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units You have: mph You want: kph * 1.609344 / 0.62137119
I have alias units='units --verbose in my shell rc which makes the output much more understandable: You have: mph You want: kph mph = 1.609344 kph mph = (1 / 0.62137119) kph
Best part of reading this is coming away having learned the existence of units the CLI. How did I spend 20 years on the shell and not have needed or discovered this?
IMO even though this has been posted a bunch of times it’s important to repost these sort of campfire ghost stories so future developers can think more creatively about strange errors.
Is there a book written about these campfire programming stories? This one and the microsoft bedlam one are some of my favorites.
I've had enough years to become wiser, become a fanatic for configuration management, and get over the embarrassment: I'm the consultant that screwed things up. Some background: the Stat department was running a variety of systems besides the Solaris workstations, and there was, within UNC-CH, a separate support organization that was cheaper and more comfortable with Microsoft products where Stat was sending their su…
Only the other week we were doing some testing on a new HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) I'm doing the network for. At the end of the test period, we were having some storage sync issues. Everything seemed to PING ok, except my colleague happened to notice large jumbo frames over 8000 bytes were getting dropped. I double checked that we hadn't inadvertently changed network configuration. It was only by chance we…
As a hobbyist sound engineer, usually regular cables are the first I check, but maybe I should extend that to fibre?
Interesting error nevertheless, and honestly, checking fibre cabling for those kind of errors would probably be a bit lower on my list, unless I saw a lot of tranciever errors.
I've heard this story before, but i didn't realize it was as recent as 2002. It feels like something from a much earlier bygone era, like the early 90s
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Yes. Seriously... I’m willing to pay for the shipping and everything. I’ve told this story countless times to people over the years. This and the “OpenOffice can’t print on Tuesday” bug are two of my favourite troubleshooting stories.
I would also be ready to pay for a signed copy of this story. I’d frame it up in the office :)
Source: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html FAQ about the story: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail-faq.html Past submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (It seems I can’t find a search query which includes both urls)
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Can I get your autograph? The 500 mile email story has been a story since I was a teenager. Thank you for the comment. It was delightful to hear your take on the (mildly apocryphal, but highly enjoyable) tale.
How about a joint autograph from both the protagonist—Trey Harris, and the antagonist—the consultant to the Stats department :) ? Trey Harris also on HN [0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TreyHarris