Posts by C R Mudgeon

Re: Error message

Indeed. In movie mode to catch the ones that fly by too fast. You only need one frame, but timing a still photo just right can be a pain. (Obviously the movie thing only works if you can reproduce the problem.)

Re: screen messages

The worst time-sheet program I ever used was the one that required you to log exactly 35 [1] hours per week, regardless of how many hours you'd actually worked. If you'd put in 10 hours of overtime to meet a deadline? <fingers in ears> "Lah lah lah lah lah".

And this was for a salaried position, for which overtime wouldn't have been forthcoming in any case. But that they didn't even want to know how much unpaid work they were getting out of us? That was adding insult to injury.

[1] It would reduce that for weeks containing statutory holidays, but still, it knew exactly how many hours it expected you to work in any given week, and wouldn't let you report either more or fewer.

Re: Joined up thinking

And build even more complete profiles of everyone. Sure, it's frustrating when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, but to my mind the alternative is worse.

Re: Might?

Back in the day, one could *expect* email to take days. Ah, the joys of UUCP.

(It was fun, back then, to read through the Received: headers to see what circuitous route the message had taken. No longer; now it's one hop from your organization to mine, preceded and followed by a bunch of bouncing around each company's internal infrastructure. Boring...)

Re: Well, someone had to do it

That cartoon reminds me of an incident at university.

There was a skunkworks Unix system that was adminned mostly by students[1]. On graduation day one year, I saw one of said student admins leaving the machine room, still wearing his ceremonial gown[2], with his proud parents in tow.

"Showing your folks around?" I observed.

"Yeah," he said. "Unix was down; I had to reboot it."

Given the state of Unix at the time [3], I presume he'd kept his folks waiting a while as he typed arcane commands on the system console.

[1] The PDP 11/45 it ran on was left over from an old research project.

[2] At least, so I recall, but I admit that the gown might be a false memory.

[3] This was back in the pre-BSD, pre-fsck days when file-system damage was almost guaranteed after a crash, and fixing it required manual surgery using the dcheck, ncheck, icheck, and clri commands.

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"Back in those days, "Long Distance" calling charged by the minute. To see really high rates, make a call overseas."

Indeed.

In 1985 I had to make a short phone call from West Germany to Canada, using a pay phone. I was kept so busy feeding a constant stream of Deutchmarks into the slot that I could barely concentrate on the conversation.

Re: Ah, those good old days...

Re transcontinental logins, I heard a story, back in around 1980 or so, from someone who had previously worked for one of the big mainframe companies of the day. He had been visiting one of their offices in Paris and needed the address of another Paris office. He signed on to the system at his usual office back in the States (presumably over Telenet or Tymnet -- those were commercial X.25 networking providers) -- and emailed(?) a colleague, who, as I recall the story, happened to be online despite the time difference.

It developed that the colleague was at yet a third of their Paris offices. So although they could have had a local phone call if they'd only known to do that, they were communicating via two transatlantic links.

And one of my own -- not between continents, but definitely long-haul: a 3600ish-km copy/paste over ssh, to get some course notes from the computer I had taken them on, onto my then employer's network where I had email, so that I could then email them to the person sitting beside me and watching me do it. (This was 1999, so USB keys weren't a thing yet.)

Re: Implausible to say the least.

"a 50:50 chance of actually getting a large file"

There was a time when I was using PGP for that -- not to encrypt, but just using its ASCII armoring as a better uuencode, because it was happy to split a large file into chunks and reassemble them at the other end (after I'd emailed them all to myself) -- and, crucially, to verify the results.

IIRC I did PGP-sign such files, just as a better integrity check than whatever the armoring itself was using.

Re: That's a bummer

"Definitely sounds like a swap issue to me."

That was my thought as well. If your system's "disk" light (assuming there is one, but that's another rant) is on almost solid, page thrashing is a pretty good bet.

On Linux, instead of playing Whac-a-Mole with Firefox processes, you can "pkill firefox", which kills all of them at once. (Well, all of your own. "sudo pkill firefox", if necessary and appropriate, to take out every user's.)

Be patient. Once it actually runs, pkill is pretty fast, but it can take a *very* long time to get to the point of running it. On my 16 GiB system, if page thrashing is especially severe, it can take minutes for the terminal window and then the shell process to page in, both of which are prerequisites to running that quick pkill command.

I don't know the correct incantation on Windows, but from another comment here, PowerShell might be a good starting point.

Re: Absolutely Correct, Senator Cornyn

"This isn't rocket science."

No, it's rocket logistics.

Exactly. It's an easy enough problem that some newspapers set examples as a weekend entertainment, i.e. cryptograms.

Why yes, many of us here are from the left side of the pond. What would you have us do?

Leaving aside the rude-word aspect, how did that error ever make it through testing? "count" is a reserved word in that context. I'd have expected "select arbitrarystring(*) from..." to fail utterly.

"Remember the B-52s references that abounded on the PCBs?"

Not to mention the many devs' signatures on the inside of the A1000's case.

Re: Looking at article's graphic ...

I picture all its little legs waving helplessly as it desperately tries to right itself.

Re: To quote Mark Twain

Indeed. The inestimable Quote Investigator looked into it.

TL;DR: A precursor quote goes all the way back to the Old Testament, but the line only reached its modern form in a 1993 Usenet post. It's fascinating how these things evolve.

But the mis-attribution detracts not one whit from the line itself.

"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"

- Joni Mitchell

Re: HUH!

It's like one of those trick card decks with black hearts and red spades.

If one didn't know what an overhead projector was, "overhead projector outlet" would be an easy phrase to mis-parse.

I deplore that hyphens have gone out of style; their lack makes for a lot of such ambiguities -- or at best, sentences that you have to stop and puzzle over, but whose meanings could have been crystal clear with better punctuation.

"If Tex was fired because he pointed out the obvious, then it was obviously not a company worth working for."

What he was presumably fired for was showing up the manager, who hadn't noticed the obvious himself. Still, your conclusion holds.