Notices by Garrett Wollman (wollman@mastodon.social), page 3

@robey Great thing about pw(8) is it doesn't care which order you use: `useradd`, `adduser`, `addgroup`, `groupadd`, whatever.

@Fiona At work, we mostly use function + year-entered-service or function + ordinal for things that exist in multiple instances. Our AFS file servers are named after maritime disasters (mostly oil spills these days). We used to use cartoon characters, and there were a series of login servers named after the characters in Scooby-Doo. Personal machines are named after either horses in Robin McKinley's Damar books or swords in Diane Duane's Middle Kingdoms books.

@mwl Hmmm....

webdns=> select serial from zone;
serial
------------
26906
25975
252888627
2007102006
28697
26886
22213
184
45238
253322835
(10 rows)

Ok, that fits. The one zone that actually used the data-based scheme (probably because it was imported from a manually maintained zone file) is an empty in-addr.arpa zone that hasn't changed in 17 years.

@SteveBellovin Re: JSON, back in the days when XML was The Hot Thing, Juniper needed a way for existing normal FreeBSD command-line tools to generate XML output, so they created a library (libxo, for Xml Output) which is like "structured printf", and added standard command-line options to invoke it. Then when JSON became The New Hot Thing, it was just one change in the library to add it as a new format. FreeBSD has shipped this for eight years now, with additional utilities converted over time.

@gumnos @joel rs(1) was part of a set of tools along with lam(1) and jot(1) that were posted to comp.sources.unix in ancient times and got included in 4BSD at some point. rs does the thing most commonly wanted in this scenario if you don't supply options.

It took visiting five different web sites and a google search to finally find the right Nvidia page for downloading the latest release of Cumulus Linux.

Some punctuation characters have control-character equivalents but most don't, simply because of how the ASCII table is laid out: there are only 33 control characters (values 0 through 31 plus 127) and most punctuation characters don't have values that land in that range when XORed with 64. Some terminals used this combinations for other things but mostly they were not implemented. (One important exception is that control-SPACE, which should be "`" (backtick) is often mapped to NUL.)

Ever wonder why the DEL (delete) character is shown as ^? if your terminal settings are messed up? Control characters are not arbitrary: the control key of a classic ASCII terminal was implemented as just (ASCII code of character typed) XOR 64. So ^A is 65 (ASCII 'A') XOR 64 = 1. ^@ is 64 XOR 64 = 0 (NUL), and ^? is 63 XOR 64 = 127 which is DEL. That's why not all punctuation characters have control-character equivalents. Early terminals didn't support lower case, so ^a is the same as ^A.

One thing I have never understood about my employer's use of Concur: every time we book a flight, we pay a commission to a travel agency. The agency provides us no service, and it's all on the traveler to actually browse schedules and fares in whatever GDS Concur uses -- there's just an extra $7 or whatever sent off to the agency for nothing, which we have to submit a separate "receipt" for. Why not just book directly with the airline on our travel cards?

@irene Sounds like it would be tasty, but I could never do it because that would be far too much food to have around at once. (Also, my favorite "baked" bean recipe is cooked on the stovetop, not in the oven.)

@irene @dan My freezer is very smol and mostly filled with the meat from my quarterly meat delivery service that I haven't figured out how to use yet. Oh, and bread, because in my house bread starts showing visible mold in three days on the counter.

@irene @dan This is the point at which you have bought half a steer or half a hog and realize you can't eat that much meat right away?

(My parents bought a quarter-steer once, when I was about 10, and had to buy a chest freezer just for that... they never tried that again, although they kept the freezer for another decade.)

@trabex Nearly all public companies are incorporated in Delaware, unless they're really really old and have never recapitalized.

It'll probably finish some time on Sunday, this machine is ancient and slow and small and I would really do well to replace it with something more modern. I guess I could shop for a new build server (more affordable than the one I have at work, anyway).

Hey, it's Friday night! So what am I doing?

Oh, right, I'm waiting for rust to build. It'll be a while...

(This poor old server is a 6-core Dell R415 from 2012 with only 16GB of RAM. It has served me pretty well but modern software is just too resource-intensive.)

@MrMeritology That's what I keep hearing. Even when we have positions open (usually helpdesk) it's difficult to get decent candidates -- sometimes it's difficult to get candidates we know and encouraged to apply through the first-level screen and on to the hiring manager. (It doesn't help that we're a university and HR has a built-in bias towards credentialism.)

@ewen @nic How many eels can you fit in that hovercraft anyway?

@jef @nblr Both came out of Barbara Liskov's research group. In 1994, although Scheifler had moved on, Barbara and her group were still there, around the corner and down the hall from me.

The 5th floor of 545 Tech Square was an astonishingly productive place: X, the End-to-End Principle, library operating systems, packet audio and video over wide-area networks, "soft state", RSVP, mesh networks, content-addressable file systems, TCP time-sequence plots, ...

@futurshox This is apparently why Koreans with the family name "I" still use "Lee" on their passports and not the government recommended "Yi".