systems_glitch

Thanks, this is exactly the content I come here for. Apt handle :P

I am very not comfortable with the situation, as a seller. I mailed out the stuff that was paid for before the outage...but I don't think I'm mailing anything else until I can disburse.

We all know that's what it is, I don't know why people aren't willing to just say it.

It has a domain, it has a logo, they were going for maximum impact because it's their business.

Yeah this sucks, I have a bunch of hobbyist orders stuck in limbo since last week -- customers have paid, but I can't pull the orders down even through the API.

I really like Tindie as a platform and have been using it since nearly the beginning...but I'd have lost the contract if I pulled this level of nonsense on a customer's production application.

Nothing wrong with Rails in 2026. We still use it for both internal and customer projects. I haven't yet encountered anything that made me feel like switching. I'm also not interested in changing frameworks just to have the New Hotness die in 2-5 years (our oldest currently maintained Rails project is over 10 years old, and some stuff I started working on when Rails 2 was new is still being maintained, just not by us)

End of an era. We used to get it on CD in school.

And it'll be open sourced once everything is done!

I don't always play UT2K4, but when I do, it's usually with Ballistic Weapons mod + Sergeant Kelly's weapon packs. I agree that the UT2K4 weapons just don't quite do it like UT99.

Still the FPS I play the most! We organize LAN parties at some of the vintage computer events.

Probably the most likely explanation, given so many things do inherit idiosyncrasies from C. I'd always assumed it was from Perl, given its heavy use in CGI back then -- like $_ being the default var. But that would probably also eventually inherit from C :P

"I dunno...is magic" (engineering Calculus II GTA, Virginia Tech, 2006)

We're redoing some of our application servers to bring everything under Ansible management, modernize, etc. Most of what we write gets deployed on OpenBSD. It's mostly been a painless process, except for that nagging "have to build it by hand with command line switches" issue with Nokogiri :P

Anyway, this writeup is basically everything you need to get your Sinatra application deploying under Puma, using Capistrano to manage the deploys, onto OpenBSD hosts. Reverse proxying and TLS

Same basic experience. The colo ISP soaks up most actual DDoS. We had a couple mid-sized ones when we were hosting irc.binrev.net from salty b& users. No real effect other than the colo did let us know it was happening and that it was "not a significant amount of DDoS by our standards."

Plus, learning PDP-11 ASM explains some of the idioms from C as they map directly onto the architecture! "Pointer to a pointer" is just a native addressing mode, for instance.

Agree, I like the 6502 architecture but tend to steer newcomers in vintage computers away from it if they have no previous ASM experience.

I started on PIC16 assembly, and dabbled in a bunch of other architectures, but my favorite in terms of cleanness has been MIPS32.

Nitpick: you can still buy new made 6502s, MCUs with 6502 cores, and peripheral chips from Western Design Center. They sell through e.g. Mouser:

https://www.mouser.com/c/?m=Western%20Design%20Center%20%28W...

Judging from former jobs, yeah, kinda lost :/ We still colo, it's way more cost effective than PaaS or VMs or someone else's bare metal.

Email sent, we can probably host you.

Indeed, we donate to several open source projects on which we depend, but we're also a small two-person operation. No medium/large company I've worked for ever donated monetarily to open source projects, though one did encourage us to fix bugs and submit patches/pull request, which is at least something!

Slackware's the same way, most donations come from individuals and very small companies.

Oh man that sucks! I wonder if we could pull Alpine into our colo, we recently upgraded to a full rack from 2U (it was cheaper than a quarter rack!) and have a ton of space. Plus all of our libvirt/KVM HVMs run Alpine.

There's an old LCM (Living Computer Museum, RIP) video where they run off a card deck of a risque ASCII art program on an IBM mainframe's line printer. It feigns a printer fault after printing the subject down to the shoulders, only to finish the print suddenly (line printers are fast!) when the operator has gone over to the printer. IIRC the original livestream was unprepared for that :P

Yup, that's why they were such useful devices! Even if you were ending up with inefficient storage (punching ASCII vs. binary, or expanded BASIC source vs. tokens), it was built-in.

Rails still gets the job done. That's what you get paid to do -- the job!

Important point not really expanded upon in the article: Roger Melen was one of the founders of Cromemco, a very successful microcomputer company that started with S-100 products!

Or: why I still drive to a lot of customer on-site visits, so I can take the hardware with me personally.

It's not 150 LBS, even fully kitted out (which wasn't possible at the time!), but it definitely didn't fit in the luggage compartment. The first portable to do that was the Osborne :P

Furthermore, the Teletype was also your storage device, if you bought the Model 33 ASR. It had both a paper tape punch and a reader. For $1500 you got not only your hardcopy console terminal, but at the time the most compatible way to load and store programs and data!

Yes, in its most basic configuration, it is essentially a microprocessor trainer! The only I/O you had was a set of 8 "sense switches," which were a byte-wide input port, and those were shared with the upper 8 address bits. Someone eventually figured out routines that make use of nonexistent memory in the base configuration to use the upper address lights as a "display," by writing loops that accessed those areas frequently enough to make the LEDs look illuminated due to persistence of vision. That, with the sense switch inputs, was used to put together a "Kill the Bit" game!

There was another "output device" discovered in the basic configuration: RF interference! Someone was listening to an AM radio while hacking on their Altair, and noticed in some parts of the program they'd get a ZIIIIIP! sort of noise out of the radio, when the cover was off. This was hacked on and expanded into a tune-playing program! Naturally, one of the first songs the Altair was taught to "sing" was "Bicycle Built for Two" ("Daisy"). Here's a video of a friend of mine's Altair running the music program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tImrHlYLzZo

He'd brought his recently-acquired Altair 8800 over to our house to get it running, since I had a lot of other S-100 stuff going. The terminal to the left of it was running a ROM monitor on a Dajen SCI board, described here:

http://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2011/11/03/dajen-sci

...after painstakingly toggling in the music program through the front panel, we used the Dajen board to burn the program into a 2708 1K x 8 EPROM so we wouldn't have to do it again!

Probably. I run all the old, insecure machines on their own subnet and physical segment, and some of the "keep them going" services are hosted on VMs running on our modern VM hosts. We've got a few things that have to cross the router/firewall between the two networks, not SMB currently though.

Yeah we run this on our own Proton Mail whitelabel, and for a few customers who have us manage it, mostly for the filtering aspect, and the occasional customer who has the wrong/mis-spelled address in their system and won't change it.

Indeed, most of our public-facing services are hosted on OpenBSD, and all of our routers and firewalls run it. We started managing everything with Ansible to make it easier to ignore what the host OS is for a deployment, and that has worked well both in moving things to [Open,Net]BSD for experiments, and also standing up tests on various Linux distros just to make sure we're not running into a BSD vs. GNU issue, or even a "problem only on this specific distro" issue.

#1 reason we chose Ansible over other tools was support for the BSDs.

Ugh, we had a FNG that did debug things like that at a previous job. His "humor" got exposed to the client several times.