For every computer system, someone needs to know what they are doing, and check up on it when something goes wrong. That person is the sysadmin.

If you don’t know who the sysadmin is, it’s you.

It’s just like everything else in life: if you care about a thing, you are responsible for taking care of it. If nobody takes care of it, it decays and dies.

Today I replaced the last spinning root disk in the house. The media server still has 4x3TB spinning disks, but the old 120GB spinning boot disk has been replaced by a cheap 1 TB SSD. Boot times improved dramatically, and the database access for various things now feels instantaneous.

Process follows, but it’s nothing extraordinary.

One thing that UNIX users have that Mac and Windows users don’t: it’s generally quite easy to change their window manager theme – and to write/draw their own.

Window decorations – a frame, a titlebar, some buttons – are handled by the X11 window manager, which is itself a replaceable part. Window managers range from minimalist exercises in reductionism through gaudy feature-festivals like Enlightenment, the original perpetrator of shaped, translucent and transparent effects. But…

“Magic”, applied to technology, is an indictment, not a compliment.

– me, July 15 2020.

A departing co-op (student intern, paid) said that she had been told by another co-op that the company’s keywords were “clever, competent, and kind” and that she was amazed to discover that we all lived up to that.

Since I was the first person at the company to start using that phrase – in employment advertisements, where I was describing necessary traits of the people I wanted to hire – I am entirely chuffed.

Internet Fast Lanes: Every time somebody says “Fast Lane” in this argument, I get a little more upset. The Internet doesn’t have fast lanes and slow lanes.

The Internet is not a highway.

The Internet is a railway system.

You probably already know this, but as a reminder:

• sed is for inserting, replacing and deleting. -i causes sed to edit in place.

• pandoc is for converting between text formats like HTML, Markdown, RST, TeX, various wikis…

• calibre has command-line subtools like ebook-convert which can produce good EPUB from lots of other formats.

• libreoffice handles typical office document tasks. Graphical.

• sigil is specialized as an EPUB authoring tool. Graphical.

• scribus can do page-layout tasks up to full daily newspapers. Graphical.

With those and a good text editor, you can produce good-looking documents ranging from a business letter through a book.

Comments go via email; if they contribute, I put them up. If they don’t, you never see them.

Don’t use the new search engine Privado (no link on purpose.) They keep spamming me with requests to mention them in a positive light. That’s not going to happen.

Perl is the best language if it’s the language that you remember well enough.

My father loves math puzzles. He told me about one he was working on, and I did a quick estimate of how complex the answer space was and told him that it would be faster to have a computer try out every answer than to be clever about solving it.

Of course he wanted me to prove that, so I had to brush off Perl or Python. For some reason, Perl felt better.

I got spammed by Privado – no link, they really want a link – which claims to be a privacy-enhanced search engine. Investigating their privacy policy, you can see that they are a proxy for Microsoft Bing. In effect, they exist in order to put ads in front of Bing searches: it’s another company eking out a profit margin between ads from ad networks and paying AWS fees.

Anti-recommended.

In the spirit of “the best way to get a correct answer is to post an obviously wrong answer on USENET”, I hereby present the most efficient method of mass-alteration of LDAP user entities I can think of.

You probably shouldn’t do this.

• Is it plugged in?
• At both ends?
• Does the other end work with something else?
• Are all the power switches on? Including the one on the strip, the one on the back, and the one that’s not connected?
• Is DNS working?
• Are you out of disk space?
• Are you out of inodes?
• Where are the logs?
• What do the logs say?
• Have you ever gotten it to work before?

This entry brought to you by being out of disk space, a day after I asked for more disk space as a precautionary measure.

Email disclaimers are stupid and they make your company look stupid.

The only email disclaimer that seems to have any legal effect whatsoever is when a lawyer says “This email does not create a client confidentiality relationship.” All others are completely bogus. The lawyer one is almost bogus, since it is a reminder that should not be needed – but apparently a lot of people get confused easily. Law is like that.

A common feature of bogus disclaimers is that they tell the reader that if they aren’t the proper recipient, they should stop reading immediately. You know, at the end of the email. Very clever.

I found a dubious improvement today: a company sent me an email with a disclaimer that was referenced via a URL. So: you get to the bottom of the email, find a link to a disclaimer, and then click on it to go retrieve it and read it. The punchline: “you are prohibited from reading this email”.

Great work, people. Your mission is done.

Who do you trust? And do you trust them indefinitely far into the future?

If you have specific reasons to believe you will be targetted by an interested, competent, resourceful attacker: you need serious information security measures, which will be painful and potentially expensive in both time and money. I have no such specific fears, so I’m merely interested in protecting my household against generalized attacks, the sort of thing that Google and Facebook and Amazon and every advertiser in the world carries out as a matter of course.

In this installment, I’m going to increase the difficulty of tracking my household network via intercepting DNS requests. I will assume you know a fair amount about DNS and feel comfortable configuring daemons and running them – this isn’t a step-by-step HowTo.