Im letzten Job hatte ich nen Kollegen. Klassischer Metalhead mit langen Haaren, Bart, langer Kerl. Zum Weltfrauentag isser immer im Kleid auf die Arbeit gekommen. Total grossartig. Ich bin da noch zu verklemmt für.

Aber vllt kauf ich mir zum Christopher Street Day und zum Weltfrauentag Haarkreide und lauf ein paar Tage mit langen Regenbogen-Haaren rum. Haha.

Es ist kompliziert.

Es gibt Sport, in dem das Geschlecht dominant ist. Es gibt Sportarten, in denen non-trans-Männer non-trans-Frauen aus evolutionären Gründen hart überlegen sind, primär durch Testosteron. Wenn zwei gleich lange MMA-Kämpfer antreten, und es gibt keine signifikanten Faktor ausser Mann vs Frau, wird der Mann nach der Pubertät gewinnen ohne sich gross anzustrengen.

Und hey, ich als männliche Bürodrohne kenn Frauen die mich physikalisch fertig machen können. Bei vielen Anderen fragt man sich, ob die das im Moment wirklich versuchen. Bis man feststellt, dass die ersteren Damen es im Ernstfall auf ekelige Dinge wie Gelenk-Überdehnungen und Brechungen anlegen. Sorry, ist leider so.

Schach gehört nicht dazu.

Und darum finde ich find es korrekt, dass Frauen-Schach getrennt wird, weil es einfach weniger Frauen gibt, die professionell Schach spielen. Und dann kommen noch Belästigungen und sexuelle Übergriffe dazu, die die Menge von Spielerinnen weiter reduziert. Lichess hatte dazu letztens einen echt harten Artikel.

Und andersdrum tritt Judit Polgar echt vielen Männer auf dem Brett in die Weichteile.

Und wie man das dann mit Trans-Gedanken zusammenbringt… um ehrlich zu sein, keine Ahnung. Ich fände es besser, wenn Menschen in dieem Kontext Sex einfach ausblenden könnten.

Ich mein, Frauen sind so eine Sache. Was ist mit 10 Jahre alten Kindern die 2000 FIDE Elo haben?

Ich find es eigentlich schade, dass so ein egalitäres Konstrukt wie Schach defakto negativ in derartige Diskussionen reingezogen wird. Blunders sind Blunders meine Freunde.

DOTA auf Warcraft 3 Basis ist der Grossvater von LoL, DOTA2 und anderen vergleichbaren Spielen. Das Anzuschauen weckt gerade echte Nostalgie an komische wirre Starcraft I und Warcraft 3 custom maps. Gute, wenn auch wirre Zeiten.

I mean to a certain degree, I can understand if people find a problem with Poetterings approach of doing things !CORRECTLY!. Like, systemd-resolved resolving A-records with multiple addresses ina deterministic fashion because it’s not defined not to be deterministic, and because actual load balancing would be better. It’s not wrong, but it’s breaking everything. And it got patched after some uproar. And there are a few things like that.

But at the same time - I don’t think people appreciate how hard doing process management right on linux can be, especially if the daemon to run is shitty. Like, init scripts just triggering the shutdown port on a tomcat - except the tomcat is stuck and not reacting to the normal shutdown port and now you have a zombie process and an init script in a fucked up state. Or, just killing the main process and for some reason not really removing the children, now there’s zombies all over the place. Or, not trying appropriate shutdown procedures first and just killing things, “because it’s easier” - except my day just got harder with a corrupt dataset. Or, just trying soft and “Pwease wexit Mr Pwocess” signals and then just giving up. Or having “start” just crash because there was a stale PID from an OOM killed process around. Man I’m getting anxiety just thinking about this.

And that’s just talking about ExecStart and ExecStop, pretty much, which I have done somewhat correct in a few init scripts back in the day (over months of iteration of edge cases). Now start thinking about the security features systemd-analyze can tell you about, like namespaces, unmapping syscalls, masking parts of the filesystem, … imagine doing that with the jankyness of the average init.d script. At that point I’d start thinking about rebooting systems instead of trying to restart services, honestly.

And similarly, I’m growing fond of things like systemd-networkd, systemd-timesyncd. I’ve had to try to manage NetworkManager automatically and jeez… Or just directly handling networking with network-scripts. Always a pleasure. Chucking a bunch of pretty readable ini-files into /etc/systemd/networkd is a blessing. They are even readable even to people rather faint on the networking heart.

And even password based disk encryption can be defeated with 2-3 physical accesses if an organization wants to hard enough. Keyloggers can be very, very sneaky.

At that point you’d have to roll something like Yubikey-based disk encryption to be safe, because this re-establishes control over some physical parts of the system. Until they find the backup Yubikey you had to not lose all data by losing the primary key you’re carrying around to maintain control over it.

It’s not a battle the defending side can win.

Ich glaub du bist da auf halbem Weg zu einem legendären Powermetal-Song. Die unschlagbare Eichhorn-Kavalerie auf Seepferden des Hering-Königreiches der südlichen Nordsee! Zittert vor ihrer Macht! Mat? Maat? Ach. Zittert vor ihrem mächtigem Maat!

Catan just feels weird. The thing is - and I kinda validated that recently by watching highlevel competetive play of the catan base game, but: You only have like 2-4 meaningful decisions in a game. The rest is just follow through and dice.

And these things aren’t that hard to see at a decent level. And when you make these decent decisions, you mostly just win. Even with the robber, there’s limited counterplay to these good initial choices. This makes it hard to play casually as well once you know the good things.

Hier kommt btw auch Wiederstand gegen Digitalisierung her. Ich hab hier mal im Hotel mit ner Altenpflegerin geredet.

Und, rein technisch ist die Digitalisierung erstmal ne Erleichterung. Ok, jemand komplett erfahrenes kann so nen Formular über nen Patienten in 5 - 10 Minuten ausfüllen, und die Software mit der sie gearbeitet hat war halt Scheisse, darum hat das 10-20 Minuten gedauert. Aber, dann muss man keine Formulare leer rumtragen, ausgefüllt abgeben, sortieren, Leute anmotzen um die Formulare rumzuschieben.

Aber… aus Gründen der grossartigen Digitalisierung und Integration von IT-Systemen im Land wurde aus einem kaputten System 2 Systeme, dann 3 Systeme, dann 4 Systeme. Dann kümmert man sich ne Stunde um nen Patienten und statt 10 Minuten auf nem Formular zu dokumentieren hat man dann 80 Minuten Dateneingabe vor sich. Und man gibt 4x die gleichen Daten ein. Komplett die gleichen Daten.

Und, wenn man das sorum strickt, dann versteh ich vollkommen warum Digitalisierung scheisse ist.

Ich frag mich aber auch, was man zu sich nehmen muss um das derartig hart zu versauen?

Wobei es da auch genug Stories gibt. Erfahrene Admins mit physikalischer Arbeitskomponente, die ehrenamtlich anbieten in einer Schule mal nen Wochenende Access Points an Decken zu schrauben und Strippen zu ziehen, aber das darf man nicht, weil da “gesicherte Netze” im Spiel sind und so. Krampf-Thema.

Wow. I’m not particularly sensitive, but that seems like the right amount of very bright strobe that gives me headaches in concerts, especially at night in the dark. That’s very much the level of trying to find out a way to get to the roof to unplug it.

And that skeleton of a system becomes easier to test.

I don’t need to test ~80 - 100 different in-house applications on whatever many different versions of java, python, .net and so on.

I rather end up with 12 different classes of systems. My integration tests on a buildserver can check these thoroughly every night against multiple versions of the OS. And if the integration tests are green, I can be 95 - 99% sure things will work right. The dev and testing environments will figure out the rest if something wonky is going on with docker and new kernels.

Entirely true.

I’m currently working on a little project that’s interesting to me (a low-spoiler walkthrough system for adventure games) and after a lot of back and forth, I decided to cut all of JS out of the picture. Just get rid of all of it, and do good old 90s server-side rendered HTML with modern CSS placed on top of it.

And that’s, honestly, a joy. The first draft of a page looks like the first screenshot, then you add some semantic classes to the html and throw some simple CSS at it and it looks acceptably neat. And I could get rid of so much janky toolchain I just fail to understand.

Inside, I like Abyss, similar to the OceanDeep theme of Vim.

When I’m on the balcony, it’s hard to see anything, so them I switch to Solarized Light.

Ich muss immer noch drüber lachen. Paar Jahre zurück hab ich 2-3 unsere Firmen-Standorte besucht.

Die Niederlande waren grossartig. Man konnte nen Grossteil der einfachen Sprache verstehen und mit ein wenig Nuscheln und Platt verstanden auch andere einen gut genug.

Und dann kamen wir nach München. Da hab ich mich irgendwann auf Englisch verständigt. Weil… nei. Wat?

I just enjoy the scene of the oldtimers strutting in like true chads and showing the youngsters how to take care of the big lady. It’s so wonderfully corny. And it’s such wonderful bullshit, and when you learn how many hands were necessary to run such a ship, it’s even more fun.

I’m more of a specialist and a rule lawyer.

I mostly have a small collection of games ranging from easily explained to really huge. Like, I have Flashpoint, or Pandemic, or Betrayal at the house on the Hill. All of these are games you can understand well enough in 1-2 rounds of going if you know boardgames a bit. And then there are things like Junta, Arkham Horror, Eldricht Horror, Battlestar Galactica, considering to get the new dune game. Those are great, but a lot harder to get into.

But that’s a quality my current gaming circle likes. I can pick up a lot of rulesets and digest them decently quickly, because I’ve played a lot of games, and a lot of complicated games over the years. Like, if you’ve dealt with MtG and Dominion, you’ve seen 90% of deck building concepts and rules. Some P&P RPG experiences in 2-3 frameworks cover a lot of ground for a bunch of game rules. You kinda learn how rules tend to be written, how rules tend to be designed, and how rules are usually intended to be and that helps processing rulesets quicker.

Die FSTab ist die grundlegende Information für den startenden Kernel, um sein Filesystem aus Platten, Netzwerk-Platten und anderem Kram zusammenzupuzzlen. Das Ding hat soviele Fusspistolen eingebaut - mehr oder weniger alles kann richtig oder auch falsch sein, und manchmal auch beides. Selbst wenn man das ein paar Jahre macht fühlt sich direktes FStab-Handling wie Jenga auf einer Rüttelmaschine an.

Soweit ich mich erinner, generiert systemd-mount die /etc/fstab im Hintergrund. Es gibt also kein entkommen, es wird nur weniger fummelig :)

IMO, this is the elephant in the room.

If you’re looking at what people used CentOS or Rocky or Alma for - dev systems, CI systems, … These aren’t lost sales. If you forced them to off of their solution, they aren’t going to pay the price tag and management/installation pain of RHEL. If they have people knowing how to run Linux, they’ll use something else. And sure, they are drawing some resources from RH (bandwidth for packages at the very least), but they are giving the RH system a larger footprint in deployed systems. And people running it had a positive opinion about the system.

But Oracle Linux is a different beast. Here a company is poaching large customers willing to pay for support by repackaging your product for less effort. It sucks, but it’s entirely consistent for Oracle to be part of ruining a good thing.

A bit from an ops-side, but I think it applies. I think pair-work, pair-programming, pair-troubleshooting is a tool for specific situations. It’s amazing in some places, and an exhausting waste of company resources in other places.

Like, if we’re in a hard situation with many unknowns and possibly horrible consequences of mistakes. Critical systems down, situation is weird. Or, implementing config management for something entirely new. Or, trying out new code structures, ideas. That’s when being two is great. You can bounce changes you make to the system off of your copilot, so you can be very safe while being fast. You can have two opinions about shaping a piece of code and APIs. You can iterate very quickly if necessary.

On the other hand though, there are things that require deep thought. Like, I had to figure out how 4-5 teams use an infrastructural component, what’s the live cycle of the component, when to create it, when to delete it, how to remove it. It ended up being twelve lines of code in the end, but like 1 phone call every two lines of code, and an hour of thinking per line of code. Pair programming would not have been compatible with this.

Or, the third kind, is crunch work. The best way to do crunch work (besides automating it) is to just put up headphones, find flow and hammer it down. Have it reviewed later if necessary. But why would we need 2 guys following the same runbook for the upteemth time?

It’s a great tool to share knowledge and to handle critical tasks with high error potential and I wouldn’t want to miss it for that. But it can be overused in my book.

Well, you’re looking at a method, and imagine two things.

The first is a link to a confluence article. You click on it. Nothing loads. Ah, right. Activate the VPN. Click the link again. You have no access. So you send your IT a ticket to gain access. One week later you get a mail you have access know. For what? Who’d remember last week?

Alternatively, there’s an inline comment, or a markdown file in the same repo so you click on it and your IDE opens it. And then you modify the piece of code and you realize you still have that markdown file still open, so you adjust a few things and also note down a weird quirk you found during debugging.

However, in the first case… well, you finally had access to the documentation, so you want to modify it to bring it up to date. Well, guess what. You have read access. So back to another ticket with IT that you’re actually working on this and you’d like to update the documentation. After a week, you’re notified: Well they need approval of the documentation owner for you to get write access. They are on vacation. When they get back after 2 weeks, they approve the request, and it goes into a second round of approvai with your teamlead. And guess what? Right, he’s not in for the next 2 weeks. By the time you finally have write access, you’re not working in that department anymore. And no, that other department doesn’t use that confluence.

Overall, documentation tends to be somewhat of a chore for many people. If it’s close - it’s in the same repo, you can open the file in your IDE, you can commit updated documentation with your code in the same PR - there’s a slightly higher chance for folks to update documentation. If you put in the hellscape of a process some companies have for their tooling there, no one will ever touch the documentation.

Zwingst du uns nu zu den 3-5 laut gerufenen Worten? Ich find das ja eher unnötig und provokant.