Notices by Chris Siebenmann (cks@mastodon.social), page 8

@ghibli My theory: at the start of the movie, the spirit world wants to lure people in, so it's trying to be plausibly attractive. At the end of the movie it isn't, so it can look more natural. You could also make a thematic link to restoring Haku.

Since the ending of the movie is supposed to be a victory for Chihiro, I don't think she got spirited away for any significant outside-world length of time. (That would cause problems for her parents and her and so not be a true success.)

@JessTheUnstill My cynical suspicion is that much like more police create more crime, SWAT teams create excuses to use them for internal reasons. If you have a SWAT team sitting around not doing anything, do they really need all of that budget money? So SWAT teams are motivated to find ways to get used, the more the better (for their budget and prestige).

(Plus this isn't just police, there's a whole pressure on government as a whole to be 'efficient', which often means no idle resources.)

@hailey As someone who has looked at various aspects of Unix V7, I have to laugh sadly at the people who think that Unix's early versions and early designs were the platonic ideal and everything went downhill from there. But I suspect most of those originalist Unix people are imagining some golden past.

This is my sad face when someone thinks a HTTP reply having a Last-Modified of December 28th on a request made recently means the software responsible for it either has to have aggressive caching or be building static pages.

It is possible to dynamically generate pages with accurate last-modified dates based on their component parts, and thus get old Last-Modified dates naturally. It's just that a lot of dynamic site programs don't bother. (My program does, for reasons.)

@gnomon This is for the work desktop, so I couldn't honestly take it; work should be ponying up for it (them, I mirror everything). Home has big NVMe drives already (partly because I delayed on NVMe long enough that big ones got startlingly cheap).

Finally sat down and upgraded the work desktop to Fedora 39. I really need to do something to free up more disk space on its root filesystem; it's getting troublesome during upgrades. I think /var/cache/dnf is about to get voted off to another location.

(The real cure is bigger NVMe drives, but there's a lot of yak shaving and manager persuasion in there.)

@gnomon Also, the current root disks are 500 GB NVMe drives, it's just that almost all of their space is in a ZFS pool. I sort of cut my 'how small can I make the root filesystem in order to have as much fast ZFS as possible' a little bit too close when I did this in (checks notes) late 2019[1].

1: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/MultiNVMeMotherboardIssue (blogging nearly everything can be helpful!)

@gnomon My manager would probably be happy to get me a new desktop and would likely urge me to if I mentioned that it dates from the end of 2017, but I hate shopping, especially for PC components.

(I sort of have alternate hardware if it explodes, and as time goes by I slowly get increasingly nervous about that possibility. Five years is pretty decent lifetime for eg CPU fans. Of course the home desktop is also about that old.)

Dear me: you do not need more cold weather bike gloves. Not even if the much-loved pair you wore today (for the first time this year because now it's cold(er)) is out of production and wearing out. You have more than enough. Stop eyeing those bike gloves that the nice bike shop just down the street has (on sale, no less).

One of my odd bits of computing history is that I have used both an original Bell Lab Blit terminal and the later AT&T DMD 5620 commercialized version of it, and in both cases by choice and with the host software that made each into an interesting windowing environment.

(My X window manager root menu still (sort of) mimics the Blit's menu and is called 'Blit' in my fvwm configuration file. It used to be much closer to the Blit's, but things happened over the years.)

Dear OpenZFS: if you are going to produce a kernel message with the string 'PANIC' in it, and then a kernel stack dump, please make it an actual panic so that my 'reboot on panic' settings kick in. Otherwise we will be very confused.

Also, upgrading old ZFS filesystems from version 4 (I said they were old) to version 5 is apparently not harmless on Ubuntu 22.04 OpenZFS.

@dangoodin I was a university sysadmin (University of Toronto) at the time SSH was released, and my memory is that we jumped on it basically immediately because it was clearly better than rsh/rlogin. Not only was it more secure, it also had X forwarding over SSH (a big help if you worked from Unix workstations, as was the case for us) and I think various other conveniences.

(We built it ourselves from source on our Unix machines, as was common at the time.)

Blog post: Why systemd-resolved can give weird results for nonexistent bare hostnames, where 'ping nosuchname' will report a temporary failure in resolution https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/linux/SystemdResolvedSingleNamesDNS

tl;dr: if you have a DNS search path and your programs make DNS queries to talk to resolved instead of using DBus, you'll make an A/AAAA query for the bare DNS name 'nosuchname.' and resolved's DNS server will answer those queries with a SERVFAIL instead of a NXDOMAIN the way other DNS servers do.

@ibboard I still fondly remember how back in the days when I listened to streaming MP3s over the Internet, my (Linux) MP3 player got de-synched from the stream and I didn't notice until some time later, when I was thinking 'I didn't know this stream played modern noise music ... oh'.

(Noise music isn't quite an oxymoron but it's pretty far out there, eg Glenn Branca and also some of the non-dance 'industrial' music axis. It's an acquired taste.)

@lanodan Somehow this works (for ZFS at least) even in NFS v3, at least in Linux for both servers and clients (the Linux exports(5) 'crossmnt' option). I actually haven't tested this in our NFS v4 environment and I should someday.

(We have it not enabled due to an old ZFS kernel panic bug that's now long gone. It would otherwise be useful to expose eg ZFS snapshots to NFS clients.)

It's always a good day when I can share cursed NFS v3 knowledge with innocent bystanders.

(Someday I should test how much of this cursed knowledge is still true in NFS v4, since work has now switched over to v4 for reasons. Yes, it took us a while; for a long time we didn't see much of a reason to switch.)

It's great that our users are apparently very good at ignoring phishes. Unfortunately, this has the small side effect that they're also very good at ignoring our plaintive requests to change their Unix passwords because their Unix passwords are so old that they're using old-school 'descrypt' format encrypted passwords (8 characters maximum and all that fun).

(The alternate interpretation is that they're very good at ignoring everything 'we' send them, which is perhaps not wrong either.)

@Gaelan Based on a quick reading of the source, the V6 shell took the brute force approach of dup()'ing any script on the command line to fd 0, so it could always just read from fd 0 (it carefully turned off printing the prompt if it was running a script). Then goto and exit manipulated fd 0, which the shell passed to them. Presumably people learned to not run programs in shell scripts that also tried to read stdin on their own.

Today's ancient Unix trivia: in the Research Unix V6 shell, 'goto' and 'exit' were both external programs. They worked by changing the seek position on the file descriptor of the shell script (which they shared with the shell). This worked because the shell read its input line by line (which actually meant character by character).

Interested parties can read more on the V6 shell's control flow at https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/V6ShellControlFlow

Current status: committing GNU Date crimes to do time arithmetic because I need to invoke tools that need specific combinations of start time, end time, and duration, and I want to be flexible about which ones have to be provided. Also, they have picky formatting requirements because Go.