billybofh

That might be due to restrictions on things regular companies/people can post in the UK. I used to work for $big_parcel_company and the list of things you weren't allowed to send was... interesting. Some made sense (bodily fluids for instance) some just seemed like old hangups (which possibly accounts for the hair in this case).

There's also an excellent old BBC dramatisation of this - and a few other good dystopian sci-fi's as part of the same strand called "Out of the Unknown". "Level Seven" and "Tunnel Under the World" are especially memorable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Unknown

Having been doing sysadmin duties for more years than I care to remember and having gone through the gradual process of manual configuration -> shell scripts -> cfengine -> puppet, I'd say despite problems in tools like puppet/salt/etc they are way, way more reliable and sysadmin friendly than shell scripts.

For just one example, I've recently begun deploying CentOS 7 boxes whereas previously we mostly used 6 (and some 5). Largely the existing puppet modules kept on working despite major OS changes (hello systemd!). If I'd been maintaining a set of bash (or as used to be, csh) scripts I'd hate to imagine the amount of spaghetti I'd have to have mashed up.

We've also got almost every Linux distribution out there you can think of, versions going back a decade or more, Solaris boxes, BSD's and not long got rid of our last AIX box (and I'm going to ignore the last couple of OpenVMS machines). Handling it with hand-rolled scripts was really not fun compared to puppet.

Just curious if you've ever tried a non-GUI client like Mutt[1]. I used to love Mutt, but switched to Thunderbird at work as I was increasingly having to deal with a lot of attachments and it was just easier to handle with the GUI. At home I still use Mutt though.

[1] http://www.mutt.org/

I really liked him in the 1978 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077745/

The choice of font is terrible...

I do quite a lot of what could be considered artistic photography, had exhibitions, been published etc - and I find film is just more beautiful than digital. A poetic point possibly, but when I'm making a piece of visual art that's kind of what I'm after. Digital is certainly a lot more convenient and a lot quicker, but when I want to really capture a special image I'll always do it on film.

I started out on digital but now work more and more with film. There's just "something" about a film image compared to the same shot done digitally which I can't explain. Though a friend who is an optics&laser specialist and does a lot of astronomy photography going back many years suggested that your eyes can perceive the crystal/"organic" structure of a film print and prefers it to a clean ordered digital one. No idea if that's true - but I liked the idea ;-)

One of our city-based HPC facilities has had a recurring fault where the aircon goes off for no obvious reason overnight. Eventually we figured out that a homeless guy had realised he could sleep above a vent from the aircon and be relatively warm - and had also realised he could turn off the system (it's not very secure) to cut the noise down but still be warm from the heat coming out.

At the moment we're just ignoring it as it's -3C just now in the daytime. Better to loose a few HPC jobs than freeze the poor guy.

On another comic note : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YKvtX8E-v8

See also the 'Synod of Whitby' (Whitby is also famous for Dracula - I'm not sure if that's related, but if you're a goth or easter-history fan it's a great place to visit! ;-) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Whitby

I have suffered a few commercial backup packages, and by and large they've been pretty grim to use. Veritas was the last one and (at the time) its interface was a horrid java lump combined with a fairly arcane backend of config files. And it was eye-wateringly expensive for what we needed (or had the budget for).

If I was still backing up to tape units I might still consider them as last time I looked at OSS tape-backed backup it was pretty spartan.

Yikes - this took me right back to writing M68000 bootsector demo/loaders on my AtariST in the 80's. Happy times. I sometimes wish there was still more of that creative free-for-all spirit in todays UI's. To think of the computing power we have now compared to then - it's slightly saddening to see how conservative and often ugly the interfaces we use are.

I've been a longtime linux sysadmin (back into the 90's) and have run into similar issues as you. I've never had as many problems with basic system stuff as I have since testing some of the new systemd-defaulting distro's. For instance, the centos/rhel 7 boxes I've tried have erratic problems - sometimes not setting the hostname, sometimes services don't start, sometimes services I've disabled _do_ start. It's making me really think about shifting to FreeBSD (or, god help me back to Solaris).

There's a really good O'Reilly book on this geared towards sysadmins (though I'm sure it applies to dev's etc).

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007836.do

Just following it for a short time made my work & life a whole, whole lot better.

All this without docker? Their devops team is seriously behind the times...

It reads to me like it's going to do what OpenVZ has been doing for the past decade or so. Where would be be in IT without wheels needing re-invented?

I've used to to make an Ubuntu packaged app available on CentOS machines. The compile-from-source was a bit of a headache (lots of dependencies which also had to be compiled from source) so being able to deploy like this saved a lot of hassle.

I've got to maintain a couple of RHEL4 servers that have simulation software running on them that has never been ported forward (education - the people who wrote it have long since left). Though we also still have a couple of DEC Alpha's kicking about attached to nanofabrication services. Fun times... Luckily I don't need to maintain all the win98 boxes we still have as well. Or the DOS ones.

Variety is the spice of life, and all that...

That would diminish the usefulness of the map quite a bit. People will be interested in this on a ward-by-ward basis - I'm pretty sure. A small random 'shuggle' should be enough to help.

Do you have any plans to have a 'broadcast' mode where the person who creates the whiteboard is the only one who can draw on it? I can see itchy student fingers abusing it otherwise in a teaching context... ;-)

There was a related 'In Business' BBC Radio 4 programme on this subject last week - it was an interesting listen. You can download it here (possibly UK only - not sure) "In Business: Fast and Furious 7 Aug 2014" :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/worldbiz

There was also a pretty good BBC Radio dramatisation of it. Sadly, from a quick search, they don't seem to be selling it - but there are copies floating about online. Well worth a listen.

A really simple typo - but it's always stayed with me. Many years ago on a Very Important Solaris Box(TM) I wanted to check when it had rebooted a few months before, so typed "last | grep reboot". Only I forgot to put in the 'grep'... (and if you're not a Solaris person - 'reboot' is pretty brutal on it - you may as well just pull the power cable out the back).

What a fun day that was....

I guess. Having a commercial version with a different name to push can't have helped the branding either.

Yeah, I realise it's place in LXC history. It still seems slightly odd that it's been kind of overlooked. It offered quite a lot (and still does) that I don't see replicated in any of the other container packages. At least not without quite a lot of manual faff.

Possibly it was just a little ahead of it's time and was also overshadowed by the rise of HW virtualisation in the later 2000's. Having to install a custom kernel (certainly when I used it) was also a bit of a hassle mind you. Anyway - maybe someone will re-invent the toolchain using Swift or Node and it'll become cool again ;-)

I'm always surprised that OpenVZ[1] doesn't come up more in discussions about containers. I used to use it extensively in for small lightweight VPS's (usually just an apache or mysql instance) and always found it to be pretty impressive. I've used Docker to make a debian-packaged app available on a bunch of CentOS machines and it saved me a huge headache (the dependency tree for the app was huge) so I'm a fan - but still a little puzzled at OpenVZ's seeming invisibility.

[1] http://openvz.org/Main_Page

For me http://www.taps-aff.co.uk/ is usually the go-to site. Certainly a taps-aff kinda day!