Viewing profile — patrck

Yeah, the Mitnick hack of Shimomura (rsh + predictable TCP seq #s) was already out there due to that incident's publicity. How many BOFHs generated keys for everyone, mailed them o…

Nice. like a command-line version of Charlie Cheever's bunny1. https://github.com/ccheever/bunny1

Yeah, Harford overweights the trade-offs and does not cover any benefits. For parents, one large gain is explaining your work to your kids. They get to see how you work, and this p…

Yeah, think cheap and distributed. Like Tsutomu Shimomura's quiet Xterminal connected to a noisy box in another room. The alternative gamer-mentality of tightly coupled cpu, gpu, a…

Though, if your bias is towards action, how do you avoid stepping on toes? These discussions seem like MBA brain-teasers, ie. there can't be any hard and fast rules, so each case n…

Yeah, it seems odd that a golang solution was used instead of just shell. paths() { dir=`dirname $1` while test "$dir" != '/' && test "$dir" != '.' ; do echo $dir dir=`dirname $dir…

One of the best classes I ever had was a stats class where the prof assigned a paper a week for us to review and mark up any and all faults. In the beginning, the papers were from …

Gnu M4 manual works well, while for TeX there's the Gentle Introduction. For an abstract, design/implementation introduction, though? There isn't. We don't learn about macro langua…

Schools don't teach macro languages is probably the biggest problem. Before YAML or Dockerfiles, it was the way to declare state and reduce complexity for sysadmins. Basically, any…

Yeah, Audit for the win. And it's not "billing", it's Compliance + Bill Presentment (marketing!) where we are always trying to find the most profitable local maximum of explainabil…

Yeah, think like equity analysts during upturns, and in a downturn think like credit, ie. map out the sources and uses of funds. The big caveat here is rising rates on floating rat…

I guess CCAN died? https://ccodearchive.net/

Yeah, this is received unix lore: anything needed to recover a system needs to be statically linked and in /bin or /sbin.

The gnu m4 manual is the go-to documentation. One way to think about m4 is as form-substitution, eg. the ssh-config customization via sed. Another is as text generator, eg. the cla…

Corollary to this is that Conferences are judged not by their overt content, but by their curation of the un-conferences / birds-of-a-feather meetings that they facilitate.

Seems like it should use m4 instead of sed/awk for the templating. And `make` for the dependencies that will arise, eg. HUP sshd after config change.

Typing directly into a shell is a smell for teams that manage unwieldy-without-automation amounts of machines. Shells are just REPLs; use your editor to drive them. This helps docu…

Yeah, it seems a lot of this reduces to preferences. FWIW, my email has just INBOX, Archive, and Todo. When documenting, I will log the message-id of an email, so that I can just q…

A couple reasons maybe: Specialization means everyone's chasing their own frontiers in their companies, which leads to less toe-stepping? "Everyone knows" IT is complex. So as long…

> Technology robbed workers’ of what had been highly valued physical knowledge about a job: the precise way to jimmy a stuck gear, the sound a machine makes when something’s about …

It's good to practice the different situations. I spend most my time `duck-talking` with a TeX doc that alternates between annotated questions and answers from some REPL. When I go…

Definitely. Nobody likes forklift upgrades in PROD. Unless it's a complete wreck and one's much better off moving to a different country or the like. Even smaller, more incremental…

True. Was angling for that with the "that those will remain stable". It seems easier to personally define what one thinks winning is, and then evaluate (and modify if possible) the…

Recognizing the games that others are playing is useful, however refining your own games seems the much better play. What are your personal win conditions? What are the odds and yo…