Posts by DarkwavePunk

The Roc

The Roc is so batshit insane to see flying that I'm sure Burt Rutan has a smile on his face.

This is one of those things...

...that me and a bunch of mates could knock up in a boozy week-long bender on magic mushrooms (even ignoring the Pink Monkey Bird) for a few million quid.

If...

I can ssh into it and it's a good keyboard - "maybe"

Perl

Used Perl4 as an awk/sed substitute for silly nested/piped shell scripts. Worked okay and still looked horrible. Perl5 still fits that role as well. If version 7 doesn't break the horrible 1-line data munge crap - go for it. Stick with sed/awk/shell, if only to piss off the Ops team. </sysadmin>

Well this will be fun...

I wonder what my higher-ups will think of this article when I send it to them. Or, should I just not? Sometimes ignorance, hiding under a blanket with a teddy bear and swigging neat vodka is the right option.

Even when the Web existed...

Back in the day when I first used the Internet at university I had the chance to use the early WWW. It was a rubbish experience (especially with the network connections in Australia then). I went back to Gopher, Archie, Veronica. When the web took off I still tended to use Lynx which is sadly no longer really possible for most sites these days. Glad to see there's various projects kicking back against bloat and prioritising information again - as it should be.

Slimy Arse Sausages.

As I age it seems I spend more time answering questions than doing stuff in the IT sphere. I swear like a fucking trooper but not at people directly. Vent my anger over some fucking shitty wankstain system that some poor sod has to support not them. If something is an utter cockbadger pile of fartmunch swine shlongs I can say it and they can get a bit of confidence about their (muted) thoughts. Old and cocking foulmouthed rants can elevate the youth into a proper state of nihilistic ennui.

Kuiper

I find it amusing that Blue Origin hasn't even made it into orbit, the Ariane 6 isn't finished yet, and the BE-4 engine (Blue Origin again) isn't ready to go for the Vulcan Centaur. Maybe Kuiper will launch on rainbow farting unicorns.

Sodding bogshite.

I managed to get windows 10 to install on an ancient ExoPC demo unit I got from some Intel conference nearly a decade ago. It was meant to run Meego as the OS which dates it somewhat. Sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet taking off, and could probably be used as a very loud impromptu version of Air Hockey. It did fucking work though. Now my old-ish i7 laptop with 16G of RAM with a discrete graphics card can't even run Win 11. Not that I particularly want to anyway.

Apparently...

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D can't be overclocked at the moment I gather. Not that I care as it's not my thing. Don't know how much overclocking really boosts these days anyway. It's an interesting architecture and looking forward to see where it goes.

Odd.

Given the benefits to humanity (if nuclear fusion actually fucking works as a viable energy source) I'm surprised at how little money is - in relative terms - assigned to it. Obviously it's not a problem you can just solve by spaffing cash at. It's nice to see so many different design concepts. I don't see that as a bad thing as nobody has got it right yet, but it does rather dilute the funding. Public/private is a good idea, although as with anything it can stray into the "pork" territory...

The joy...

Being in a pub and getting a panicked technical support call as their team had run out of ideas. Trying to visualise the screen they're on and the system involved from memory whilst slightly sloshed (I wasn't technically on call, honest). Too many times to count. As an aside - why do all these calls seem to start with "Sorry to bother you, but..."?

Ah "Abort"

The "kill -9" of the DOS world. Does that make "Retry" -HUP, and "Fail" -TERM, loosely speaking? Bugger knows what "Ignore" would be, but I don't like it. A fun and simpler time, sort of, with caveats...

I'm still not that sure

I kinda like some of the ideas. Feel like adding even more stuff to the "Exposé" style thing dilutes it actually. Having had to deal with OL(V)WM and CDE in the past and various other shitshows of so-called Desktop Environments they still fall flat. Obviously not the target audience for such things as FVWM would probably still be fine for my needs. Guess it comes down to choice which is nice. Remember - set your virtual desktops in a 3x3 grid, bind a function key and cursor keys to move between them, make sure the background is different on each VD. Or don't.

No Sendmail?!

You and your fancy modern Postfix! Back in my day we wrote sendmail.cf files by hand and sent email crafted in telnet sessions. If anyone complained we'd beat them around the head with the complete Sendmail reference manual. I can't even see a way to download Slackware via Kermit - what is wrong with the world?!

I for one...

I make all my financial decisions based off what an ex-boxer and a mutant alien with a huge arse says.

Telcos and Bodge.

One of my mentors at a Telco in Oz used to write CGI scripts in shell and C. I expanded on this to use sed and awk (mainly because I knew it, but also because Perl 4 was utter shite). It stuck with me as an ethos. I'm so sorry to every company I've worked for in the last 25 years. Sort of. Maybe. Lot's of love - The Eternal Bodge.

I hate these things...

1) I never completely understand the question (I'm a moron). 2) Even if I do vaguely glean the problem I'll try and solve it with some mutant hybrid of bash/sed/awk/bc (I'm a moron). Once tried that Project Euler thing. Got a little way through it mostly because there's a Unix util called "primes". Attempted to use Python but that added more misery and woe. They all seem to descend into "Your late uncle's half brother's sister married a fridge stolen from your great aunt. How many magnets do you need?". Have I mentioned I'm a moron?

I don't know...

...if it's just because I'm recently out of surgery and on a lot of medication, but the title of the story alone gives me the utter FEAR. The rest of the article doesn't help much either. Maybe should just go back to the tried and tested dried frog pills. Nurse?!

Head hurts.

I use WSL2 with Kali rolling distro (yes, I'm a criminal or terrorist or something - better than using PowerShell) but this is utter voodoo to me. I sort of get the pros, but the cons sound like an utter clusterfuck.

Draft copies..

I was once tasked with creating a networking diagram that was required for some Financial Services regulation. My draft copy had a label for one of our connections as "PISSNet WANK Link" as a joke. My final of course had "PSINet WAN Link", can you guess which one I sent?...

Uh

Don't mess with halogens. Put some dioxygen difluoride into the mix to spice things up - that'll get you bang for your buck.

Simpler times.

I remember back in the mid 90s in Australia registering a .au domain was so quaint. You just emailed or faxed some dude at a university in Victoria (Monash?) with the relevant details. Job done. How things have changed...

I almost want to...

...go back to CDE/Motif these days. That was an utter shitshow, but at least it was a consistent shower of shite. Maybe even GEM. Don't know, don't care, just work, be cohesive, and leave me the fuck alone.

Tesla valves

Tesla valves are so very clever. There are many good videos on YT about them. I'm not entirely in the market for a phone that needs it to stop my genitals from catching fire, but the history and technology is groovy.

To think...

...it was only the early 90s and rendering a refractive ball with multiple light sources on a chequerboard in 320x200 resolution using an Atari ST could take a day or more of work in PovRay. To think that real-time raytracing (even with some cheats) is possible blows my (albeit tiny) mind.

Long live the king.

X11 might be a bit of a mess as a protocol but I have fond memories of being able to use a web browser that my feeble hardware couldn't possibly have run at the time. Run off the mighty SunOS server at my university and projected to my screen at home in glorious 14.4 modem speeds I was truly enlightened.

Okay, all 1000 websites there were at the time, but still.

Why...

...did I get a CAPTCHA trying to read the El Reg Forums? Like I know what a fucking bus looks like. I've lived in a cave for over 1.5 years now.

Pi Zero looks neat though.