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.

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 on making an estimate, I am reasonably confident that my logic is consistent and my sources are not absolutely ridiculous. But it’s an estimate, and you should confirm it independently before relying on it in any serious decision-making.

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 as a response to your feedback. When both things happen, management might see an increase in reported problems during development, but they’ll also see an increase in resolutions, instead of seeing fewer but critical issues that go unresolved.

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 of the user commands are available. Look for a mismatch.

I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, “On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it …

The price for using a math library developed by Foobar Corporation is $10,000 plus 1% of the sale price of your product, or whatever you negotiate with them.

The price for using a GPL’d math library is that you must license your source code under the GPL as well.

The price for using an LGPL’d math library is distributing the source for the library along with your product. If you modify the library itself, then that falls back to the GPL.

This is the end of my second year as a Google Fi subscriber.

TL;DR: I’m keeping this service and I recommend it for people who are happy with the limited phone selection.