a friend pascal in a weekend. Learning vi.
This is the top of my current .cshrc, which I snagged from Eiji the fall of 1988:
# Luke Hankins’ .cshrc file
# Original written by Garth Snyder and Dan Rice 9/18/87.
# Modified extensively by Eiji Hirai, Jan 1988.
# Last update: Um, yesterday.
A long, strange trip indeed.
Google has released its geocoder. I haven’t tried it out, but I have high hopes. (Geocoding is one of those things that it’s much easier to let someone else do than do yourself. In fact, there will someday be a complete, canonical list of the exact coordinates for every address in the world. The current state of geocoding is pretty much “estimate and guess”, which is frustrating at times.)
There needs to be a tool where I enter a ping time in ms and it returns the equivalent baud. (I’m trying to type over a VPN link that’s throwing 200ms pings and 5% packet loss at me and I’m having flashbacks to long night playing Empire in college. Though that might just be the green-on-black terminal windows that I refuse to give up.)
The site I scrape to get this data had the nerve to toss in an “I accept the terms and conditions of this site” interstitial before it’ll show you the search results once each session. 30 minutes with “Show Source” and Live HTTP Headers and I was back in business. Don’t they know that they’re just being annoying? When I’m king, everyone will be required to provide search APIs for their databases, free of charge. *sigh*
I’m trying to get my head around DateTime::Sets, but they’re winning. Ouch.
For some reason I suddenly (at 4am) realized that someone, somewhere has created an XML DTD for describing farts. This was giggle-worthy.
(Context? Sabrina farted and I’ve been fighting with XML recently.)
One of these showed up at my house a week ago. I haven’t had the time or energy to play with it yet. Ouch.
Seen in a mailing list posting:
A: Yes. >Q: Are you sure? >>A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>>Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?
– Etaoin Shrdlu to tech[]lopsa.org
Hope nothing broke.
The computer game Civilization IV came out last week. I stumbled to bed at 4AM this morning and was pleased to realize that it was only three due to the time switch. Only. I’m to old for Civ. Sad.
I just soldered for the first time in my life and it actually seems to have worked. Woot! (I just made a cable for the CVS disposable camcorder so I could download the videos without having to bring it to CVS for processing.) I did it with a thrown-together setup (sitting on a folding chair with not nearly enough light, the work piece balanced on a milk crate and horrible ventilation), but it seems to have mostly worked. (I say mostly because I’m getting some weird artifacts in the resulting movies that may or may not be related to shorts in the cable. Unclear.)
Example: Movie_0001.avi
(You may need to download and install this codec to be able to view the movie.)
Those of you who use Bloglines (or some other RSS reader) won’t have seen this, but I’m excessively proud of the image that’s the new header on this blog. Took about 90 minutes in Photoshop, most of which was learning about cool things the app can do. (I could reproduce it in about 10 minutes now, and that’s just because my machine could use some more horsepower…)
The original photo was taken by my dad when we went up to Maine one summer Wednesday and hung out at the DZ. I was a low-time jumper looking to get more jumps out of anything that flew, so I went along on some student jumps out of a Cessna 182. Slooow plane, but the altitude is the same no matter how you get there.
They’re right when they say everything changes when you have a kid. Forget the frequency of shaves dropping to a week. Forget that my short-term memory is shot. Forget that I’m back on Mountain Dew as a way to get through a workday. Forget that nothing else really matters anymore. I’ve found that (gasp!) even my coding style has changed.
Well, it kinda has to, actually. No longer can I take hours to poke at a problem, experimenting around it, looking for a good solution. With time being so precious, I find that I’m doing a lot more research and design work up front, sometimes even spending a few days picking between modules to use. Is it helping my code? I doubt it. But I do feel like I’m back in the days of punch cards and “daily runs”, and the satisfaction of something that works the first time out is kinda nice.
