Centralized facilities are easier to manage. Centralized facilities are easier to control.

Distributed facilities are harder to manage, harder to control.

Centralized facilities need expensive, difficult redundancies to maintain function during a partial outage. Distributed facilities need coordination.

Centralized is cheaper than distributed if you don’t pay for the things that can make it reliable.

I was chatting (via work’s internal chat system) to a coworker, answering a question when the CFO came in and got my attention. I swivelled my head and greeted her while finishing my response.

“Were you really typing just then?” she inquired.

“Yes, until I dropped my train of thought when you came in.”

I’m not a classical touch-typist; I mostly use six fingers or so, and I don’t really keep them over the home row – rather, I have two or three hand positions that I can feel properly, and that’s where I type from. My speed would probably be improved if I practiced proper touch-typing, but on the other hand, maybe I would lose my ability to type the arcane symbols of computer incantations that are not so common in the mainstream typing systems.

Do learn some form of typing; it’s ever so much more convenient for getting your thoughts out.

If a previously reliable gigabit connection is suddenly working at 100 Mb/s, you probably have a flaky cable. Replace it. Yes, I know it hasn’t moved in months or years so there can’t possibly be any mechanical stress. Kill it with scissors.

Do you have an X11 application that insists on using a font you hate?

Change that easily with fontconfig.

This syntax in your .fonts.conf will change the response for one font into an answer from another:

<alias>
 <family>Gentium</family>
 <prefer>
  <family>Tex Gyre Pagella</family>
 </prefer>
</alias>

Add as many stanzas as you like; then run fc-cache and restart your application.

/785 days ago:/

First post. I should tell you a little bit about myself… blah, blah, blah, so I set up this wordpress account. I plan on updating once a week or so.

/784 days ago:/

I solved this obscure technical problem with a for-loop in bash. Now, the syntax …

This is a reminder that spinning storage is still useful for large data dumps, media, backups, and other bulky things that you don’t need to change continuously.

But mostly, it’s cost-effective. The two current sweet spots for capacity/performance (assuming brand-name, non-sale, 7200RPM SATA3 3.5" disks) are at 4TB (about $75) and 10TB (about $270).

I also remind you that you want RAID for reliability, but it’s not backup by itself.

Via Rick Thomas on the Debian Users mailing list:

In any case, the solution I came up with is

apt-get --purge install -y sysvinit-core dbus- glib-networking- libgtk-3-0-
apt-get --purge autoremove

Note the trailing minus-signs on dbus- glib-networking- libgtk-3-0- These packages need to be deleted in the same pass as sysvinit-core …

There is no such thing as an intuitive interface (to a computer). All interfaces are learned, To the extent that they re-use components and repeat behaviors already learned, some interfaces can be easier to learn.

Somebody quipped “The only intuitive interface is the nipple; after that it’s all learned.” It might have been Bruce Ediger. Doesn’t matter who it was: turns out that humans don’t have much of an intuition for nipples, either. Breastfeeding techniques need to be learned, too. It’s always easier to learn something that lots of other people around you are demonstrating regularly; you also know who to ask for help.

You know how this works, right? These are false statements about what non-programmers believe about programmers and programming. The proper response to every single statement is “Not always.”

• Programming is just a job that anyone can do.
• Programming is just a job that anyone who has taken programming courses can …

Let’s keep track of some laws in Massachusetts that should be changed.

https://malegislature.gov/Laws/SessionLaws/Acts/2018/Chapter228

SECTION 56. Notwithstanding any general or special law to the contrary, any city or town that has received a grant from the executive office of housing and economic development …

It seems increasingly unwise to allow an Intel-made CPU to talk to the outside world. But the NUC-style machines are almost exclusively Intel. What should we do for a new firewall?

You’ll recall that I prefer firewalls to run Debian Stable, so that security updates are available promptly. While …

I recently ordered a dozen things from Amazon from six vendors. All the things were pretty technical – ethernet switches, fiber optic cables, transceivers, things like that. This is normal.

Four of the six vendors asked me to review their products. Two asked me multiple times over the same order.

Here’s my policy, and I urge you to consider the same one:

I will only leave a review on a commerce site if I have an unusual experience to report. An unusual experience is either surprisingly good or exceptionally bad. I won’t give any feedback for a transaction in which I paid the agreed amount of money, received the product in a reasonable time, and the product worked as expected.

Adding reviews outside of that policy has two negative effects: it adds useless noise to the review section, and it tends to inflate star-system grades.

Lots of projects focus on an MVP, a minimum viable product: the least effort that it takes to make something that someone will pay for. The idea is that you can use that as a base to incrementally improve the product into something that people will actually recommend to each …

Let’s name a thing: dominant data formats.

A data format is a specification for how to turn information into a digital encoding that a computer can work with, and of course how to reverse that back into a human-readable method.

A dominant data format is one that is used …

Somehow, without me being consciously aware of it, every device in the house that I use to play music has become capable of playing FLAC.

(FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio CoDec. A CoDec is a compressor/decompressor, a method of potentially squeezing lots of data into less data. Lossless …