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Being able to open a file to quickly change the fill color of a figure for example is nice.

I first did it with inscape and the file size of the simple logo I was editing went up by 6x due to the inscape metadata so I did it manually.

I'm 5 year older and I agree. You can also have a lot more fun by mixing board games / (drinking) card games / beer pongs in the same party.

It's becoming pretty common to know a few amateur DJs / music creators and if you have some decent speakers they happily mix for a part of the night. When they're done it's back to DJ ipod.

There is also plenty of raves where I live. I feel the atmosphere is much more enjoyable there than in night clubs

I agree that's not good but redhat seems to be one of the few organization that pays developers to improve parts of the linux ecosystem. So when redhat endorse a project it probably means it tries to address some pain points of the status quo.

That's how I see systemd and wayland. For systemd the consensus seems to be that's it's better than the previous init systems as most distributions have adopted it. It seems we're going in that direction with wayland but we'll see how it goes.

I seriously doubt that only one IP of Hetzner sent spam but unfortunately it seems to be pretty common for email providers to soft ban VPS IPs.

I don't know how much spam come from cheap hosting services but between the hacked servers and servers rented by spammers it's probably a lot.

The bombs have been removed some years ago in Switzerland as the risk of them going off was deemed greater than the risk of sudden invasion.

Just to nitpick, your point absolutely stands

Didn't the eu explicitly forbid this ? I wonder how their lawyer found a loophole. Or did they did the math and the fine is cheaper than the gains ?

If the person gives their consent to be filmed I don't think it's morally wrong. If I ended up in intensive care due to the covid I'd agree to be filmed for prevention

The people that have serious cases of the flu don't overwhelm the hospitals because a good part of the vulnerable population get vaccinated. The herd immunity also plays a role because this kind of virus has been around for a long time.

We could decide that lockdowns / restrictions are not good but then we also have to be okay with letting lot of people die gasping for air and drowning in their own lungs at home / in the hospital corridors. As much as I hate not being able to socialize how I like I still prefer that and it seem to also be the case for most of the population.

I have no idea if we'll ever be able to eradicate the Covid but if we don't it might become just an other flu when enough people are vaccinated or had it.

Don't universities have a huge number of IPs because they were the first to use internet ?

Mine gives one public ipv4 per device that access the internet on the network (with some exceptions). Strategies varies but if you have a lot of addresses why not use them.

Which is fine, you can learn a lot by immersion when you hear other native speakers talk. I only ask a person to repeat when I don't understand or if it's unclear and I need to be sure about something. Not breaking the flow of conversation is much more important to me

The last update of Firefox mobile really made wonder how it passed QA.

The navigation bar on the bottom is an interesting expiriment but still I quickly moved it back up.

The new tab layout is worse. Each tab need much more space so you can display about half the number of tabs on the same space.

The top sites when you opened a new tab also disappeared. It seems you can put bookmark or something to replace them but the top site feature was really good. I'm likely to want to visit sites I visit the most and that used to be a touch away

You can do that with old diesel engines but new ones are too sensitive and destroy themselves if you try to run them on anything but diesel.

It mostly because the high pressure pump use the Diesel for lubrication so if you use something else the pump destroy itself sending tiny metal shards down the pipe and into the injectors.

That's why accidentally running a diesel car on gas turn expensive fast. The contrary is much cheaper as just have to flush the fuel lines and you're good to go.

I really like most of the Pixar movies. I find them enjoyable both from a children and adult point of view while still touching pretty deep subject (inside out, up...)

St least Gboard let's you turn an option to allow "potentially offensive words" or something like that. I'm surprised it doesn't seem to exist on apple devices

The time iDrac annoyed me the most is when I bricked a server trying to update it.

I made the terrible mistake of jumping too far between versions and the update broke iDrac and thus the server. There was no warning on Dell's website nor any when I applied the update. I only found out what happened after some googling where I found the upgrade path I should have taken.

This is just terrible quality control and software engineering.

I recently had to code an HTML email signature for the first time and naive me used standard HTML/CSS features. It exploded in all kinds of wonderful ways.

Long story short it took me a week (try something, test it a bit, send it to a larger group of people and fix what broke) and email clients are stuck in the distant past. You have to use fixed-width tables to embed images (but also define the image width in the image tag ! Some clients ignore one or the other), you also have to use tables for layout and style inheritance doesn't really work because clients override styles. The only way to get consistent layout is to embed text in <span> and repeat the styling everywhere.

I also coded something to auto-generate the signature using data from the company intranet and I discovered that when you copy paste HTML code the browser will only copy HTML/CSS code that's actually rendered (you can fix that using draft APIs) but you still have the same problem when pasting the signature in the signature form (roundcube in our case) some duplicates attributes that the browser skip are actually useful for broken mail clients.

I finally got it working but I'd really wish mail clients would use modern web engines. All major mail clients come from organization that also make browsers. I doesn't have to be that painful

Edit: thanks to those who suggested tools to help with that ! It took so long because I was just telling myself, it can't be that broken. Just try that and it should work. I'll definitely try them if I ever have to write email HTML again

The article made me think that the guy who rejected the proposition rejected it because it would have lessened the importance of his ministry as most of the job within could have been automated if the project turned out to be successful.

I'd also say that great social skills are just as important today. Society is not meritocratic, you can have best idea, the best solution to a problem if you can't sell it or react appropriately to criticism (even to you coworkers) you're going to be frustrated. I'd that sometimes include being "cunning" if the person you're talking to is not being honest you don't have to be either.

People who try to move stock market have certainly some power (or at least lot of money or it's useless) but that doesn't mean that people who lost money or the regulators are okay with market manipulation.

Maybe they can't do anything about it. I admit my knowledge of finance is limited. I've read about the SEC doing investigations after Elon Musk tweet for example.

And they face no repercussions for that ? That's the kind of things that tend to annoy powerful people

As a customer I'm somewhat happy Intel finally pays for their anticompetitves practices (karma wise) but at the same time I'm worried about the US losing its advantage in chip manufacturing.

Do we know what really went wrong at Intel ? I know they made a big bet on a technology that didn't pay off. Is it that they just had no competition for years and became complacent ?

I also wonder how much TSMC will ask Intel to split the company to ensure that their process does not leak to the Intel side. There is probably lots of interesting details about what works you can obtain if you work closely with TSMC engineers.

That server is at least 10 years old and quite custom. For example when an email is received the address is queried to an ldap and if it's a mailing list the email is sent to all the recipients of that mailing list which can be other mailing lists ! This goes on until an user address is found and then the email is delivered to the cyrus server.

Each user can also have many alternative addresses that map to an unique mailbox

Those mailings lists are used a lot internally and managed with internally developed tools. This make migrating to an external service difficult.

That's the classic example of some critical piece of infrastructure that nobody dare to touch because it works... until it doesn't anymore.

That's why we don't use external services to receive email. I'll consider using mailJet if setting up exim & related stuff correctly to send email in 2020 proves too painful.

Tangentially related but I'm having some issues related to email beeing refused by Gmail.

In my organization we have ~10 linux VM and they are all configured to send email to an exim MTA. For example monitoring stuff. The system mail name is set to vmName.srv.domain.name (domain.name is replaced by our actual domain and this resolve to a local address) so it's quite common to receive mail from root@vmName.srv.domain.name. This cause no issue when it's delivered to the local Cyrus server but when it's transfered to a Gmail address for some reason Gmail reject the email because the headers are bad.

I am considering rewriting the address to user.vmName.srv@domain.name in exim when receiving email from local VMs and I am wondering if this could be a bad idea.

I'm going to redo this mail server from scratch soon because it has been left untouched for something like 6 years. Some software was compiled on it with shared libraries which then were updated but the software was not recompiled. It's a dumpster fire and I'm actually surprised most of our emails seem to go through.

I would also add to the article that's it's a good idea to have some rate limit on outbound email, outbound email spam checks and to check that the user sending email has the right to use that address.

I think backblaze does it well. You can set limits for each type of API transaction and you receive email and sms notification when you get close to the cutoff limit (70% and 90% IIRC). You have a page with all the costs and how close you're to the limit if any. 2FA was also straightforward to setup. If your account is compromised the limits can still be lifted but there is limited interest in compromising a backblaze account in the first place and the 2FA makes it unlikely.

I'm the sysadmin for a small nonprofit so my organization qualify for the $3500 yearly azure credits but the inability to set spending limits makes me not use azure. If I make a mistake or worse an admin account is compromised the azure bill is potentially infinite.

With azure I think you can mitigate the issue somewhat by having a superAdmin account without limits and set quotas for everything else but I still don't feel at ease with that.

My organization is a music festival so the infrastructure really has to work and not stop one day per year. I can keep an eye on everything during the festival and monitor spending. If things stop not during the festival people are a bit annoyed until I can look into the issue but nothing bad happens.

In a perfect world I'd like to have a way to setup a limit where you need to go through support to increase it. I'd really pay for that. I think it's really too easy to receive a nasty surprise bill.

Thank you ! That was interesting read. The main problems with LibreSSL are software compatibility since most software only build against OpenSSL and performance because the portable version doesn't include optimisations for other platforms than x86_64

The slides came out in 2014 so the API / ABI thing was probably true then but not anymore.

Maybe things would have been different if LibreSSL was backed by a major Linux distribution and OpenBSD. Even then Unix/Linux is not the only target of a lot of software and I doubt a lot of developer would have put the time to support both.

[Edit] I just saw in an other comment that LibreSSL is used in MacOSX and windows for openSSH. Maybe developers will consider it if it becomes available on major platforms

Damn OpenSSL sounds a lot worse than I thought after reading those slides. The custom malloc, the function that allow you to jump anywhere in OpenSSL, the 17 layer deep IFDef, the dubious entropy that openSSL try to generate if the OS doesn't provide it, the bugs that sit in the issue tracker for years.

A lot of that uglyness seems to come from the fact that OpenSSL wants to support all environments (even DOS). I wonder why distributions haven't switched since LibreSSL was made to be API/ABI compatible with openSSL and target a POSIX OS. This would be much more justified than the ffmepg / libav thing imo.

This made me think of BoringSSL and LibreSSL again.

Looking up on Wikipedia it seems that LibreSSL is focused on OpenBSD and removed lots of legacy code. BoringSSL (Google) got renamed to Tink but I couldn't not find much more.

It's sad to see that duplication of effort but it's also the force of open source

You can tell your Dell laptop to not charge the battery to 100% in bios now. Since mine is often plugged in I enabled this setting and the capacity seems to stay stable (I've had it for two years now)

Reading part 1&2 I wonder how many people at HP tried to simplify that process and juste gave up.

It's probably pretty invisible for the developer if he has the "firmware creation pipeline" working on his machine but that's layer over layers of legacy stuff and the added complexity probably led to some nasty bugs.

I wonder if it was a fuel issue. The "we lost two engines" near the destination airport makes me think of that.

Did you end up with significally different values sometimes ?