One problem: we have built an immense network of supercomputers that is essentially a Commons. An abuse of this Commons that would be ridiculously unprofitable if it had to be carried out by humans – say, an expected return of one one-hundredth cent per attempt – is highly attractive to unscrupulous actors …

I work at a small technology company, recently moved from Cambridge to Boston. The new landlords were a little surprised that we wanted to expand the kitchen. This is what we normally supply to our employees and guests:

We have an espresso machine (and will teach you how to use …

“Move fast and break stuff” is a decent philosophy if and only if the consequences of breaking stuff are survivable.

• If breaking stuff means that your website looks weird, that’s survivable.

• If breaking stuff means that performance sucks for a while, that’s survivable.

• If breaking stuff causes unavailability …

0.1 First ‘Real’ Job

“Hey, do you want to interview at an ISP? They’re looking for part-time people who can use UNIX.”

Lars (pronounced Larsh) lived across the hall from me in the dorm. Four of us piled into his car, all of us were accepted provisionally as …

Gas ranges have the UNIX nature: they are powerful, can be controlled precisely, and if you only half-know what you are doing, it’s possible to blow up your house. If you do know what you’re doing, nearly any problem can be solved by taking it apart and cleaning …

The Amazon Kindle Fire HD10 (2017) is the high-end tablet of their line. The hardware is mediocre and the software is quite bad. I do not recommend you purchase this or any other Fire tablet… unless you have some very specific requirements.

Let’s consider the negatives, first.

Bootloader is …

By all means, replace procmail with maildrop.

If you haven’t read a procmailrc in a few months, it’s so much line noise and you need to consult the man pages again.

If you haven’t read a maildrop recipe file, well – here’s a nearly maximum-complexity snippet:

   xfilter …

The new office is further away from my house but a shorter commute in time.

For the last fourteen or so years, my commute has been one of these variations:

• Walk to a bus stop, catch a bus for an hour, walk to work. Elapsed time 1:25.
• Walk to …

Someone on the debian-user list just discovered that gpt partitioning allows you to put 128 partitions on a disk. They got really excited at the granularity that would allow. They weren’t thinking about the exciting maintenance procedures that would inevitably follow – not enough space here, too much space there …

We’re moving the corporate headquarters from Cambridge to Boston. Rent in Kendall Square is up to Manhattan levels, and despite two rounds of looking for new places in Cambridge, we need to go over the bridge.

This is the fifth or sixth move I’ve been part of. When …

This is a personal blog. I run it myself. I own the hardware, I select the software, it is all properly (open source) licensed. If you read things here, peachy. If you don’t read, how are you going to complain?

If you send me comments, I may publish them …

If you have a domain name registered, you need to renew your registration every few years. You can generally ask for a 1-3 year cycle.

If you like your DNS registrar, there is no need to switch.

Today I received paper mail from a company called iDNS. I’m not …

I haven’t seen this documented before, so I will do so.

Let’s suppose that we are playing the Internet’s favorite interactive game, Discuss Something. I’m sure you’ve played it. One person makes a statement, another person decides that they should correct the statement, and the …