Posts by el_oscuro

Re: The enshittification continues

That even predates the Internet by a lot - Google "round down fraud". I first learned about it 40 years ago.

Oracle PL/SQL has entered the chat:

BEGIN

do-a-bunch-of-crtical-transations;

EXCEPTION

WHEN OTHERS THEN NULL;

END;

Re: Have they tried

In the Army in West Germany, we ran a mobile datacenter with an IBM 360 in the back of a pair of deuce in a half trucks. And we had an IPL tape. The comment written on it was very reassuring: "Might work, might not". It actually did work. And the other backup software we had for that system was grenade proof. Fast Dump Restore sets the standard for every backup program I have seen in the 35+ years since. One time, I needed to restore a critical file and the only backup tape was an old one that had expired and was in the scratch pool. But it hadn't been overwritten yet, so I mounted it and started the restore job. It started reading that tape, then started getting I/O and data check errors on it, dumping all sorts of diagnostic messages on the console. But it kept going past the bad section on the tape - and restored my file from a section on that tape that was actually after the bad section.

Re: Just to make sure I have the timeline correct

Pro tip: If you ever go to one of those DEF CON conferences, bring a burner phone and laptop and wipe both before letting them anywhere near one of your networks.

Re: Is anyone surprised?

I remember that, and I consider Google buying Doubleclick to be the moment they turned evil. Kind of like Boeing buying out McDonnell Douglas.

I wasn't aware that the old Twitter was a "carefully curated and censored echo chamber" of "the liberal left". Unlike Parler, Gab, "Truth" social, and now X, I don't thing "the liberal left" has ever had any echo chambers like those.

Re: Lost in Translation?

I am a DBA, that is the literal description of the job. Make sure you have backups, and more importantly, make sure you can restore from them. If you have practiced a restore in the last 6 months, you aren't doing your job.

Re: Abiword and rant

When did notepad get better? It has basically the same functionality as I could have written with about 20 lines of code in Visual Basic 30 years ago. I think they might have added tabs and the ability to open multiple files, but that is about it. They could have made it better by adding regex search and replace, syntax highlighting, block copy and paste, and other features that modern editors like VI have had for years.

I once had a project like that - took 2 weeks to set up Oracle failsafe on Windows. And in the end, my entire output of the gig was a single Windows .BAT file and instructions on how to use it. The project was a success.

I'm in the Equifax breach (and the OPM too). Probably lots of others. I'm sure whatever the Chinese and Russians don't already have, they can get from my Facebook shadow profile or Google. And I immediately put a freeze on all my account for all 3 credit reporting bureaus.

I also got a settlement check from the Equifax class action suit - for $10. Apparently it is a lot more than most other people got.

Re: What's yours is mine, and what's mine is mine too.

True. They made the fortune 500 before IBM bought them out.

Re: Um, Remember /etc/inittab?

I remember that - and it was pretty easy. Much easier that systemd when it breaks. On one box, it broke after a graphics driver update and just had a blank screen. After a lot off Googling, I was able to boot into a shell, where I found the error message:

"The logind failed to start. Please run journal control for more details."

And the details were:

"The logind failed to start."

Lots of Googling later, I was getting absolutely nowhere. So I found a website: without-systemd.org that had instructions for removing it. I deleted systemd along with the gnome desktop and all the dependencies and replaced it with sys5 and XFCE. That was years ago and I haven't had any issues since.

Re: turn around three times and punch yourself in the face

My solution to that "we have always done it that way" is to simply change it without asking for permission. I just tell them: "I made a change that I think you will like: You no longer have to do steps 4 through 7. Everything else is the same. Just skip steps 4-7. Please try it and let me know if you like it."

I have never been asked to roll back one of these changes. But I have gotten free beer after a few. It is amazing how well people respond when you actually make their jobs easier.

Re: Waiting for the gotcha

I had something like that happen to me. Coming over to London from the other side of the pond for a G5 summit, all of our equipment was 110 v. So we had transformers to convert the 220 to 110. Our setup was very important, so we had to test every piece of equipment in isolation plus as the full set up. So I plugged one of the laptops into the 110 v transformer and booted it up fine. Then I plugged a surge protector into that same transformer and it immediately exploded. Puzzled, we connected a volt meter to the "110 v" transformer and it was actually putting out about 400 v. Seems the lapop's auto switching power supply was capable of handling the 400 v.

Re: Video on Ring's servers is the problem

On option is Blink (which is unfortunately also owned by Amazon). They try to push you towards a cloud subscription of course, but also have a local storage option which I use.

Re: future of apt on Ubuntu?

You are basically describing Oracle. You have $ORACLE_BASE, $ORACLE_HOME and so on. But Oracle manages to combine all of the worst of a tarball type install with all of the jankyness of a Java GUI installer. Plus different patch sets, one off patches and a separate patch installer tarball, which must be patched itself in order to install the other patches.

I read somewhere that to patch one $ORACLE_HOME takes an average of 4 hours. And based on many years of experience, that sounds about right.

Re: Orbit

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to defying gravity. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Re: Unhash?

It's trivial if an unsalted hash like MD5 is used. All FB needs to do is hash the emails and store the hashed value in the database. It is basically the same as sending it in clear text.

$ echo bob@gmail.com | md5sum

204f7f3db175147a889be577eb1b51ec