I spend a lot of time digging around in other people's data. If I'm not hunting for anything in particular then it's a bit of a crapshoot, to be honest, if only because you never know what you're in for. You can pretty much take it to the bank that if you didn't assemble it yourself, you can't count on it being complete, well formed, or anything approximating the output of a human being (it usually came out of a database, but I think you see what I'm getting at). Sometimes, if I'm really lucky I'll just get hold of …
checkers and chess - noun phrase - A situation where two or more actors in a situation are using entirely different strategies, working toward two entirely different goals, or are following entirely unrelated ideologies. With sufficient cluelessness the actors in question may never actually come into conflict, even though they may be convinced they are fighting tooth and nail with one another. The end result is a complete and total waste of time, money, and energy.
For a couple of years now, I've had my eye on the community of people who've had RFID or NFC chips implanted somewhere in their bodies, usually in the back of the hand. If you've ever used a badge to unlock a door at work or tapped your phone on a point-of-sale terminal to buy something, you've used one of these two technologies in your everyday life to do something useful. What I've wanted to do for a while was use an implanted chip as a second authentication factor to my servers for better security. As for why I couldn't …
I haven't actually been on vacation lately, not really. I decided that I needed to go off and do some different stuff for a while. I've been in a rut lately and decided that I needed to shuffle some stuff around. I swapped out the "writing rambling computer nerd blog posts" module for teaching myself a couple of new things and spending some of my downtime offline, curled up with cinnamon tea and a stack of books. Getting away from a screen for a while seems to have done me some good, and I'm almost back up to my old …
Longtime readers are aware that I've been a customer of Dreamhost for quite a few years now, and by and large they've done all right by me. They haven't complained (much) about all the stuff I have running there, and I try to keep my hosted databases in good condition. However, the server they have my stuff on is starting to act wonky. Periodic outages mostly, but when my Wallabag installation started throwing all sorts of errors and generally not working right, that got under my skin in a fairly big hurry. I reinstalled. I upgraded to the latest stable …
Disclaimer: The content of this post does not reflect my current employer, or any of my clients at present. I've pulled details from my work history dating back about 20 years and stitched them into a more-or-less coherent narrative without being specific about any one company or client because, as unfashionable as it may be, I take my NDAs seriously. If you want to get into an IT genitalia measuring contest please close this tab, I don't care and have no interest.
Time was, back in the days of the home 8-bit computers, we were very limited in what we …
disasterbation - noun - Idly fantasizing about possible catastrophes (World War III, EMP strikes, nexus collapse, civil war, simulation hypothesis system shutdown, full-blown hyper-blight) without considering their likelihood or their possible solutions and preventions. Very common in the prepper and futurist communities.
Source: M. Alan Kazlev (updated a bit and cross-referenced by me)
A couple of weeks ago, one of my co-workers mentioned in passing that he'd surprised himself by adding an SSD (solid state drive) to his file server at home. To recap a bit, Leandra, my primary server at home has a sizable RAID-5 array storing all of my data. However, one of the tradeoffs is that stuff recently written to the array is a little slow to be read back. It's really not noticeable unless you're logged in and running commands, and even then the lag is something like one or two seconds. Noticeable but not actually problematic. At any …
