My opinions, worth every penny you paid me for them
I know I’m a bit of an ass, but this has been tickling my funny bone ever since Microsoft Teams suddenly appeared on my workstation and started automatically launching itself (uninvited):
This is the splash screen that shows for a little while, as the machine finishes starting up, and Teams wants to let you know that it is loading.
Anyone else see (with perhaps a bit of squinting and imagination): TIFU
? 🤣
I know: I’m late to the game.
My employer had let me continue to report to work after the pandemic hit. Many of my co-workers immediately opted-in to working from home; but I wasn’t one of them.
I am thankful for that I got to keep reporting to work, because I like the normalcy of the routine. I loved the peace and quiet of no co-workers at all.
Other departments in my employer’s organization had brought all their staff back in September. Then reported infections started happening, and they would have to send everyone home for a few days while the work site was disinfected. Turns out each one of those events cost $2,000 – $5,000. My department decided that everyone should work from home, no exceptions, until further notice.
They ordered me a VPN appliance that extends the network into my home. I brought it home, hooked it up, and it worked perfectly on the first try. Apparently our Networks team is very good.
The last few days, my “commute” has been from my living room to the spare bedroom I’m setting up as my home office. I’ve tried adjusting my alarm clocks and such, but with mixed results.
Regarding my commute: I put $10 of gasoline in my car yesterday. This will probably be the last gasoline I put in my car for many months. My car is mostly electric; but even with the heater going for my nightly trips out, I’m never draining the battery to zero.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I am under more stress now. It’s probably due to a big project at work entering it’s final laps, and there seems to be more work to do than there are hours in the day. But I can definitely tell that my shoulders are tight all the time now; an eye twitch that I get has come back.
I’ve done some shopping for the new home office. Parts are starting to dribble in. I wanted a new desk that was large enough to hold all my stuff; but apparently there is not a market for that short of $1,000+. I’m using a four person dining table with the extension leaves put in. The space is still too small. I need to shut my laptop in order to see the bottom half of one of the desktop monitor screens.
My ass hurts at the end of the day, because the wooden chair is not meant for eight hours of use per day. The real chair is on order, but won’t arrive for two to seven days.
My telephone headset has a faint hum in it that I don’t remember from before. But perhaps it was always there, and the work room air conditioning set a minimum noise level the headset hum never cleared. I did buy some LED light strips because I need light first thing in the morning and at night. Those definitely added some hum; so I’ve moved them far away. Then I discovered I ordered the wrong part, and want the ones with Amazon Alexa built in. I’ve also ordered some quarter-round aluminum channel to mount in the upper corner of the room between wall and ceiling. The LED light strips will go inside the channel. When the diffuser is snapped in place, I should get a nice broad light source that illuminates the room without much (if any) shadow.
The alarm clocks have been more work than I had expected. Because I used home automation (I bought it; I might as well use it), there are way more things to be reconfigured now, just by not needing to wake up quite so early in the morning. Some of the stuff is in Amazon Alexa, and others of it are in Philips Hue.
Upshot is, the installer has two different options depending on if you are in graphical mode (init 5) versus text mode (init 3). Graphical mode (which was not recommended) at least had the possibility of working.
Back story: at work more than a decade ago, the whole team got new computers, but one of my co-workers preferred his MacBook laptop. After his PC sat unused for a couple years, I got the idea to ask him if he minded me having his dual monitors. He was okay with that. Of course, to drive those two monitors, one needs a dual monitor video card, so I took that too.
Now my machine had two identical video cards and four identical monitors. It was pretty sweet. The nVidia drivers had handled that just fine. Well, until ….
Then some upgrade happened (in 2017), and suddenly the nVidia driver could only light up one of the two video cards. I really liked having four screens, so I went and bought a single nVidia card with four outputs – NVIDIA Quadro P600. Life was good.
However, with this configuration, all the upgrades to OpenSUSE since then are just miserable. This weekend, I tried again. Awful, as usual.
The problem is that the install wants to replace the nVidia (proprietary) driver with the nouveau (open source) driver, but that never works right.
The other, bigger, problem is that if (in text mode) you don’t agree to let nouveau foul over your machine, you don’t get to upgrade at all.
I’ll try to illustrate the steps:
In text only mode: zypper dup, and at the end I was warned that the nouveau driver was going to be used. The prompt says “do you agree? yes/no: “
If you type “no”, the upgrade stops.
If you type “yes”, the upgrade continues and then trashes the graphical mode configuration. It installs the nouveau driver which doesn’t work with a single card and four monitors.
After banging my head against the problem for too long, it gets time to give up, download the ISO, burn a DVD, boot off the DVD, and choose “install” – completely wiping out all sorts of needed stuff. 🙁
But doing that (a fresh install), I get a graphical install. I get to the point where one of the prompts warned that the nouveau driver was going to be used. The prompt says “do you agree?” There are two buttons: “I agree” and “I disagree”. But most importantly, there is a checkbox for “Install using software emulation only”
That checkbox disables nouveau from breaking the system. Well, it disables nouveau completely, which prevents the system from being broken by nouveau. During the install, I saw a log line that nouveau was being locked from zypper updates, and that a blacklist entry was being added for nouveau to prevent start up.
Finally, I had a system that would boot. It wasn’t particularly stable, but at least it could boot and present the graphical login prompt. The graphical session wasn’t stable or working well, but at least it wasn’t booting to a single blinking text cursor in the corner of one monitor.
It turned out it was easiest to ssh in from a different machine, run the zypper command to add the nVidia repository, and install the nVidia proprietary drivers.
One more reboot later, and I’ve got a stable, four monitor, graphical environment once again. Hooray! 😀
One thing a person should always to with Linux: use a separate hard drive for /home
This way, installing a new operating system (whether it is Mint, OpenSUSE, Kubuntu) does not mess with your files. The new install sticks to the Operating System disk, and doesn’t mess with your /home disk.
So, all my VM guests are fine, my Perl scripts are fine, my login environment (KDE) is fine. That’s all good.
What’s bad about replacing the OS because the upgrade trashed the system is that my personal crontab file is not stored under /home.
I didn’t remember to go find and back up that file, so now it’s gone. I’m going to have to re-invent it from memory. All the scripts I write output log files; but, those get written to /var/tmp – which also gets wiped out when a fresh install happens.
Although I had printed the names of all the repositories I use (and put that file on /home) I was in a hurry and didn’t realize that the screen didn’t list the URLs. Whoops.
And of course, since the way out of the broken system was a fresh install, all the Perl modules I’ve installed in the last few years need to be discovered and installed again.
But, I’m running OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 now. Leap 15.1 is planned to go end-of-life next month, so I thought it about time to get to 15.2. That’s done, but man was it painful.
So far, it’s been easy. I have a post about How to make Ubuntu have a nice bash shell like OpenSuSE and it barely needs any update.
But it does, a little.
sudo update-alternatives --config editorIn the menu that was presented to me, Option 2: 2 /usr/bin/vim.basic was the right one. There’s nothing there to tell me the difference between vim.basic versus vim.tiny (I wanted whatever vim.fullsuperduperthrowinallthebellsandwhistles is) – but vim.tiny was not it.
touch ~/.bash_aliases
vim ~/.bash_aliases
(insert mode)
alias ll="ls -la"
alias ..="cd .."
(escape)
:wqand lastly, the step that is the same:
sudo vim /etc/inputrcFind my way down to where the comments say alternate mappings for “page up” and “page down” to search the history and then hit the x key a few times to delete the characters which comment out the functionality I want.
Log out, and log back in. It’s good. 🙂
The number one reason I would love to have the USPS privatized is that it would become possible for me to pay a fee (to whomever takes their place) to trash any junk mail that gets put in the queue to be sent to me.
At work, we spend a rather large amount of dollars to combat email spam. Everyone’s life is better for it*. But that’s not an option with physical snail mail. Why the heck not? Because the USPS is a government agency. They are very specifically not allowed to “censor” mail by just throwing it in the trash.
If they tried, they would get sued, because if you’re a scumbag with a lawyer, you want to sue the really big organization with the large checking account.
But with a private company, I could buy in to a Friend of the Environment subscription plan, where I pay the delivery company a small monthly fee, and they chuck the junk mail into the recycling bin. They don’t want to spend the money on fuel to transport it. They would have a financial incentive to do the right thing early on in the process.
Indeed, it would take almost no time for the people who pay for snail mail spam to ask the privatized company “How many of these should we print? How many are actually going to get delivered?” The end result would be less trash generated; less trash to be wrangled. It’s a win-win-lose for me, the mail carrier, and then the spammer, er advertiser.
One problem of course, would be predatory advertisers implementing junk delivery, as a protection racket (to collect the fee to not deliver it). They’d hire an Uber or Lyft driver to put trash in your mailbox, along with a flyer that suggests you pay them for no more trash.
I’m going to have to puzzle out what antidotes there might be to a pristine mailbox protection racket. If you have any ideas, please feel free to make a SQRL identity, and login and post.
This is not the USPS fault. But, because they are a government agency, they are the tail on the dog that is Congress and their buddies. Congresscritters love to commission a new post office building to line the pockets of their buddy who has some land for sale. Whether that buddy then kicks back some of the overpriced payment back to the critter is an exercise for the reader.
Back during the Reagan and (first) Bush era, every post office building had a Novell NetWare server in it. When Bill Clinton got elected, every one of those NetWare servers were replaced with Microsoft Windows servers. It was a gift to Microsoft, at the expense of Novell.
Because email started replacing some snail mail, the overall volume dropped. Suddenly we didn’t need so many post office buildings. And magically, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s husband’s company was awarded the contract to broker the sales of 60 USPS facilities (one report says 600 were on the list to be considered for sale).
The problem is, that as a Federal agency, if there is corruption there, there is no incentive to get rid of it as long as it doesn’t become embarrassing. Did the CIO of USPS get a kickback from Microsoft? Nobody has incentive to rat the guy out, and, they do have incentive to keep their jobs by keeping their mouths shut. Did someone at USPS get a kickback from Richard Blum (Feinstein’s husband)? Nobody has incentive to rat the guy out, and, they do have incentive to avoid retaliatory employment decisions.
So, my dad was a member of the California Young Republicans back in the 1960’s and 70’s. I would learn that the postmaster in town was on the Democratic Central Committee. I remember my dad suddenly going in to a rage one day; I had followed him out to the mailbox. “Do you see this‽ Do you see this‽”
The post office was reading our mail.
Of course, in school I was educated that one’s mail was sacrosanct, and the Post Office never read one’s mail. That turned out to be total bullshit.
What my dad was shaking in front of me was an envelope with a return address stamp of CYR California Young Republicans. The top of the envelope had been sliced open (all the way across the top, and not gently, either), and then lots of cellophane tape had been used to close it again. There was a rubber stamp on it: Damaged During Handling.
My dad would later go to the post office and speak with the postmaster, telling him that someone in the post office was reading his mail. The postmaster feigned an apology, but the mail reading did not stop. It was the postmaster himself who had ordered that all the CYR mail get routed to his desk first.
When I was younger, pretty much the very beginning of mass-shootings in America was in Post Offices. A new term entered the vernacular: “Going Postal”. What was happening was that guys were in line for promotion in every post office, and (some of) their bosses were real assholes. They would torment an underling for decades, and the underling couldn’t do anything about it, because his hopes for advancement would then be destroyed. 20 years later, it’s finally time to get the promotion to Postmaster of the Office, and the outgoing asshole gives the promotion to a junior bootlicker. The next day, the spurned postal worker would come in and shoot up the place. Institutional assholism works in government, because one cannot go to other bosses and say “This asshole is losing us money”. It’s a government agency. It’s not supposed to make money. If it’s making money, then it’s competing with the private sector who could probably do the job more efficiently anyway.
In my dad’s case of systematic invasion of privacy for political gain, there was nothing to do but to hide. The mail from CYR started using a fake return address. It was some sort of charity / orphanage, if I recall correctly.
That doesn’t mean that the California Young Republicans never sent another envelope with the old CYR rubber stamp. Indeed, one went out with “Remember that the big all-state dinner meeting will be held at the Black Oak Restaurant in Paso Robles at 7:00 PM on (whatever date)”. Our copy was opened and read and taped shut and rubber stamped with fuck-you-we’re-reading-your-mail as per usual. In the envelope with the charity return address, the letter said the meeting was still in Paso Robles, but it had been moved to a different restaurant. Someone from CYR did go hang out in the lobby at the Black Oak, and sure enough a total stranger walked up to the hostess and asked to be seated with the California Young Republicans group. Confusion ensued for the hostess and spy, although the CYR member got the chuckle he was expecting.
My bigger point is that management assholes exist in larger organizations, but, when that organization is private sector, the organization suffers enough for it that there is financial incentive to change (not always, due to monopoly power). But in public sector organizations, it is almost impossible to remove bad apples. There is no real incentive to change. The person who reports is asking for a target on their back and henceforth will never get another promotion, ever.
If Congress couldn’t manipulate USPS (because now they are UPS or Fedex or whatever), that would be a good thing. If bad apples didn’t have the career public sector employment worth suing over (for wrongful termination), that would be a good thing. And if I could pay to auto-trash junk mail, I would love that, and it would be the best thing.
*I would even argue that the spammer’s life is better for it: if you are a spammer, you are a loser who thinks there is a easy / low effort / low quality way to get rich. The quicker we clobber your delusion, the better for you.
I don’t know how much money there is in tracking people and selling their online profiles / behavior patterns. My guess is that a huge amount of folly has people convinced that their folly is worth it. I hope that they are severely disappointed.
I first noticed with WordPress, that Automattic (the company behind WordPress), really wants to track your every move. They created the Gravatar system, and it is something that you cannot opt out of. You as a WordPress admin were not allowed local profile pictures – you had to use Automattic’s avatars or use nothing. And now it’s gotten worse. Your web site won’t run right without reporting in to the Automattic servers.
Every visit of yours to any WordPress site will generate a “hit” of you going to that web site. It’s worse than cookies, because at least you can delete your cookies.
What I’ve noticed is that if I have uBlock Origin turned on and “Block remote fonts” turned on, then WordPress does not render the admin panel correctly. Remote fonts are a way for the web site to get your machine to “phone home” to someone else’s servers. Apparently, Dahsicons have been a thing since WordPress 3.3.
Why should my web site make a call to Automattic’s servers just because you visited my web site? It does that with Gravatar (unless I try really hard to block that).
Other web sites appear broken when remote fonts are turned off.
I have a hard time believing that there is any good value to me for my web browser to retrieve on every page load an image file from a remote server just to show a button.
At work, I’ve been tasked with finding the best e-discovery software for an Office 365 environment. I found one document that shows Mimecast, Smarsh, and Proofpoint in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant”.
Smarsh, my employer has looked at before, for mobile messaging.
Proofpoint, my employer currently uses, but for anti-spam / anti-virus and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) only.
Mimecast, I don’t know anything about. So I went to look at their web site.
L.O.L.
Guess what doesn’t load worth crap if you have an ad-blocker?
uBlock Origins tells me it has blocked 53 ads and privacy invasion tracking bugs. And because of that the render of the web page is horrific.
Way to make a terrible first impression, guys.
I just received an email that Delta is processing my refund. Good on them.
I had never minded Delta a company; at least up until they had told me they were issuing a credit, and AIG didn’t need to pay out because the credit was as good as the original trip. Every time I went to the BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, I had flown Delta (SLC is a hub for them). It was always a nice flight, and the people seemed efficient and friendly. I’ve met some really nice passengers on flights to and from Salt Lake City.
After cancelling the flight and getting the email that I would need to file against my flight cancellation insurance policy, and then AIG saying the credit from Delta nullified the insurance; I was pretty unhappy. Although really, I was more unhappy with the insurance company AIG than I was with Delta.
Now, Delta has done the right thing. I like Delta again. 🙂
And now AIG is off the hook. I would kind of like to see Delta redeem the cancellation insurance policy that AIG got paid for; but since I paid for it, I doubt that the insurance is transferable to Delta.
As I mentioned before, I intensely disliked Microsoft under Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. That post was a record of six times that Microsoft shipped code to fuck over you and me, if you were a customer of particular Microsoft partners. I should have included IBM OS/2, which was another case way back when.
Actually, since then another one popped up. Microsoft shipped code to all their partners for quality assurance testing – everything worked fine – and then at the last minute, they made a change and shipped. The monthly updates then happened to “accidentally” wipe out the user’s ZENworks configuration, with less than one week’s notice.
But I want to go back and rehash the underlying problem.
Microsoft won.
It won by beating your daughter for looking at another guy.
What type of morality did Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer maintain, that it was acceptable to them to ship code that deliberately fucks over their customers who happen to also be customers of other companies?
Some of those companies were actual partners, too. I remember hearing management at Novell saying “When it comes down to it, we are a Windows software publisher.” The bulk of their products were MS Windows applications and the systems to wrangle them.
That Microsoft would backstab it’s partners was my point about LIM EMS. LIM = Lotus, Intel, Microsoft. EMS = Expanded Memory Specification. The original PC’s had very real memory limitations. There was a desperate need for machines to have more memory, and for programmers to be able to access it. So Lotus Development got together with Intel and Microsoft, and they hashed out a spec that programmers could use. They published the spec. Programmers (including the programmers at Lotus) started writing to the spec.
Suddenly, your spreadsheet could have more than 80 rows and 10 columns.
If you were doing a lot of “what if” calculations back then, the memory constraints that 640 KB imposed on you were huge. Everyone needed this problem solved, if the Personal Computer wasn’t going to remain an expensive toy.
The Personal Computer went from a toy to a useful tool. Everyone won. Intel sold more chips, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, PC’s Limited (later became Dell), Gateway 2000 – they all sold computers, and Microsoft sold a license to DOS with every one of them. Lotus sold a copy of 1-2-3 to 90% of the PC buyers, because that was the point.
Sure, the “what if” calculations had been done for decades: by hand. It was a miserable process. Suddenly, “what if?” was done in minutes, and then seconds, and then milliseconds!
Maybe I need a $5,000 loan, and the bank will let me borrow and pay it back over 60 months at a 10.5% interest. What if I can come up with $300 so I only need to borrow $4,700, and, pay it back over 63 months instead? Do I save money? What does the monthly payment look like?
What about paying $4,700 back over 60 months, but paying an 11% rate? Do I save money? What does the monthly payment look like?
By hand, the formula is Principle + Interest – Payment => Balance. The next row’s Principle is the previous row’s Balance. A five year loan is “only” 60 rows. A 30 year mortgage is 360 rows. How much did it cost you? Sum the Interest column. Yes, you can do it by hand. But it is drudge work.
Lotus 1-2-3 made number crunching magic happen. Microsoft benefited from vastly expanded PC sales.
And then Microsoft saw you spending money with Lotus. You’re looking at another guy, and, spending money with him.
Time to pick a fight, beat your face, and strangle your neck. Or in Microsoft’s case, change the rules by shipping changed code and (surprise!) crashing your program.
“But, baby, I wouldn’t have to beat you up if you didn’t spend with other guys! I love you so much! It’s your fault that I care so much.”
Or, cutting away the bullshit, Microsoft was evil. Harming it’s customers so that it could destroy it’s competing partners was always on the table.
And eventually, Microsoft won. Or are you still using Lotus 1-2-3 today? OS/2? WordPerfect? NetWare?
All I want is for Firefox Multi-Account Containers is to work as I think a normal person would expect them to. And they don’t.
Doesn’t work. The new tab is not in the right container. It is in yet another new empty container. This makes the secure site I’m trying to log in to think I’m at a public kiosk.
If I delete the old saved container, I can create a new one from the current container. But it won’t last. Next week (or some random restart of Firefox later) it will be broken again.
I have a forum I’d like to keep up with. It’s login is on one domain. Let’s say www.example.com (and I should point out that if I try to go to just example.com, it redirects me to the login page at www.example.com
Once I get logged in, it transfers me discourse.example.com
Guess what doesn’t work with Firefox Multi-Account Containers?
The repository for Firefox Multi-Account Containers has sub-domain support as a requested feature (and has for a couple years now), but the developer thinks that this is out of scope. The developer says the two are (supposed to be) two different servers, therefore the containers should keep them isolated.
I just want this stuff to work. Sucks to be me, trying out these ideas that seem like a good idea but then don’t work.
The idea behind Firefox Multi-Account Containers is great. Truly great: start any random new tab as if it were opened in a brand new browser with zero cookies, zero history, zero data for tracking you. It’s a little version of Private Browsing but in just this one tab. Close the tab, and all the tracking gunk vanishes.
What if you don’t want the cookies and history and such to go away? You assign the tab to have a name and permanence. Next time you visit the web site, Firefox asks “Always open in the named container?” Yes, please.
Because it is a separate tab, it doesn’t have the Facebook cookie in it, or the Google cookie, or the Gravatar cookie in it. It’s just it’s own little self contained browser, in a named tab. It’s a great idea. The Reddit stuff stays in the Reddit container, the Ars Technica stuff stays in the Ars Technica container; ditto Phoronix, Techdirt, qwantz.com, Facebook, Newsweek, – you get the idea. If I have multiple Reddit tabs open, they all share the same container space. But the Ars Technica tab doesn’t get to look to see if there is something juicy in the Reddit container. Ars Technica gets to look in it’s own container only.
However, implementation is narrowly tied to host.domain.tld and cannot grasp that everything under domain.tld should be in the same container.
That’s a working-as-badly-designed choice. But I’m not about to learn the C programming language and start fixing someone else’s code.
And of course, there’s the fact that it keeps breaking. That is sub-optimal, too.