/dev/chat - 2017-04-27

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9:15 AM

@FaheemMitha It varies (but it’s mostly during the Northern hemisphere’s summer holidays). The dates are typically announced by December of the previous year at the latest, then registration opens in March or April. Debconf itself lasts around a week (typically including both weekends) and is preceded by Debcamp.

@StephenKitt I see. Are you planning to make the 2017 one?

@FaheemMitha It’s unlikely at this point.

@StephenKitt Ok.

Is this something that you have to take vacation time for?

@FaheemMitha Probably, unless I was giving a talk about something relating to Red Hat in some way (e.g. Fedora)...

@StephenKitt I see.

9:20 AM

But if I ever go to our offices in Pune I’ll ping you ;-). A bunch of my colleagues are in Bangalore for GIDS just now but that’s a long way from Bombay...

@StephenKitt It is. GIDS?

Oh, Great Indian Developer Summit

@FaheemMitha heh you got there first ;-)

That sounds like it would be mostly an Indian thing.

I hope this isn't a dumb question, but would any of these events be any use in trying to find work? Possibly part-time work. E.g. Debconf.

@FaheemMitha There are job fairs sometimes at Debconf. Certainly attending conferences is a positive thing in terms of networking!

You’d probably benefit most from a conference related to something you’re already somewhat involved in though.

I got my current job indirectly thanks to conference attendance: I met a Red Hatter at a local conference, who later tweeted that they were looking for a Java expert...

I wouldn’t have followed him on Twitter if I hadn’t met him previously, so attending that conference was definitely good for me ;-).

9:56 AM

@StephenKitt I see. Interesting. Are you a Java expert, then?

And how is a Java expert defined, anyway?

@FaheemMitha heh that’s an interesting question... a bit vast for this chat ;-)

@StephenKitt But you are a Java expert, though?

@FaheemMitha pretty much, yes.

I know more about Java than I do about shell scripting, that gives you some idea!

@StephenKitt Ok.

So you do Java work for RH, then? Or different stuff?

Everyone's an expert in the eyes of the one wielding that word ;-)

10:06 AM

@FaheemMitha yes, I work on OpenDaylight which is all written in Java

@StephenKitt oh

@Kusalananda exactly — it’s the words other people use behind one’s back that are really relevant

@Kusalananda It's definitely not a well-defined word.

@StephenKitt Yes.

Oh, sorry, don't mind me. Didn't want to stop the conversation. I'll go away for a bit now :-)

It’s lunchtime for me so I’ll go away for a bit too!

10:27 AM

@Kusalananda Actually I don't understand what you meant by that sentence.

@FaheemMitha I may call someone an expert, but if I know that I have a higher level of understanding than them, I might not call them an expert. However, someone who's just starting out on the topic probably would. It's in the eye's of the beholder, so to speak.

What Stephen pointed out was that it's not really important if you're an expert or not. Just like with any sort of "attainment", I'd be wary of anyone professing to have it. It's what other people say and think that matters.

@Kusalananda Ok, I see what you mean. But it's really not a very meaningful term. Like genius, for example.

It's a relative term, that's for sure

depends also on the scope of the term; I don't think you could be a world authority on everything with Java, but perhaps e.g. Java database programming

and even then you'd probably have limited experience with many popular databases

10:42 AM

And most of us have trouble considering ourselves experts since the more we learn, the more we compare ourselves with others who know more than we do.

You only really realize how much you know when you start teaching it to someone who knows far less.

@terdon Or learning from someone who knows far more.

@Kusalananda That's when you realize how little you know, not how much.

@terdon Consider yourself moving from having taught a class on shell scripting to taking a class on the same topic from someone who knows more than you. Do you know little or much?

(need to be away for abit now)

@Kusalananda Exactly. In the first case I realize how much I've learned and in the second I realize how much more I need to learn. Which is why it is so hard for me (or anyone, I guess) to call myself "an expert" on anything.

Well, with the possible exception of my PhD subject. There I really am one of the world's top 4-5 experts. No question about it.

Of course, there are only about 4-5 people who've ever worked on the subject so that doesn't mean much :P

11:09 AM

@terdon :-)

In the same vein, I used to enjoy claiming that I was one of the top 10 or 15 ice skaters in Greece.

Lol

Which was absolutely true in my teens and early twenties but, as you can imagine, there weren't many more than 20 or so people who knew how to ice skate in Greece so. . . :P

Top 10 in Greece == average in Finland :)

Kinda like being the best deep sea sailor in Switzerland

Doesn't Greece have mountains and stuff? I thought it did.

But maybe not high enough?

@FaheemMitha ice skating doesn’t correlate with mountains, but with cold climates

11:22 AM

you need flat ice, not mountains

@StephenKitt Oh, right. I got it muddled with skiing, in my mind.

not a lot of famous downhill skiers from Greece, either, though

though googling tells me there are some downhill resorts there

@terdon Just create a new sport, something like "Greek skating", and you would be world class!

@tripleee Greece is too warm for skiing to develop at a high level

you need good ski resorts in places where people can live all year round

@Kusalananda like the Finns did en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wife-carrying

11:27 AM

@tripleee Yeah, we do have some and Greece is essentially entirely mountainous (the only place in the country where there are no visible mountains is in the middle of the sea) but the weather is too mild anywhere but near the peaks. And you don't really want to ski at >2000 meters of altitude.

2 hours later…

1:34 PM

I'm inspired by JdeBP's "plagiarism" response/effort to these homework Q's:

-2

Q: How might a technician use ps and kill to investigate a misbehaving system

I am currently doing a Linux Controlled Assessment and this is one of the tasks. Evaluate the usefulness of the top command and discuss how a computer technician might use it together with ps and kill in order to investigate a system that is misbehaving. I have looked on other sites bu...

........and deleted

we scare him !!

the closest I got was a PDF talking about the assessment; if they provided links to the sources, they're not plagiarising, but they still put no effort into our site's Q. noticed several other forums via googling that also suffer these controlled assessment Q's

1:50 PM

I can't understand, they have access to internet while doing the test ? or this is a MOOC exam ?

article no longer deleted ? still cached in flare ?

Thi particular user has three non-deleted questions, all about controlled assessments.

@Archemar it was undeleted

someone is doing a cleanup in old question ?

@Archemar I sometimes do, but not at the moment

I review VTC with two question from two years ago ...

1:59 PM

@Archemar appears Rui may have started it

based on unix.stackexchange.com/review/close/history?page=2

2:13 PM

Folks, my A/C is currently shut down for repairs. The thermometers inside my alarm clocks are showing 28 C approx. I'm wondering if it is safe to run my computer without A/C for the two days I'm told it will take to repair the A/C.

Oh, and the 28 C is only approx, and may rise, I suppose.

@FaheemMitha Are you joking?

@terdon No?

Of course it is. I've been running machines at higher temperatures than that for years.

That's why computers have fans and temperature control.

@terdon My computer tech told me I needed to run it at 24 C. As I recall.

Which doesn't really happen here without A/C. Also, in the long term, I suppose there are dust issues and suchlike.

Summers in Greece are very often in the low 40ies and computers work without A/C

Worse comes to worse, they just overheat and shutdown.

2:16 PM

I've only got a very sketchy idea of how delicate computers really are.

@terdon Oh, really? I thought the consensus is that one needs A/Cs to operate them safely.

user image

I've got a massive heat sink on top of my CPU, I think. And temperature monitors.

That's what I had to do with my old laptop last year but that already had heating problems.

@terdon So your computers don't die horribly? That's reassuring. Somewhat.

No. If they overheat they just shutdown abruptly.

2:18 PM

@terdon I see. I didn't know they did that reliably.

I think they will shut down if they detect too high temeperatures. Of course, that could have unwanted consequences.

@Kusalananda Like unsaved work?

Exactly

And probably having to fsck the disks on startup.

Well, hopefully it won't get hot enough for that to happen.

@FaheemMitha They didn't used to but that was around 20 years ago I think.

2:19 PM

@terdon Hmm. And this overheating and abrupt shutting down has no bad consequence for the hardware?

No, it's doing that to protect the HW.

^^

It shuts down before the hardware is harmed.

last thermal shutdown I've eard about in datacenter, T° was about 50°C in datacenter, so must be 60°C in server.

not all host went down tho.

We don't have A/C in the flat, and we've have one or two weeks each summer with 30-35 degrees indoors. The laptops are working through it.

2:44 PM

The 4 sensors on my laptop are currently reporting temperatures between 86 and 96F. There are also listed alarm thresholds. I don't know how they were set - I don't think I set them. Like 120F.

There's a display panel on my case. It's been there for 10 years or so.

@FaheemMitha Those are hardware-defined

@terdon oh.

Well, it might be fine for computers, but it's hot here for a human.

3:03 PM

@FaheemMitha I have a built-in shutdown-like function that activates at about 35 degrees. What happens is that I tend to go into suspend or sleep mode. Pretty much exactly the same happens if I have just a couple of stronger beers or a glass of wine too, come to think about it...

@Kusalananda Built in to your desktop, or your laptop?

I'm too cheap to drink. Though I imagine it must be an expensive habit.

@FaheemMitha built in to his body ;-)

@FaheemMitha Into myself.

Oh, plus I never really took to it.

@Kusalananda Oh, I see. I misunderstood.

:-)

3:07 PM

You mean like delirium.

@FaheemMitha Brain goes "ah fu*k it, I'm out of here"

@Kusalananda That sounds like most of my evenings. Minus the profanity.

It's mornings for me. I'm a night owl.

@Kusalananda the beers? :-P

@StephenKitt No, I don't drink actually, that's why I wrote "just a couple". No, my rc.d scripts just takes forever to run.

3:13 PM

@Kusalananda right, serious big iron always takes a while to boot

either that or its the fscks from the previous night’s crash

@StephenKitt That's the most efficient way to fall asleep though; just make sure you're absolutely exhausted first... Man, that explains why I've only had 4-6h nights the last couple of months.

@Kusalananda Huh. You too? :-)

I really need to go somewhere colder. Back in a bit.

Best of luck to you @FaheemMitha

@Kusalananda In what, my quest for coldness? :-)

@FaheemMitha That was the intent, yes!

3:20 PM

@Kusalananda Well, I know where I can find a functioning A/C, so hopefully not too much luck will be involved. I don't do well with heat. Which is unfortunate, considering where I live.

But thanks, regardless.

4:15 PM

user image

exciting times

@StephenKitt Oooh, shiny!

@StephenKitt Congrats.

@StephenKitt :-) yay

@Kusalananda you might be next ;-)

4:31 PM

Fair bit to go though... And I need a holiday or something to work on it :-)

That fork question: He's probably thinking of fork+exec.

Hmm... those comments were removed now.

@Kusalananda I thought that might be the issue...

@Kusalananda what comments? I still see the four under my answer

@StephenKitt I'm sure there used to be one saying something to the effect of "if it forks, how does it know what program to run?"

@Kusalananda ah I never saw that one, that would indeed be enlightening

@terdon would know

0

Q: why fork returns sometimes parent and sometimes child?

when running fork command to create a new process, if it succeed it return either 0 (the child) or the parent. I didn't get the idea behind this. why don't fork just return always child or always parent ?

@terdon are there any deleted comments there?

nope

oh to be a mod (no........)

actually @terdon I was curious about that: do you always see deleted comments, or are they hidden by default?

it occurred to me that reading the site with all the deleted comments would be quite painful sometimes

4:36 PM

Hidden but a magic link appears to the left of any post that has deleted comments.

OK, makes sense

I have to say the SE UX tends to be pretty excellent, which is one of the strengths of the sites

@terdon Odd. I'm pretty sure there were at least one comment there (under Stephen's answer) that is now gone.

@Kusalananda perhaps it was edited

I was in a hurry.

I don’t think even mods can see previous versions of edited comments

4:38 PM

I may even have read your comment saying "here, start a new process and run this piece of code in it”, and totally got it wrong in the hurry.

That's probably it.

Right, that would explain it ;-). That seems to be what lots of people expect from fork(), at least if they’ve encountered background shell processes first!

Well, there is one edited comment (1st under Stephen's answer, note the little pencil icon) but as Stephen said, mods can't see older versions either.

ah, no, I lie!

They changed that recently and we can see. is this what you were looking for @Kusalananda?

> the fork is executed by the parent process. so I thought we still the parent process and we always get pid of the child. I dont get the idea of how the current process running fork can become the child process (case it returns 0)

@terdon No, it's more probable that I garbled Stephen's comment while speed-reading to go and do other stuff.

4:56 PM

@Kusalananda It's OK to admit that you're getting old. No need to invent feeble excuses.

(phew)

:P

5:51 PM

throws sticks at @terdon

?

what, that's just a standard way I say hi nowadays :P

ah

no but I did poke you, you have a post migrating because the user who posted it wanted it moved. Feel free to snipe, because it's offtopic on Ask Ubuntu, if its' crap then they need to learn how to write :P

(I'm modding from mobile today, it's not pretty)

and now I need coffee :)

in any case, how's things :)

@ThomasWard Where?

Ah. This:

0

Q: Kali is slow after needing to force shutdown

I'm running Kali Linux off of a USB drive. It's usually decently fast after it starts up, but I had to force shut it down after the whole system froze (by holding the power button down until it turned off). After I booted again, the whole system seems really slow. It took a good 5 minutes just to...

Yeah. Please don't migrate crap.There's no information in there, really.

5:58 PM

i can't tell from mobile quality :P

Actually, @ThomasWard a good rule of thumb is that if it's about Kali, don't migrate.

i also need more coffee

lol

Not unless it's one of the 0.001% of Kali questions that are actually useful.

like a question asked by me or something :p

though I'd put it on U&L to begin with

Mostly it's script kiddies who think Kali makes them leet or something.

6:00 PM

:P

@ThomasWard And you'd know how to ask and enough about Linux to know why you're running Kali. The one you migrated actually said:

> I'm just getting into Linux, so please avoid technical jargon if possible

@terdon yes i read it now, it's crap :p

And they're using Kali!!!

move your comment to Ubuntu :P

:37006905 snort

6:02 PM

To echo the U&L people, who rejected the migration: Kali is not for the weak-hearted and not for 'newbies' to Linux. Kali is a specialized toolkit which requires linux experience already, and is NOT designed for end-users as it is not designed with security in mind. If you're new to Linux, you need to start from an actual distribution like actual Ubuntu or Debian (or even CentOS with a GUI), not use Kali. — Thomas Ward ♦ 8 secs ago

^ that works.

Seriously need coffee, haven't had any yet all day

and that's usually a dangerous situation

@ThomasWard eeeek!

@terdon i'm surprised the air raid sirens haven't gone off yet ;)

6:15 PM

@ThomasWard Fire, explosions, people running for their lives?

@FaheemMitha *looks up at the masses of falling flaming space debris coming towards them all* How does "fiery destruction from above" sound?

@ThomasWard Armageddon? Count me in!

lol

I was just watching 2012. A very busy film. I wonder how scientifically inaccurate it is.

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