Posts by Slow Joe Crow 72 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Mar 2011
That was definitely apocryphal, most fleets of sufficient size have private fuel pumps on site or use a commercial cardlock fueling company rather than a retail gas station. For reference cardlock stations like Pacific Pride use a company credit card to operate an unmanned self service gas station, Until recently these were the only self serve gas pumps in the state of Oregon.
Oracle deserves to lose on this. In my part of the IT world Java is dead anyway since none of the mainstream browsers support it. Mercifully the only thing we usually needed it for was check scanners. I think a few ancient HP network switches used Java in their web UI but that's an excellent reason to bin them.
For a few old apps we do supply one of the free java run times to avoid dealing with Oracle. I'm disappointed because the run anywhere JVM had such promise and then failed
A microprocessor validation lab at an old job still had a Windows 3.1 machine hooked up to a very expensive ion beam device circa 2015. The vendor never bothered to upgrade/rewrite the software so it sat in a room with no network connectivity while everything else ran Windows 7/Server 2008
Sometimes that stuff backfires like the legendary USAF tale of a young airman sent to fetch 100 yards of flight line. Our hero stumbled upon some Navy Seabees who seized an opportunity to put one over on the Air Force by lending him a truck full of Marston Mat temporary runway.
Regarding shocks, back in art school we had equipment to make neon signs, which operate at very high voltage but fortunately very low amperage. During set up for a band, the student made neon tubes we screwed to the ceiling managed to shock 4 people standing in a group near the transformer, in a a piece of comedy fo those note getting zapped. By the time I got into IT I knew enough about capacitors and flyback transformers to avoid any shocking experiences.
I've personally done in an HDMI cable like that, when I first started streaming TV instead of cable I used a laptop connected to a very long HDMI cable and one day I tripped on the cable and broke the connector, then I discovered a Roku box was cheaper than a new cable. Ironically our cable TV now uses a streaming box made by Tivo.
In the mid oughts, ThinkPads starting having keyboards with sealed switches and a drain channel to direct spills away from the main board. Before that I semi seriously suggested issuing managers with Panasonic Toughbooks because they actually could be rinsed under a cold tap.
I've used ICEWM but only in lightweight distros where I was doing a specific task. I could probably run it for general use since I typically only need a web browser, some office apps and a terminal or two. That's pretty much what I did when I was working in Linux daily, although the company standard was FVWM because it ran on anything and there were still a bunch of AIX and Solaris machines with the odd bit of HP-UX alongside the thousands of Linux boxes and VMs.
You can get by with very little in the way of window managers, I've even used the ultra basic TWM that was the default with VNC on Ubuntu. I've disliked Gnome since the days of Spatial Nautilus and never took to KDE4 so my current choice is XFCE because I'm OK with the UI and file manager
I have one client using one Atlassian product, Bitbucket, which they are forcing into the cloud. We have already been unable to remediate Log4J because Atlassian won't sell a license so we install a patched version so I will recommend dropping it in favor of vanilla Git. We have a lot of stuff in the cloud and we have been selling a lot of backup products for Microsoft 365 and G Suite lately.
One of my first IT jobs had a Netware 4 server and a laser printer. Out of misplaced frugality they would power of the printer at night. This led to the occasional weirdness because if you sent a print job to the Netware server while the printer was powered off, powering on the printer would result in the laser printer spewing out several pages of PostScript source code rather than your actual print job.
I had something like this at a client site once where after a power outage they couldn't connect to the SQL server. After a bit of poking around I discovered the SQL server thought it was on a public network instead of a domain network and Windows Firewall was in full lockdown mode. The problem was that the SQL server VM booted before the domain controller, the fix was to disable Windows firewall since a server VM was hardly going to be taken to the coffee shop and connected to WiFi
I ran into a similar issue at a large tech company in early 1998 or so. One night some clever thieves who were almost certainly employees went through two floors of a building stealing every one of the then new 100Mhz frontside bus Pentium II chips and every stick of 100Mhz memory they could grab while leaving behind the older 66Mhz parts and all the cases drives and AFAIK graphics cards. For several years after that desktop PCs had a steal strap padlocked around the case.
As a long time ThinkPad user I prefer the stick and the three buttons across the top of touchpad, that are there for the stick. That third button is very useful scroll function and I hate the imprecision of the touchpad. I also prefer the old school ThinkPads that had a second set of physical button below the pad for those rare occasions I used it. My current work unit is a T440S and I'm not thrilled about the "updated" buttons, but at least it has the stick. Higher end HPs and Toshibas used to have them but Lenovo seems to be the last holdout.
I'm reminded of my ears days as SQL Server admin dealing with an in house application where the user management had neve been written so all adds and changes involved ad hoc SQL queries. I was asked to change a user's name and forgot to put a WHERE in the SQL update query, giving all 40 odd users the samw first name. Fortunately it was a lightly used system so I just restored the users table form the hourly backup.
Back in the early 70s my father would take me to the train station to watch the trains and I got a tour of the cab of an FL9 locomotive and "drove" an EMU set a few yards down the platform. I also got to sit in the pilot's seat of a 747 when our flight was stuck on the ground for several hours due to a flooded runway at our destination. One of the more interesting things was the little ball and crosshairs gadget between the windshields that was used to adjust the seat to the optimum position.
When I worked in a system validation group we had on e tech nicknamed "the human corner case" for his magical ability to break stuff. My wife carries on that tradition, even with tech as simple as a car's HVAC controls.
Also regarding expected inputs, a friend followed family tradition of giving all male children the same first name and using their middle names. This created havoc at the doctor's office since the medical records software made the staff think it was duplicate records.
Back when I repaired power tools I had a similar issue. A circular saw crossed my bench with the complaint "trips breaker" per SOP I put it on the Sotcher electrical tester and it passed, then I opened the handle and found the fine line between stupid and clever. The power cord had been replaced, badly. The tool was double insulated so it used a two wire cord and the owner had replaced it with a 3 wire cord and since ther were only two terminals he wrapped the end of the ground wire around the hot wire so plugging in the tool created an immediate short to ground. I swapped the cord for the proper two wire part. This was typical of life with the construction trades where things were "fixed" every which way but right.
Microsoft eventually figured this out and from Outlook 2013 on you can only edit an attachment after it was saved to disk. This caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among clients upgrading from Outlook 2007 and 2010. Then again we also had a lot of wailing over migrating to Windows 10 and separating the bitter clingers from Windows XP usually required either a crowbar, or a threat to terminate their support agreement.
A surprising number of "serious" photographers admit to using phones for photography. For example the proprietor of Leicaphilia.com uses his iPhone regularly http://leicaphilia.com/a-day-in-paris/.
If I had an add on module like the Hasselblad mod I'd seriously consider a phone add on to replace my Panasonic Lumix point and shoot. That said, I would prefer a Fuji or Ricoh module since they are less pretentious and more technically astute than Hasselblad.
The US Electoral college seems crazy but actually serves as a useful check in the system, Essentially it equalizes the vote among the states so that California and New York don't have absolute control of the Presidency. If you look at vote totals from 2012 and 2016 you'll notice that "flyover country" was decisive and Clinton lost to Trump because states Obama won in 2012 went to Trump in 2016. the most glaring example is Wisconsin where Clinton didn't campaign at all and Obama campaigned heavily. Some of the same complaints about the Electoral versus Popular vote were raised when George W Bush won in 2000 and 2004, echoing Hayes in 1876.
As an Oregonian I loathe the idea of letting California run the country since I already live this in microcosm with the Portland-Eugene axis overpowering the rest of the state.
Back on topic, HOAs seem to be a necessary evil of new developments where mandated common features have to be maintained. I have always lived in older subdivisions free of such nonsense and hope to avoid it since my love of old cars and motorcycles and disdain for yard work will certainly trigger the petty tyrants
I am curious to see what my Garmin does on the day. fortunately I use it more for logging than navigation.
I've had my own moment of GPS cockup when I asked Google Maps for the way to the new nature reserve and got directed to dead end private road on the opposite side of the park from the entrance gate. Fortunately Google learned but I still sanity check when possible. I also have a lot of maps and a Silva compass, JIC.
Back when the iPhone 3 was the new hotness and Android was just finding its feet I could see a value to Apple's capability and app ecosystem but now that Android is a mature product, other than sunk costs and personal inertia, why spend so much money just to play in a walled garden? For that matter why spend so much on a phone at all, other than to signal you have the money?
For my needs the only justification for an iPhone is to run the Dexcom glucose monitor software, everything else can be handled with a $200 Motorola, especially after Motorola started selling DIY repair parts and kits.
Starting with the connected water bottle, why on earth do people spend money on stuff just because it's "connected"? I don't need machinery to tell me when to drink, I don't need to monitor my pet's dish (and open a point of attack into my network) and the only thing I use Alexa for is the "Alexa play Despacito" meme, which doesn't require an actual Alexa. This is good because I don't want voice controlled crap eavesdropping on me.
As an aside my finest meme was when I walked into the kitchen wearing tracksuit pants and Adidas sandals, Slav squatted next to my teenaged daughter and said "Alexa Amazonova, to be hardbass playing".
Actually outside of the horrible cesspit of New Jersey it is completely legal to make your own guns for personal use in the US. A Federal Firearms license (FFL) is only required if you are making guns for resale. In that case you generally need an FFL 07 manufacturer's license but may be able to do onesy twosey production on an FFL 01 dealer or gunsmith license.
On the subject of making, it's actually much less work and cost to follow the widely available US Army improvised munitions manual to build a slam fire shotgun or 9mm pipe pistol with bits from the local hardware store. 3D printing is a novelty for the moment and all the pearl clutching and First Amendment violating is just a desparate attempt by ati gunners to fan hysteria.
man breaks automated tests at 00:30
SCO may have their lawsuit but back but IBM still has the Nazgul who made Boies, Schiller, and Flexner look more like Moe, Larry, & Curly. Ultimately SCO has to cough up actual infringing code in Linux and my recollection is the only things they ever showed turned out to be a snippet of deprecated Itanium code that was actually from SGI and the Berkeley Packet Filter which as you might expect came from BSD on a BSD license.
The opaque projector was a common sight during my school days but I've never seen one in a general office environment. Outside of schools it more of a specialist artist's tool, replaced by scanners and cameras.
I have seen some rigs with a a camera on a stand that perform a similar function in my children's classrooms, although digital projectors have replaced both the old overheads and the LCD panel on on OHP kludge.
Along those lines, when our office space was being converted from cubicle farm to open desks and "flexible seating" and management asked for proposals to name the various areas of the floor my colleagues and I suggested naming them after various homeless camps and shantytowns. Management wimped out and used local bridges, although in a rare flash of humor one area was called "Bridge to Nowhere".
The sole bright spot was getting the VP of global facilities to admit that tearing down the cubes was really about money and not being hip, trendy and attractive to younger employees.
I'm thanking my lucky stars right now. I work for a large company that uses proper cabling contractors so our data center racks have properly punched down and labeled patch panels and neatly labeled cables. That is the good, on the bad side as we moved to denser servers our cabling got so big it was blocking airflow under the floor and we had to convert to overhead racks.
The labs on the other hand can get very messy very quickly and start to look like some of these pictures.
but after seeing the reviews of the M8 and now the M9, my original M7 looks better than nay of the supposed improvements. I like the ultra pixel camera, my OS is still Kit Kat and blinkfeed is easily banished off screen so even though it's off contract and upgrade eligible I'm going to keep going until HTC rediscovers its mojo or something better comes along.
I went to XFCE in 2008 since I hate Nautilus and thus avoid Gnome and while I used KDE3 for years KDE4 was too weird to use daily.
I've never looked back and any complaints I have with XFCE disappear after a session with our default corporate window manager, FVWM2!
I've liked XFCE because it was simple, quick, easily grasped and Thunar worked the way I expected a file manager to work.
I fully agree that the eye behind the camera has far more effect on the photograph than the camera. That is why my justification for getting a DSLR to replace a point and shoot was to "more accurately capture the image in my head" because when I look at a scene I see the photograph I want and it's up to my hardware to create it. If the image in the photographer's mind is a flat banal snapshot it matters not whether they use a phone, a Leica or a 4x5 view camera with Zone System exposure it's still going to be crap where somebody with the right image in mind can create great art with a landfill Android phone.
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