quantum documentation inconsistency principle - An axiom of corporate life in which there will always be more than one piece of documentation for something, all of the documentation will be measurably contradictory, and none of the procedures will work anymore.  See also clandestine institutional knowledge.

clandestine institutional knowledge - The phenomenon in which everybody knows the documentation is wrong and people are so pissed off at said documentation that they don't ever bother to try to fix it.  Instead new hires have to play Indiana Jones to find the two people left in the organization who have any working knowledge of the thing and beg to be trained up so they can actually do their jobs.  Normally, the newly trained individual doesn't bother to update the documentation, either.

footnote: Most of the time, nobody has the access to update the documentation anymore, which is why nobody …

I've been promising myself that I'd do a series of articles about tools that I've incorporated into my exocortex over the years, and now's as good a time as any to start.  Rather than jump right into the crunchy stuff I thought I'd start with something that's fairly simple to use, straightforward, and endlessly useful for many purposes - a wiki.

Usually, when somebody brings up the topic of wikis one either immediately thinks of Wikipedia or one of the godsawful corporate wikis that one might be forced to use on a daily basis.  And you're not that off the mark …

For the past couple of years sonic weapons called LRADs (Long Range Accoustic Devices) have been increasingly deployed against protestors in the United States (here is footage from Pittsburgh shot in 2009 (warning: remove your earphones!)). A step up from mere marketing tricks that make you suspect that you're going mad, these sonic weapons pump out enough sound pressure to cause permanant hearing damage at a distance of a couple of hundred feet. Earplugs don't work because the sound is loud enough to be conducted into one's inner ears through the bones of the skull. Getting behind hard cover probably …

Don’t bother writing easy to understand instructions for end users. They don’t bother reading them, anyway.

Linux distribution successfully used: Gentoo Linux 2007.0

Currently running kernel: sys-kernel/vanilla-sources v2.6.24.1

I'll put everything else behind the cut because it'll take up a few pages... Hardware assay

• CPU: Intel Centrino Duo T7500 running at 2.20GHz x2
• Memory: 2GB
• Chipset: Intel ICH8M
• Video: nVidia GeForce 8400M GS, 256MB video memory on-board. Using the closed-source nVidia drivers from Portage (x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers) with full acceleration. Haven't tried VGA or TV-out yet.
• SATA: Intel 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M) chipset, using in-kernel drivers (CONFIG_ATA_PIIX)
• IDE: Intel 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M) chipset, using in-kernel drivers (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_PIIX)
• Ethernet: Broadcom BCM4401-B0, using in-kernel …

When all else fails, try doing what you know shouldn't work. I don't care if the docs say it doesn't work, if the FAQ says it doesn't work, if the books say it doesn't work.. try it anyway. Stuff like BIND is like that.

In trying to get a domain working with BIND, what I wound up doing was changing a record for a single host (www IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) to the FQDN (fully qualified domain name - www.promiseofiris.org. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), incrementing the zone's serial number, and then kickstarting the daemon. Lo …