75F and raining. Probably not getting super hot today. Yesterday was hot and humid enough for two days. Sun was out until late, when we got a quick and quiet shower. The radar maps had us getting rain late in the night and so we have been. My weather station says we’ve gotten 0.85 inch since midnight.
Did not sleep well last night. Weird dreams. Woke dreaming of working for 0.1%-ers in Chicago or some other old and big city. The gap between the wealthy and the not keeps getting bigger. Our Lords are not tied to the land, but the serfs still are. Methinks that sometime soon, we’ll have a lot fewer Lords, but times will be terrible for the serfs too. Will we see a return of families throwing their daughters out on the water like a lifeline? Will the nouveau riche scramble to find alliances to save their fortunes through their kids? If so, the old money will definitely have the edge, what with all those centuries of practice…
n
I had a funny one yesterday: a student wrote a Linux script on his Mac, then mailed it to himself on his Linux box. The script was messed up – on the end of every line was a ^M and Linux refused to run it.
Gray hairs like us, of course, immediately know what ^M is. But neither Mac nor Linux use it, so where was it coming from? It turns out that he was mailing over his school account, which runs MS Exchange. It appears that Exchange recognizes the script as a text file, and rewrites it with Windows line-endings. Seriously, WTF?
Sending it in a ZIP file solved the problem, but what is a mail server doing, altering the contents of attachments? That is seriously messed up.
– – – – –
“he signaled, but for less that 100 ft”
Actually, that’s messed up. Either they have evidence against the guy, or they don’t. Making shit up is just wrong; so is contriving some random reason to toss the guy’s car. The next logical step – which we’ve seen often enough – are the police carrying around little baggies to plant, to make sure there’s something to find.
I would guess it is not the mail server but probably some anti-virus software installed on the server. Schools have to do strange things with files to keep the network safe from corruption. The AV software probably reads the file and then rewrites morphing the line endings in the process. Probably an unknown
bugfeature.Want to know how much a pain in the ass Winmail.dat is? RTF files from old exchange servers. Several of my users still get them and of course the user is clueless. Senders using old systems never updated but ‘Everyone here can read it’. Easy to fix with the ‘Look Out’ extension in Thunderbird but not a default install.
Predicted today 101 °F then back down to mid 80s Fri and Sat then back to high 90s by Sun. What a roller coaster. Oh and Sierra snow pack adjusted to 200% normal now so rivers are running. Good day to hit the pool and avoid work.
I had a funny one yesterday: a student wrote a Linux script on his Mac, then mailed it to himself on his Linux box. The script was messed up – on the end of every line was a ^M and Linux refused to run it.
Yeah, dos2unix is his friend. Anymore, it doesn’t get installed everywhere by default, however. Increasingly, the same goes for sharutils.
FYI: With Catalina, Apple is going to ditch Bash as a default in favor of Zsh. Your students will want to be aware of the change. Bash will still be available, but Apple’s distaste for GPL 3 means that the version they ship is pretty old.
78f at 6am this morning. Humidity was 82% so it was already miserable when I got in the morning commute. Mississippi summers feel too much like Hong Kong. At least in Mississippi we get a couple of months break from the heat and humidity. I LOVED living in HK except for the weather. And the pollution blowing across from south China.
Our CEO & CIO are in town this week to see our new Security Operations Center (SOC). The new VIP of Info Security has re-purposed a big closet as a SOC with wall screens and impressive graphics. But there’s only room for two people in there and the heat from the equipment makes the room unbearable. I’m guessing the CEO won’t linger long in there.
“so is contriving some random reason to toss the guy’s car”
Yep, that was part of my point. They waited for ‘probable cause’ to pull him over, then made it look like a traffic stop all along. That helps to protect their source, and in his mind shifts the blame to his own fault rather than a snitch in his org.
They use regular patrol cops to make the stops and the searches on most of these surveillance ops. Something to keep in mind when you hear about a ‘traffic stop’ that yields a drug bust.
In general that sort of thing is called ‘selective enforcement’ and is supposed to be forbidden. It goes back to the idea of ‘3 felonies a day’ too.
Make it impossible to follow the law and you can make criminals of anyone you want.
n
added- all part of the ‘you can learn alot’ by listening to the scanner. and taking classes, and going to the meetings.
@Greg: I had totally forgotten about dos2unix. Anyway, we solved the problem by zipping the file. Frankly, I’ve never done much *nix scripting – when I need it, it’s copy-and-paste from online examples.
Today’s great task was catching up on my email. I’d been too busy to really keep up with it for the past few weeks, so it was quite a slog. Finally done, both business and private, maybe half-a-dozen “pending” messages left in each inbox. Whew!
I won’t be riding a kayak down from Lake Isabella this summer.
Kern River through Bakersfield running high and strong. They have a high outflow going to make room in Isabella Lake. Lot more water than the farms need. Tulare lake may start to reappear.
Slim, you can do a paddle board from Bakersfield west to Buena Vista Lake.
We did a professionally guided trip down many years ago after normal winter, Had to get out and ford around some rapids.
About 40 years ago, a just hired out of college would not take no to going by himself. Never came back.
@Greg: I had totally forgotten about dos2unix. Anyway, we solved the problem by zipping the file. Frankly, I’ve never done much *nix scripting – when I need it, it’s copy-and-paste from online examples.
Shellshock and a couple of other recent bugs in Bash motivated me to move away from shell scripts. The really shocking aspect of the aptly named bug is that it went back to 1989, the earliest days of GNU.
As of late, if I need to do a script that sticks around in production, I use Python and Pylint the daylights out of it until I have a 7-8 score using the defaults.
If I want to write a script that motivates people to view it as temporary and/or the TCP must be uber reliable, I use Tcl.
Perl seems unmaintainable to me, even going back to my own work viewed months later. What does that macro do again? Oh, yeah, that’s it. Madness.
A little bit of humor…
–A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
–Some technical advice: Don’t use “beef stew” as a computer password. It’s not stroganoff.
n
We have gotten at least five inches of rain so far as the swimming pool runneth over and it was at least five inches below the decking. About 30 miles south of here in the city of Wharton (where my mother was born), they have gotten over ten inches of rain and the Colorado river may come out of its primary bank later today.
https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?gage=what2&wfo=hgx
In other news, the Brazos River (just 300 ft from my house) is still running high (35 ft) since the Possum Kingdom dam north of Waco, Texas just opened a third sluice gate wide open which caused the Brazos to rise another five ft or so. The rain from today has caused the Brazos to rise another couple of feet, probably back up to 38 foot. We don’t get the river on our levee until 45 foot, but that is a lot of water out there.
https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=HGX&gage=RMOT2
“Heavy rains possible today through the early afternoon”
https://spacecityweather.com/heavy-rains-possible-today-through-the-early-afternoon/
Oh yeah, Las Vegas is looking at us enviously today.
Please divert Brazos water to Vegas.
@lynn, we are showing 2.11 inches here in spring branch since midnight.
We got almost nothing yesterday, but my wife said she was hammered in another part of town. Our neighborhood just isn’t getting the rain this time.
n
These churches are all over Houston.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-7108049/Leader-La-Luz-del-Mundo-church-charged-child-rape.html
They generally look like someone’s fever dream of a greek or roman temple.
n
“Microsoft Launches Xbox-branded Shower Gel, Deodorant, Body Spray”
https://www.thurrott.com/xbox/208029/microsoft-launches-xbox-branded-shower-gel-deodorant-body-spray
Yes, we are living in Heinlein’s crazy years.
Please divert Brazos water to Vegas.
You gotta provide the pumps, pipelines, land, and power to get that water over the Rockies. Good luck !
We’ll use solar power from the Ivanpah plant to vaporize the water with giant mirrors, then seed the clouds after they make it to Nevada. That will only take 116 years and 41 Trillion dollars. Much better than you plan. Bernie “Comrade Magoo” Sanders told me.
Green New Deal by 2135!
I need more liquor
We’ll use solar power from the Ivanpah plant to vaporize the water with giant mirrors, then seed the clouds after they make it to Nevada. That will only take 116 years and 41 Trillion dollars. Much better than you plan. Bernie “Comrade Magoo” Sanders told me.
Nope, water vapor is the number global warming compound in the atmosphere. Not green !
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.html
We got almost nothing yesterday, but my wife said she was hammered in another part of town. Our neighborhood just isn’t getting the rain this time.
The storm moved *fast*. It looks like core Houston and the upstream river areas are already on the “dry” side.
These churches are all over Houston.
…
They generally look like someone’s fever dream of a greek or roman temple.
Reminds me of International Sai.
At Death Star Telephone I worked for a guy roughly my age whose wife was one of those X-er females in college in the 80s who fell hard for the Sai Baba message … or as we called him out of earshot of the boss “The Baba Lama”.
The Baba Lama was wanted in EU countries for child molestation. Last I heard, he was still holed up in India.
My apologies if I offend anyone about International Sai, but I’d be surprised if any of the regulars here were into it.
_World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War_ by Max Brooks
https://www.amazon.com/World-War-Oral-History-Zombie/dp/0307888681/?tag=ttgnet-20
A singular book, no prequel or sequel that I know of. There are several other books published in the universe by the author though. I read the well printed and bound MMPB even though the type was little small. The original hardback of this book was published in 2006. I doubt that there will be any follow-on books but, who knows ? BTW, the author is the youngest son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft.
The book inspired a movie starring Brad Pitt. Just about the only similarity between the book and the movie is the name of the work and that the subject matter is about zombies.
I would call this book the perennial work on zombies. First, just getting bit by a zombie does not cause people to turn to a zombie in eleven seconds. People still have to get sick and die in days to weeks after the bite. Then the rise of the undead takes a day or so.
The book is a series of many short stories in which the author interviewed various survivors of the zombie apocalypse. The zombie apocalypse was devastating on the worlds population with a death toll in the several billions. The living won, but at a horrible cost.
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars (5,586 reviews)
“Microsoft Announces Modern OS” by Paul Thurrott
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/207439/microsoft-announces-modern-os
In an otherwise innocuous blog post about new PCs announce at Computex, Microsoft talked up the need for something it calls Modern OS. And it does not appear to be Windows 10.
“A modern operating system is required for these new, modern PCs and innovative devices that the ecosystem will continue to build and bring to market,” Microsoft’s Nick Parker writes after running down a list of new PCs from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI.”
“Of this Modern OS—and, yes, it’s both “Modern OS” and “a modern OS”—Parker says it:”
“Provides a set of enablers that deliver the foundational experiences customers expect from their devices. These enablers include “seamless updates where updates are invisibly done in the background; the update experience is deterministic, reliable, and instant with no interruptions.” So he clearly not talking about Windows 10.”
How many operating systems has Microsoft announced now ?
In an otherwise innocuous blog post about new PCs announce at Computex, Microsoft talked up the need for something it calls Modern OS. And it does not appear to be Windows 10.
A modern OS? They’re going to run a Linux kernel instead of VMS?
(Damn, Dave Cutler is still at Microsoft! Dave hates Unix of all kinds.)
RHEL 8 is going to be based on Fedora 28. Microsoft could one-up them and go for Fedora 30 with the new kernel and GCC. Very smooth so far for me, but this *is* Microsoft we’re talking about and Technical Fellow or higher code output is sacred (again, see rand()/srand()).
How many operating systems has Microsoft announced now ?
One day, maybe, they will get Windows 10 out of this extended mass Beta program they’ve run for the last five years. We’re all unpaid testers.
We’ll see if they actually have the stones to pull the plug in Windows 7 at the end of the year. That’s the last actual desktop of release quality produced in Redmond and not outsourced to India.
I worked on the predecessor solar plant built at Daggett, Ca, 45 years ago. TOTAL FRAUD! Gave up running as too expensive shortly.
Ok, I’ve had the kids home all day because swim got canceled due to rain. They are driving me mad…
They’ve been playing minecraft for more than an hour. Minecraft is just grinding isn’t it? Is there a game there somewhere? The weird part is they are playing in a “Nightmare Before Christmas” world, which they love. “Don’t kill all the baby kittens, we need to tame some. Try string…”
they didn’t spend much time trying to play lego Indiana Jones… or the dance game I got.
It’s quieter than the netflix series they watched all morning. I’ll give it that.
n
Please divert Brazos water to Vegas.
You gotta provide the pumps, pipelines, land, and power to get that water over the Rockies. Good luck !
I forgot to add that this will be much cheaper than your New Green Deal solution. Only hundreds of billions of dollars instead of trillions of dollars.
They’ve been playing minecraft for more than an hour. Minecraft is just grinding isn’t it? Is there a game there somewhere? The weird part is they are playing in a “Nightmare Before Christmas” world, which they love. “Don’t kill all the baby kittens, we need to tame some. Try string…”
Minecraft can be anything in theory. I remember reading that a CS PhD student proved that the Minecraft “red” stones can be used to construct Universal Turing Machines. The machines run slowly, but they do run.
Turing Machines are the most powerful model for computing found to date. While it is a gigantic, verbose pain in the a** for even a simple program, any computing process can be modeled by a Turing Machine.
Maybe some kid saving kittens in Minecraft will prove P = NP, and then cryptography is useless (among other fallout from such a proof).
The scanner is full of bus drivers that can’t get down streets to deliver their students. The rain here stopped, it got hot out, and now it’s misty and temps dropped back to 76F.
Looking at the radar map, that was a huge storm that basically missed us… but Lafayette and Baton Rouge are about to get CLOBBERED.
n
84 deg F, 78% RH: Feels like 98 deg F.
It is said that the reason why the denizens of the Crescent City look so young is that they get free saunas on days like today.
Another day of mowing… two and a half hours at a time is enough. The padding in the seat seems to have collapsed since last year. Another day tomorrow and then it’s time for the push mower around the edges and trees.
Yeah, maybe I should have mowed in March. “But the wild flowers!”. 🙂
The padding in the seat seems to have collapsed since last year.
Ok, this is unclear. Are you talking about the padding in the mower seat or your posterior ?
“Main threat of heavy rainfall over, but we have some Thursday concerns”
https://spacecityweather.com/main-threat-of-heavy-rainfall-over-but-we-have-some-thursday-concerns/
“A few notes: We actually pinpointed the Matagorda region as a potential hotspot during the overnight hours, and they along with Wharton County certainly bore the brunt of heavy rainfall with 14+ inches in a few locations. An area near College Station also picked up 5 inches of rain, as did Port Arthur. Closer to Houston, the eastern half of Harris County got the worst of it on Wednesday. I would also like to point out that fewer than 100 miles separates Wharton, where a foot of rain fell, from Conroe, where one-third of an inch fell. Welcome to meteorology.”
“I would also like to point out that fewer than 100 miles separates Wharton, where a foot of rain fell, from Conroe, where one-third of an inch fell.”
Another way to put that might be, “Wharton and Conroe are more than an hour and a half drive apart by car, with two counties in between, so it’s no surprise that they have different weather…..”
But I guess you could go with his version…
n
@nick
These churches are all over Houston.
We’ve got one in Anchorage
https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/anchorage/2018/03/21/from-inside-the-wedding-cake-church-in-midtown-anchorage-the-faithful-finally-see-progress/
Our first Cardigan died last Thursday night. He was 14 1/2. I’d been anticipating it and tried to prepare our 7 year old over the last few months.
It was a good death, as these things go. His quality of life was pretty good up to the last couple of hours. A friend who is a veterinarian did an at home euthanasia at 11:30 pm when he began showing signs of distress. He went, for the most part, on his own terms. We all had a chance to give him some last loving scritches and our daughter got to spend time with him before and after. Our other dogs are moping around (so are we) however nothing like the moping and searching I’ve seen when one of our dogs was euthanized away from home.
I submit that being prepared to do the merciful thing yourself (our plan b), or lining up a veterinarian to do an in home euthanasia ahead of time, is a reasonable prep for an animal owner. There are several veterinarians in our town who will perform this service. The cost is about the same as an after hours ER Vet Office euthanasia.
I’m grateful we weren’t at an ER Vet at midnight with a teary 7 year old.
We had a lot of fun competing in a variety of sports. He often placed in the top 3 regardless of the sport. The titles don’t mean much to the dog but the ribbons are a nice tangible thing to give shape to memories. He had a lot of friends and admirers – amusing as he didn’t particularly like people. He was our goody boy.
BarnHunt
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EQRtnkKzPos
Rally
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CyC7ygP4h4w&t=2s
1st time on sheep
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s7mwE9jhZtM
So far, in my experience, Android app updates come close to this ideal, although most occur over night or during inactivity.
OS updates are usually more difficult, and *nix variants as a group seem good, although I have no experience with servers. On the desktop, my experience with Linux has not been good. I am never sure when to restart after an update, and have suffered many problems when not restarting. My latest policy is to always restart Mint 17.x after any update. This is better, but I still have random glitches I can’t explain. Many are apps, but some take out the whole OS. I am beginning to think Windows’ more frequent restarts are actually a feature. I am doomed.
Jenny, my condolences. For most people, pets are family. Losing an animal is in some ways more difficult than losing a human. Animals are innocent creatures who love us unconditionally. We can only hope to be that good.
Our first Cardigan died last Thursday night. He was 14 1/2. I’d been anticipating it and tried to prepare our 7 year old over the last few months.
@Jenny, I feel your pain. We (and I) are still missing our 16 year old cocker spaniel Lady who passed last Dec 30. Good luck with comforting the 7 year old, he was her buddy and partner in crime from her first awareness. He was probably also her secret confidant. Good to hear that you have a couple more to help share the grieving.
We may getting an 8 week old puppy from a neighbor. She is a mix of sheltie and a few other things and a gentle soul. We will find out soon. We think that she will do well with our 12 pound Siamese male who does not like dogs. Except his friend Lady who he used to sleep with and still misses.
So far, in my experience, Android app updates come close to this ideal, although most occur over night or during inactivity.
App updates work well, but, awway from Google’s own Android devices, the manufacturers are lazy about OS updates to the point that it is scary. If updates happen, they are often delayed for months after the corresponding security bulletins.
I just got a Motorola update covering problems found in February.
@jenny, I’m so very sorry.
I’m watching my own little guy and wondering. Twice this week he scared me by not even twitching when I called his name. It’s getting to be like having a baby, I check that he’s breathing.
We love them and when they’re gone, we grieve.
n
Our first Cardigan died last Thursday night. He was 14 1/2. I’d been anticipating it and tried to prepare our 7 year old over the last few months.
Sorry about the loss.
It was tough losing our last cat. Our first child’s first word was “Kitty!”, admonishing the cat for climbing on the TV in the living room just a few hours after a nurse practitioner braintrust at the speech clinic told my wife he would never talk.
(Don’t worry. 300 lb Sony Wega. It wasn’t going anywhere, no matter what the cat did.)
The replacement doesn’t care for any other animals, but likes people and has infinite patience for small children. Her passing may be harder to accept than the last one.
Android devs drive me nuts. I refused the update several time, but then they did it anyway. I wake up and my icons have changed, the behavior of something as bedrock as email has changed, and everything wants me to click ok and accept changes when I use it again. That’s far beyond an update, done without my permission, with gratuitous changes, and new permissions for apps I’d already vetted.
My phone is clearly a toy for them to play with, and not something serious that I use and need.
n
@Jenny, my thoughts are with you and your family on the loss of your Cardigan.
Just as a person needs to have a good ongoing relationship with a Doctor, if you have pets you need to have a good ongoing relationship with a Veterinarian.
@Jenny, you are doing it right.
Peace
My condolence on your loss, Jenny.
Nope, water vapor is the number global warming compound in the atmosphere. Not green !
When we seed the clouds, we’ll get more aqua out than what went in. It’s like a carbon credit, except for water!
I forgot to add that this will be much cheaper than your New Green Deal solution. Only hundreds of billions of dollars instead of trillions of dollars.
It’s only paper, Comrade, we’ll just print more fiat!
Commies have an answer for everything.
Crazy Eyes 2024! “President For Life”