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In our company we (at least IT department) get to choose our own bags (within reason). I have some generic lenovo backpack they had laying around when I started and it’s decent enough. Maybe a bit smaller side on what I’d like, but it carries my laptop, headset, random cables, power supply, notepad and stuff like that just fine. And it doesn’t have any kind of visible logo on it at all, unless you count the Think® colour scheme on zipper tabs.

And it’s also a security thing. Should someone steal my backpack it does not have any logos to pinpoint which company it belongs unless I’ve left my lanyard in the pocket with my rfid-tag. And of course if you open the laptop it has AD forest name on there, so it’s pretty trivial to figure out, but at least I’m not advertising ‘steal my things if you want access to this company’ everywhere.

Like anyone who could think critically or even have slightest media literacy, but…

I’ve seen some shit. But I’m also old enough to not care. I’m a freaking system administrator, not a surgeon. No one has died if their email is unreacable for an hour or two. Shit happens, then you deal with it and that’s all. Difference between a junior and a seasoned veteran is that old guys with battle scars is that the seasoned guy knows that something will break, shit will hit the fan and everything might turn up into a chaos and plan accordingly. Juniors will either endure and learn along the way or crumble.

When you’ve been in the business for few decades it’s not that big of a deal to cause an outage. You know how to fix your shit, you know how to work with a severely crippled environment and you know how to build the whole circus from the ground up. And you also know that no matter how disappointed or loud the C** suits are, they’ll calm down once you get them out of the hole.

Just today I had a meeting with discussion on what to do if some obscure edge-case ruins our ~5k users and few continents wide AD tree. Sure, if that would happen, it would most definetly suck balls to get back up and it would hurt the company bottom line and it would mean few nights with very little sleep, but no one would still die and our team is up to the task to build the whole crap out of nothing if needed. So, it’s just business as usual. But all of us have been in the business long enough that we know how to avoid the common pitfalls and we trust eachother enough that should the shit hit the fan in the big way we could still recover the whole situation.

And still, even if the whole thing burns up in the flames, I’ve got the experience and skillset under my belt which will be valuable to some other business entity. I just don’t care if the main office building is on literal fire. It’s not my problem to fix immediately and when it is it’s still just work. I put in the hours they pay for me and do whatever I can but when I’m off the clock the employer doesn’t really exist in my world.

Vic 20 -> C=64 -> few 386/486 units -> AMD K6-2 and a ton of stuff after that. And maybe something in between.

And now I’m writing this in my garage computer which I picked up from a e-waste pile at work few years back and it has more computing power than pretty much all the systems combined I had before being 18 years old. And when we (as a family) got our first “mobile” phone it was hardwired to a car electronics since they took ‘a bit’ more power than the supercomputers we carry in our pockets today (obviously Li-ion batteries were not a thing either, but that old Motorola NMT450 took a crapload of power by todays standards).

It’s been a wild ride so far. My grandparents were on top of the technology when they got the first landline phone around the neighborhood (I’m living in a rural area so it was not a new invention back then by any stretch) and now I can just yell to a entity in my palm to show me pictures from another planet or a high definition live video from Earth orbit.

And still I’m somehow trying to teach basic tehcnology concepts to both my parents and my kids. It’s bizarre to try and explain about benefits of touch typing to a 16 year old who thinks it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to type out an essay at school containing 2000 words in an hour (33wpm)…

I think it was some XMPP related server I ran quite a few years ago which had ‘i_have_read_the_manual = 0’ or something similar buried into default configuration file. And it would just silently exit if that variable was not set properly.

Maybe we need more things like that.

Don’t know what Elmos minions are doing, but I’ve written code at least equally unefficient. It was quite a few years ago (the code was in written in perl) and I at least want to think that I’m better now (but I’m not paid to code anymore). The task was to pull in data from a CSV (or something like that, as I mentioned, it’s been a while) and it needed conversion to XML (or something similar).

The idea behind my code was that you could just configure which fields you want from arbitary source data and on where to place them on the whatever supported destination format. I still think that the basic idea behind that project is pretty neat, just throw in whatever you happen to have and have something completely else out of the other end. And it worked as it should. It was just stupidly hungry for memory. 20k entries would eat up several gigabytes of memory from a workstation (and back then it was premium to have even 16G around) and it was also freaking slow to run (like 0.2 - 0.5 seconds per entry).

But even then I didn’t need to tweet that my hard drive is overheating. I well understood that my code is just bad and I even improved it a bit here and there, but it was still so very slow and used ridiculous amounts of RAM. The project was pretty neat and when you had few hundred items to process at a time it was even pretty good, there was companies who relied on that code and paid for support. It just totally broke down with even a slightly bigger datasets.

But, as I already mentioned, my hard drive didn’t overheat on that load.

Yes. Their law doesn’t allow elections when martial law is in effect and it also states that the current president will hold office as long as the successor has been chosen. Plus, if I’m not mistaken, it was Ukrainian parliament (or whatever they’re called) who decided to not run elections, not Zelensky himself.

Also that 4% approval is complete bullshit, as the article states. If something Zelensky has a bit higher approval than before.

You can also set your profile picture to ‘missing/broken image’ icon.

German humour is no laughing matter.

Väki also means (or at least used to) ‘power’ or ‘strong’ (väkivahva, väkijuoma…) and that’s also where the etymology for ‘väkivalta’ comes from. So it’s got nothing to do with people.

My bank uses 6 digit ‘customer number’ (which is set by the bank) and that’s verified with an app and a personal PIN (app shows ‘login attempt ABCD at mm.dd. hh:mm’ where ABCD is shown on login page too) or via SMS OTP (again with ‘ABCD’ verification). And again with personal pin + app or OTP to confirm transactions. The app itself can be protected with a fingerprint or phone pin and every new installation needs to be registered to the system, so I can’t just use my phone app to access my wifes account (or anyone elses) but I still can map multiple accounts (like corporate ones) to the same installation.

I think that’s pretty reasonable approach.

The command in question recursively changes file ownership to account “user” and group “user” for every file and folder in the system. With linux, where many processes are run as root and on various other accounts (like apache or www-data for web server, mysql for MySql database and so on) and after that command none of the services can access the files they need to function. And as the whole system is broken on a very fundamental level changing everything back would be a huge pain in the rear.

On this ubuntu system I’m using right now I have 53 separate user accounts for various things. Some are obsolete and not in use, but majority are used for something and 15 of them are in active use for different services. Different systems have a bit different numbers, but you’d basically need to track down all the millions of files on your computer and fix each of their permission by hand. It can be done, and if you have similar system to copy privileges from you could write a script to fix most of the things, but in vast majority of cases it’s easier to just wipe the drive and reinstall.

127.0.0.1 / 255.0.0.0

I’m pretty sure the cameras around here don’t use OCR at all or even if it does it only recognizes the format for plates from a thing shaped like a plate. So if you’re driving like an ass with the drop tables-“plate” that is pretty relevant.

The Bobby Tables one I’m quite sure would work at least on some systems if they let you input your kids name by yourself to some sort of digital form. Or at least I would be pretty surprised if every school system on earth would be patched against simple sql injections.

Firewall kinda-sorta plays with this idea, but all the tech is pretty stupid (and main focus, if memory serves, isn’t even in the technology). It’s not a bad movie as a hollywood 13-in-a-dozen action category, but it’s a far cry from “Server Down” we have here.

Bing Chat (so ChatGPT) wrote an opening scene (or maybe more like a trailer, prompt was opening scene) too:

The opening scene of “Server Down” begins with a shot of a high-tech skyscraper. The camera then zooms into the basement of the building, where we see Jack Bauer, a nerdy and obsessive system administrator, working on his servers. He is surrounded by racks of blinking machines, tangled cables, and humming fans. Jack is wearing a t-shirt with a witty tech joke printed on it, and he is sipping a cup of coffee from a “World’s Best Sysadmin” mug.

Suddenly, the lights flicker, and the servers go offline. Jack’s face turns pale, and he drops his coffee mug. He frantically tries to reboot the servers, but nothing works. He checks the network connections, the power supply, and the cooling system, but everything seems fine. He then realizes that the problem is not with his servers, but with the building’s infrastructure. He rushes to the security room, where he finds out that the building has been taken over by terrorists.

The camera then cuts to the terrorists, who are holding the employees hostage and demanding a ransom from the government. They have cut off all communication lines, disabled the security cameras, and planted a bomb in the building. They are confident that they can get away with their plan, but they didn’t count on one thing: Jack Bauer.

The scene ends with Jack staring at the security monitors, his eyes burning with determination. He knows that he has to act fast to save his servers, his colleagues, and himself. He takes a deep breath, puts on his backpack, and heads towards the ventilation ducts. The adventure begins!

Bare feet are a bit clickbaity on the headline. That alone doesn’t mean much, but when it happens on a area where you should have full protective gear at the (supposed to be) sterile part of the manufacturing it’s of course a big deal. But it would be equally big deal if you just stroll there in your jeans and t-shirt with boots you stepped on a dog shit on your way to work. And even then it’s not even close of being the biggest issue on manufacturing where they constantly ignored all of the safety protocols, including ignoring test results which told them that the product is faulty.

In EU no one individual needs to sue them. The what-ever-the-office-might-be-responsible at EU burecracy will just send them an nicely worded letter that says “play by the book or we’ll give you fine big enough to bankrupt you no matter how much money you think you have”. The fine is based on company revenue (or sales, I don’t remember what it spesifically was) and there’s no way you’ll weasel yourself out of that no matter how many american lawyers you can hire. The same folks forced Apple to adapt usb-c, so good luck Spez if you try to challenge that.