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 …

To be clear:

• If I link or otherwise attribute a source for a statistical figure, that’s the source that I’m using.

• If I blather off an estimate like 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot, that is almost certainly hyperbole.

• If I show my work …

As a manager, you can tell if an engineer is happy with their work if they are comfortable with giving higher-ups constructive feedback about issues at hand directly. As an engineer, you can tell if a manager is actively working for you if you see at least some action performed …

Useful tip (for me): any time ZFS emits internal error: Invalid argument, what it probably means is that the DKMS module and the userland utilities are different versions.

sudo modinfo zfs|head will tell you what version your kernel is using; apt show -a zfsutils-linux will tell you what versions …