The Comms Room

Mark Henderson

22:04

This is absurd, right?

blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown

You contact the guy asking him for his approval, he doesn't bother replying so you try again and he doesn't bother replying

So you do something and then he gets super shitty about it and demands that you apologise in public and change the name of your project so that it doesn't contain "standard" or "markdown" in the name

Ry Jones

@MarkHenderson yes, he's a dick

Mark Henderson

@RyJones So its not just me thinking that then

Ry Jones

John Gruber has burned off any respect I had for him. Not like he cared, but he could have been a lot easier to work with.

Michael Hampton

Fuck John Gruber.

6

Shane Madden

My favorite part is complaining about the use of the name markdown being a violation of the license. The software license, on the original perl implementation, which I'm pretty sure isn't in use in the new project.

Mark Henderson

22:09

@RyJones You've had other dealings with him?

Ry Jones

@MarkHenderson Less said the better.

HopelessN00b

@MarkHenderson Pity they didn't tell John to sit on a poisoned spear. Repeatedly.

On a related note, my boss spent 10 minutes dancing around the problem he thought we were having facilitating a DDoS because he didn't know what Akamai was. <sigh>

Ry Jones

@HopelessN00b nice. "I'm under a sustained assault on port 53 by clients all over the world. the IP addresses then connect on port 80 for some length of time. what is going on?!"

2

HopelessN00b

@RyJones More or less. Except it was 10 minutes of "OMG, check out the traffic reports on our monitoring system!!!" "What about them?" "OMG, here they are!!!" "So what?" "OMG, here's a slightly different copy."

Ry Jones

@HopelessN00b strange

HopelessN00b

22:24

It seems to be his thing. Does that all the time. Instead of just saying foo, he'll dance around foo for 15 minutes until he thinks he's going to get thrown out a window if he doesn't get to the point already...

It's amazing the shit you can come to accept as normal.

Ry Jones

so start asking pointed questions earlier. "What exactly is the problem you see here? What exactly do you want me to do about it?"

Michael Hampton

Clearly you have too much patience, and need to throw him out of a window sooner.

Ry Jones

pre-mark a window and let him know what you're doing. "This is the exact window I'm throwing you out of if you don't stop looking at our monitoring system"

HopelessN00b

(And there's more.)

@MichaelHampton On a related note, I really need to find myself a job that pays enough for it to be worth throwing bad bosses out an 8th story window.

Ry Jones

@HopelessN00b you only need to do it once

HopelessN00b

22:35

I dunno. If I want to stay out of jail, I think I'd have to avoid taking credit. Might need to do it a few times to establish a pattern about what type of dumbassery is liable to get someone defenestrated to death.

ewwhite

I don't understand this...

83

A: nice sudo or sudo nice?

There's a difference, a crucial one. If you want to decrease the process' priority, the order does not matter. On the other hand, if you want to increase it, you must put sudo before nice. Since you are running the command as a normal user (otherwise you would not bother with sudo at all), you ...

+83 ?!?

Michael Hampton

It happens...

ewwhite

You said, "you win"

what do you mean?

Ry Jones

@ewwhite uh wow

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite He dramatically outscored me since I hadn't mentioned the raising priority thing.

ewwhite

22:38

I can't even imagine a situation where I'd need to use sudo and nice together...

and if I were, it would be sudo nice command

Ry Jones

@ewwhite one of my co-workers will do whatever in linux, and if it doesn't work, he'll add sudo as an incantation

ewwhite

haha

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

Ry Jones

@ewwhite pretty much

ewwhite

It's weird to see which questions get traction

My old boss sent a long missive detailing what he thinks is wrong with serverfault and stackoverflow

Michael Hampton

We aren't personal shoppers?

Ry Jones

22:42

@ewwhite that's nice for him

ewwhite

No... more of... I still stand by my earlier assertion that the stack exchange sites were awesome at short form question and answers "what command line option do I give x to produce y" "how do I change the color of a button in language z" but they have always sucked at longer form. It's designed as question/answer and they hate question/discuss nuanced answer, they just weren't built for that or focused on that.

Then he brought up Google Answers...

and Honestly, why shouldn't people who answer questions on serverfault get paid?

HopelessN00b

Pretty much. And like it or not, doing IT well is usually a longer form answer, whether you're in IT-Ops, or writing code.

ewwhite

At breakfast today, my wife was like, "aside from job opportunities, what have you gotten out of spending FIVE years on ServerFault?"

Michael Hampton

Umm, Server Fault chat?

Ry Jones

@ewwhite give her a gold star for perceptiveness

ewwhite

22:45

I didn't have a good answer...

I was sad that reaching my goal would come at a time where its meaning would be so devalued.

Ry Jones

@ewwhite what was the goal? five years?

I mean, I have three months and nine years on you

holy shit I'm wearing the hat, shirt, and blue badge lanyard in my profile photo.

HopelessN00b

@ewwhite "aside from job opportunities" <--- pretty big aside, there. At least for most of us mere mortals.

ewwhite

@RyJones oh, the goal...

Michael Hampton

Yeah, but @ewwhite makes more than all the rest of us combined.

ewwhite

Evan Anderson, Troy, OH

106k 8 110 237

that was the goal.

Ry Jones

22:48

My neard is more luxurious though

@ewwhite well, you beat him.

ewwhite

@RyJones naw, not yet

few more weeks

HopelessN00b

@RyJones Not yet, actually. At least, not on ServerFault.

ewwhite

I fear that SF won't be as valuable for job stuff as it once was

Ry Jones

Let me know when you pass Greg Hewgill

ewwhite

this opened up a lot of opportunities for me...

HopelessN00b

22:50

@ewwhite Yeah, it already isn't. Give it a little more time and it'll be just another Experts Exchange.

ewwhite

yet, many jobs are posted here

but they're not getting filled by SF regulars

that's the difference

I've gotten 4 jobs through Careers.SE

Ry Jones

I think, based on your comment, it should be called Jobs.SE since nobody is making a career out of anything

ewwhite

haha

Michael Hampton

IT has shifted dramatically and we're all trying to cope?

ewwhite

it has shifted

wanna see something from the people at my old cloud firm?

I was involved in the sale of some high-end server gear to them

"We are having some difficulties with the Disk Enclosure we leased not too long ago... THREE of the (25) 600Gb SAS drives come up as bad. We think it is the disks themselves because when we swapped in other disks they did not show up as bad."

351  Smart Array P420i in Embedded Slot CACHE STATUS PROBLEM DETECTED: The cache on this controller has a problem. To prevent data loss, configuration changes to this controller are not allowed. Please replace the cache to be able to continue to configure this controller.

"We have replaced the controller twice now and still get the same message."

Ry Jones

22:54

wow

ewwhite

So I told them two things... "You have 3 bad disks... shit happens"

and "I don't know where you're getting replacement cache modules. Call HP."

Michael Hampton

That's maybe one standard deviation

ewwhite

@MichaelHampton It's Logicworks... everything that touched their data centers seemed to just fall over.

Michael Hampton

And.. isn't the cache module an item that plugs into the controller?

ewwhite

even $30k HP server solutions.

Michael Hampton

22:56

@ewwhite Oh, right, so it's that guy with the static electricity

ewwhite

the cache module is just a plug-in part. But they had a high failure rate in the default 2Gb capacity. I replace them with 1Gb on systems I put into production since they fail less. Someone like @chopper3 would be able to speak about reliability at scale, but this was my workaround

@MichaelHampton something like that... or the datacenter carpeting or whatever...

Michael Hampton

My thought was that they tried to use a new controller with the old cache module

Ry Jones

@ewwhite seems strange. density too high on the 2Gb modules, leading to overheating?

ewwhite

but these people are paid engineers... and they couldn't troubleshoot this... with HP support contracts and everything

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite Yeah, you should have told them that shag carpet in the datacenter was a bad idea

ewwhite

22:58

they're blaming my vendor

@RyJones I had two DOA in a week period...

and was just like, F-U HP

Ry Jones

@ewwhite reminds me of my disk array problems in 94

ewwhite

Old-school hardware.

I think that's what missing in today's systems world... having to diagnose and fix hardware problems

Ry Jones

heh searching for dec 8200 turns up desktop systems

ewwhite

having to fix things that aren't googleable.

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite You have something there... I would rather pay someone to worry about the hardware.

ewwhite

23:01

@MichaelHampton which equals: Cloud

@MichaelHampton But you have to have some hardware chops, right?

Michael Hampton

@ewwhite I need to know if my vendors are competent or drooling idiots.

Ry Jones

I need some training on how to put in and remove contacts.

Michael Hampton

Contacts? Are those a part of a switch or something?

cole

I've been wearing contacts for...

15 years.

Not the same pair, though :P

Ry Jones

@cole well good for you, I've never worn them, and they're impossible to insert

cole

23:04

@RyJones at first, yes.

After 15 years, I don't even look in the mirror

84104

You cannot configure the whole WSUS website to require SSL because all traffic to the WSUS site would have to be encrypted.

I don't really see the problem.

Ry Jones

@84104 ugh

Shane Madden

@84104 If I remember right, several of the routes are required to be plain HTTP accessible or clients blow up.

Journeyman Geek

@cole: I would hope not ;p

84104

@ShaneMadden So they say.

cole

23:05

takes me probably 30 seconds to put both contacts in now. Most people say they prefer me with glasses though.

ewwhite

@ShaneMadden Do you miss VMware?

Ry Jones

@cole I got the contacts only for use with my VR headset

cole

@RyJones priorities man.

Shane Madden

@84104 Well, hardcoded crap in the windows update agent I assume.

Ry Jones

@cole yeah, I know

Shane Madden

23:07

@ewwhite Miss? We use it here

Journeyman Geek

@RyJones man, someone should design VR headsets you can install custom ground lenses into ;p

ewwhite

really?

@ShaneMadden in any reasonable scale?

or just basics?

Ry Jones

@JourneymanGeek you can get custom lenses for the DK2, and I might do it

Shane Madden

@ewwhite Not like service provider scale like at the old job obviously, but everything here that isn't massive-physical-box scale is on there.. about 190 total VMs at the moment.

84104

@ShaneMadden Yeah, I was amused? that they said, "You can't encrypt everything. That would make everything encrypted!"

Shane Madden

23:11

@84104 Yeah, the implied "You wouldn't want that!!" is um.. interesting.

HopelessN00b

Between the ransomware over the weekend, and now that I'm replaying the Mass Effect series - All of ME3's DLC would cost $870 - I can't escape the feeling that my career's gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Shane Madden

@HopelessN00b Figurines, controllers, and headsets count as DLC? Um.

84104

Of course, I still haven't figured out how to encrypt any of the things. But I'll wait for the initial sync to finish first.

HopelessN00b

@ShaneMadden Well, they're all packaged with at least a small piece of digital DLC, so you can't have it all without buying the physical stuff. Or digital theft.

Shane Madden

@84104 I remember the SSL setup on that being a bit of a headache; mainly from the MMC snapin getting twitchy

HopelessN00b

23:17

Kind of a sweet scam... just like the crypto ransomware.

Shane Madden

@HopelessN00b Looks like mostly upgrades of multiplayer items (which you can get by playing multiplayer, just shortcut with the DLC)

HopelessN00b

@ShaneMadden Oh, can you? Never did multiplayer, because.... well, I'm not 12, and I didn't just learn how to swear.

ewwhite

@ShaneMadden not bad... hire me

Shane Madden

Aww, the N7 snowboard is no longer on the bioware store, or that'd be a good example of something they left off the list :)

HopelessN00b

Damn, I... I mean... just... who? Who would even want that?

Shane Madden

23:21

@HopelessN00b No voice chat, all cooperative. It was pretty good, but repetitive.

@ewwhite Heh :) We'll have another position posted soonish!

HopelessN00b

@ShaneMadden Make it a Hyper-V admin. Make him work for it. :)

Shane Madden

@HopelessN00b If I snowboarded instead of skied I would have considered it!

ewwhite

@ShaneMadden I'm in! Will you pay $500k?

:)

Shane Madden

@ewwhite Heh, going to go with "probably not"

ewwhite

poop

HopelessN00b

23:24

Hmm. Must be just me, then. Wouldn't fly my geek flag with a "brand"... or whatever you want to consider ME3 gear.

Shane Madden

@HopelessN00b Heh. I'm fine with game related stuff that's like subtle and interesting. Currently wearing: fangamer.com/products/pirate

HopelessN00b

Yeah, guess I'm just weird. No news there, though.

Ry Jones

@HopelessN00b eh I wear Gem-Tech hats because people that recognize them leads to discussions about things I'm interested in

HopelessN00b

Ah yes, conversations. I try to avoid those as much as possible. :)

84104

23:48

@HopelessN00b You don't say?

HopelessN00b

@84104 Indeed. At some point, I noticed that my users were people... and I've been turned off the idea of interacting with people ever since.

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