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 who can automate a billion attempts for an expenditure of a few days or weeks worth of setup and expect a hundred thousand dollars of return.

Another problem: there has been little incentive for software developers to guarantee the security (integrity, privacy, trustworthiness) of their products, because they face so …

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 it), a drip machine, a French press, a coffee grinder, a rotating selection of coffees including decaf in the freezer, about twenty kinds of tea/herbal tea/tisanes…

and a refrigerator stocked with skim milk, whole milk, half-and-half, heavy cream (usually), lemon juice, lime juice, soy and/or almond milk …

“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 during a critical period of end-user demand, a few incidents might be survivable.

• If breaking stuff causes your company to have a terrible reputation for privacy, security, or competency, that might not be survivable.

• If breaking stuff causes your company to divulge financial information, that might not be survivable.

• If …

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 juniormost UNIX people, and I progressed from “sure, I know what Usenet is” to being the Usenet news admin, then a general purpose sysadmin, and eventually to the Director of IT (aka seniormost sysadmin). The beginning was pure luck.

0.2 Traditional Approach

I sent my resume off to a …

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 things or replacing components.

Electric ranges are like Windows: they might eventually do the thing they’re supposed to do, but it’s hard to control them, there is a propensity to wildly oversteer, and you really don’t get the same power. If it breaks in a way that …

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 locked

Having a locked bootloader means that you can’t replace the OS with a sane one. If you could do that, then all other software problems could be overcome by a slightly technical person. (If you can follow directions well enough, there are good guides for most systems to …

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 "/usr/bin/spamc -U /var/lib/spamassassin/socket"
      if (/^X-Spam-Status: Yes/)
      {   
        to Maildir/spam/
      }

   `reformail -D 16000 duplicate.cache`
   if ( $RETURNCODE == 0 )
       exit

   if (/^X-Facebook.*/:h)
       to Maildir/facebook/

   if (/^Subject: \[Slack\] Notifications.*/:h)
       to Maildir/slack/

You now know how to do 90% of everything you’ll ever want …

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 a bus stop, catch a bus for an hour, take the Red Line, walk to work. Elapsed time 1:30. * Be dropped off at a trolley stop, catch a trolley, change to Red Line, walk to work. Elapsed time 1:05.
• Be dropped off at a Red Line stop, take the Red Line, walk to work. 0:55.

I can still do the last three of those, adding about 5 minutes for a further stop on the Red Line. But I now have a new option:

• Be dropped off at the commuter rail stop, take a train to North Station, walk to work. 0:43.

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, backups all over the place.

This is the sort of thing that ZFS excels at.

For example, let’s say you have five 1 TB disks, and you have less than 1TB that you really really want to have safe.

You could set up the following:

mainpool: a zpool composed …

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 your company is profitable but not a super-profitable growth giant, having a good space to work in is difficult, but not difficult enough to make it impossible. You can’t afford to buy real estate, and you’re not big enough to make a landlord drool. On the other hand …

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, unless you tell me not to.

If you subscribe via RSS, presumably you know how to unsubscribe, too.

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 a customer. The mail looked an awful lot like a bill.

“You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your name from your current Registrar to Internet Domain Name Services. Failure to renew your …

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 game is on. Assuming an appropriate medium - Usenet, an email list, a chat board, Facebook, LiveJournal, the comments section of a newspaper - other people might join in.

One style of argument is to present evidence, preferably citing sources, along with a chain of reasonable statements that move from the evidence to the desired conclusion.

Another style of argument is to present hypotheses that exactly counter the last evidence of the other side.

In a game of escalating hypotheses, where one side feels bound to respect evidence and the other gets to make up stories, the side that makes up stories also gets to make up the story where they win.