“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.

Developer: “I need root access!!”
Me: … talktalktalk
Developer: “Ok, so I need read access on that system logfile!”
Me: … talktalktalk
Developer: “Oh. I need to know how to redirect the output of a command to a file.”
Me: “Sure! I’ll send you mail with a cut and paste it from a place where you’ve already done the same thing. Have a great day!”

Quoting from the Monkeybagel Document:

SYSADMIN: I used to provide system support for a team of database administrators. One time, out of the blue, for no apparent reason, they called up a senior vice-president and told him that they needed root access to all of our servers so they could run the ‘ls’ command and if they didn’t get that permission then nobody in the company would get paid that month. In the end I had to tell them that if they ever had the need, they could call me at any time, day or night, and I would at that time tell them the root password. They agreed and were happy. They called the first night and used the password to set up a porn site on our firewall. I shut the site down and notified our security guys. I got fired when our security guys found out I’d given out the password over the phone and reasoned that the database people wouldn’t have been that obvious so it must have been a Russian hacker. So let us now return to the matter at hand, about which I have only one question: What kind of pickles?

• calibre on Ubuntu 8.10 and CentOS 5.3
• DBD::mysql on RHEL5
• graphite on RHEL5
• php-mysql with wildly disparate versions of mysql and php

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

I think she’s got a pretty good handle on social engineering. And at such a young age, too.

Speaking of “social”, here she is with a Nice Young Man who thinks Very Highly of her.

Checkout Girl (with cute pigtail braids): So this morning I figured I’d do something different with my hair.
Bagger Boy: Did you?
CG: Yea… (strike one!)
BB: Oh! Don’t you usually only have one braid?
CG: No… This is the first time I’ve braided it. (strike two!)
BB: Er, ah, well, I haven’t seen you in a while.
CG: We worked together two days ago! (strike three!)

Given that I saw him deliberately edged out another bagger to work on her line, it’s not as if he wasn’t aware of her…

Glad to see that they’re training men in Advanced Oblivion in younger and younger these days.

“One saloon to every 200 population.”

– from the makingmaps blog

My favorite is 2nd St. between Avenue B and C: 18 saloons, one church. Doesn’t look like the church is still there, unfortunately, but there’s a firehouse at the other end of the block. I bet they wish the pubs were still there.

The bobble during Obama’s swearing-in caused me to remember my wedding day. No, I wasn’t being married to a supreme court justice, but it was more important to me than the recent inauguration, believe it or not.

During a Quaker wedding ceremony:

Following a period of silence, as long or as short as the couple is led to observe, the two rise and, each in turn taking the other by the hand, make their promises to each other, in the words from their marriage certificate, in tones clear enough to be heard throughout the meeting.

In the run-up to the wedding, Lindy and I had agreed to “use the vows in Faith and Practice“, and checked off the “write vows” item on the checklist. Easy, peasy, right?

Come the day of the wedding, I stood and, in tones clear enough to be heard throughout the meeting, said my vows. Lindy took her turn and, I thought, got it a bit wrong. “Ah, well,” I thought, “it’s the thought that counts.”

It wasn’t until we escaped into the getaway car that we compared notes and discovered that we were both right. Turns out that I had used the 1972 edition of F&P and she’d used the 1997 version. Whups!

I’m pretty sure that Justice Roberts doesn’t have that same excuse, though.