I hear the support argument a lot. Again, in my experience the amount of support anyone ever actually needs is significantly less than the price they pay to get that support. And sure, there is some risk in going with an unsupported product. That risk can typically be mitigated, too. Really, if your company needs constant hand-holding from a supplier for one of their products, that would be a red flag to me about the quality of that product or the quality of your employees. Or maybe both.

Funny thing is I've never seen a client that actually needed the power Oracle or DB2 brings to the table. Most of them don't need anything more complex than glorified key/value storage and some standards on where files shall be located. If you're a bank and need to store tens of millions of actually organized data, yeah, go for the big database. If you're a small business and need to store the company's shopping list for the next couple months, something as powerful as Postgres is probably overkill for you.

In other words, try spending as much on actually understanding your data and how it needs to be organized as you do on the thing you plan to store that data in.

By jacking up baggage fees some more, obviously!

I was just noticing the other day that a number of emacs lisp packages I use on a regular basis hadn't had any development work in 5-10 years. It's a bit discouraging to go looking for something and only find a goddamn sourceforge link for it. That's my main metric for the death of a project -- you can only find a sourceforge link.

I guess it's understandable. Those guys wrote those things to scratch an itch and they worked well enough long enough. If a company where trying to maintain all the code that goes into a typical Linux install for me, it'd probably cost billions of dollars. It seems to me it would be fairly easy to subvert entire subsystems in a distribution by, for example, waiting for everyone to be happy with how it works and going off, then picking up maintenance or starting a replacement project because "No one works on that old one anymore!" Next thing you know, the system you used to love is bleeding features left and right and before you know it ends up being a dumbed-down version of Windows. Maybe that's just the open source lifecycle on a scale of decades...

The Illumanati who secretly run everything are building the world's largest collection of dick pics. Their end goal is to be able to look at the penis of every man on the planet. Now you might think that sounds gay, and it is, They just pop them up on the big wall of monitors and masturbate to them. Right now someone in GCHQ is masturbating to a picture of your penis, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Even if you find their secret bunker and the secret room in the secret bunker with the big wall of dicks, go down there and wander in on them, they won't stop masturbating. You'll be all like "HEY! Is that a PICTURE OF MY DICK?!" And they'll be all like "OHH YEAH HNGGG!" So just sit back and feel secure in the knowledge that the world is safer because every intelligence organization on the planet has a picture of your dick.

I can get by on 6 more or less indefinitely. Some nights I feel like I'm tossing and turning and not getting to sleep all night, but if I get up on those nights I'm even more of a wreck the next day than I would be otherwise. I'm pretty sure I'm just getting a few minutes of sleep each hour punctuated by moments of conscious awareness. So I'm sleeping-ish, but it doesn't feel to me like I am.

Oddly the time I get up also makes a difference. I've found that if I set my alarm for 6 AM, I'll usually wake up a few minutes before the alarm goes off and be ready to go. If I set it for 6:30, I won't want to get out of bed at that time. I figure I'm usually cutting off a deeper sleep cycle at 6:30, which makes it harder to get going. At least that's my hypothesis.

I've found a 20 minute power nap when I'm feeling really tired can keep me going another 4-6 hours, too. I read a study a while back that put forth the idea that you could get by indefinitely on a 4-hours-up cycle with a 20 minute nap between each cycle. Life circumstances usually make that difficult to test, and I'm almost completely positive that strategy wouldn't work for me anyway.

Will not be going to space today.

How to get that economy rolling again after it grinds to a halt. I'm thinking put everything for the next couple of years into farming and becoming self-sufficient, and start printing a crypto-drachma. This will look exactly like a regular drachma, except it will have the word "Crypto" in front of it. People with money eat that shit up. The Crypto-drachma will be backed with the full standing and reputation of the Greek government... and... um... did I mention it has the word "Crypto" in front of it? Say that enough and it will quickly become the pre-eminent currency of the world. Admittedly I know absolutely nothing about economics, but apparently neither did the people who got Greece into this.

That worked very well for PGP.

I believe technically ITAR classifies me as a weapon, because of the things that I know. One of which being exactly how well using ITAR to forbid the distribution of software worked on PGP. And also that putting shit back in the dog doesn't tend to work very well. And that the law was crafted by ignorant people who were under the illusion that was an option. The funny thing is, Americans are actually getting interested in making things again. With their hands. And other parts. And after a couple-three... four... or so... decades of Americans not really being all that interested in that, policy makers have no idea how to deal with it. So they can keep writing their laws and then someone will invent something like a crossbow that shoots dildos, and the legal arms race will continue. Except then at least one person will already have a crossbow that shoots dildos.

There you go, some premium weapon-grade snark. If someone is inspired by this post to create a crossbow that shoots dildos, please credit me. Or at least send me a youtube link.

Yeah, I started ripping my own CDs to MP3 early on in the game and quickly realized that putting my collection in Apple's hands would not let me retain control of my collection. That was back in the days of the white iPod. I currently use git annex to keep my collection synchronized across two computers and my android phone. That mostly seems to work, although the android client does seem to be a bit flaky.

Stores information and processes it in the same place? You mean like every other computer ever?

Smoke plus meat not hard. Og do great!

Funnily enough at the satellite company I worked for that one time, one of the older guys there mentioned how he almost lost a satellite once by logging in to his own account and issuing a maneuver command to the satellite. Problem was the satellite was expecting times in GMT and got them in MST. Took them days to get it oriented correctly again.

Now the programmers in the audience could probably think of like 10 different specific things that could be coded into the system to prevent that from happening, but this company didn't. Which really isn't too surprising. I asked one of the devs on the ground systems team if the ground systems was using GMT or UTC. His answer was "What's the difference?" I was able to infer from his answer that it was most likely GMT, and that did appear to be the case. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the system there was presumably some piece of code written by an Indian contractor with a math degree adjusting times for leap seconds, but it wasn't in any code that anyone knew about.

The early history of that company read like a Monty Python sketch. The first satellite exploded on the launch pad. The second satellite fell over and then exploded. The third satellite burned down, fell over, exploded and then sank into the swamp. The forth satellite got into orbit and was promptly bricked by sending the wrong version of Windows(!) to it. To be fair they only had to do that because they launched it with the wrong version of Windows(!!) in the first place. One would think that ANY version of Windows would be the wrong version of Windows to shoot into space, but that's why you're not the head of a billion dollar satellite company.

Was curious what an apparently undocumented feature on the login page did. Turns out what it did was crash the mainframe. Go figure. You'd think they'd take that shit off the login page, but apparently no one had ever been so curious as to explore it before. Which says a lot about that uni, now that I think about it. Also, once trash talked a uni in a story on a news blag website. Yeah, those were the days...

Mostly I make my career out of fixing other people's tech mistakes. Which is not something that uni taught me how to do. Man I'm glad I got out of that place before I ran up any significant student debt. Did I mention I trash talked a uni on a news blag website?

Well, they'll be useful when I decide to start jumping off perfectly good cliffs. If I ever get sick of IT, I could make a better-than-average living packing parachutes or possibly even flying a jump plane. I'd need to go get a pilot's license and a commercial rating for the latter, but demand definitely exceeds supply for skydiving pilots. Just because the majority of people never picks up a skill (Like lockpicking, contact juggling, parquor, etc) doesn't mean those skills aren't useful. They just require some creativity to use to their full potential.

More to the point, the skills I've picked up skydiving are not ones that are going to go away at any point in my life. Even if I quit the sport, I'd still be able to hop into the wind tunnel at any point and fly. Contrast that with the ability to, let's say, run Molten Core. Anyone in a guild who did that during vanilla WoW spent way more time learning how to do that than I did skydiving. Keep in mind that my actual freefall time at the time I got my A license was less than an hour. And that's with wind tunnel time. The hypothetical guild probably spent several times that much time wiping on trash to get to the first boss. Three years later, I'm still building on my skydiving skills. Three years later, the hypothetical guild's shiny purple crap has been obsolete for three expansions and if anyone runs Molten Core anymore, it's 1 or 2 people going for some vanity drop. That's a significantly less rewarding experience, and I know that first-hand.