Saying you don't like a distribution because of its desktop GUI or some other changeable config setting is like saying you don't like a house because the water is running.

Proton is some of the most amazing software I have ever used. More games are updated all the time to gold and platinum. With the recent release of v4.2, the first major proton release downstream from wine 4, the situation has improved to a greater degree than ever.

An immediate and profound rush of relief.

We're hiring managers and engineers at a remote site, and the recruiter is setting up calls with skype for business. To use this-- even the web version, I have to run windows, so I had to dust off my windows VM to join. I fire up the VM, called "plague" in virsh, and...

Boom! An hour of updates and a half dozen reboots! And people wonder why windows is dying.

I just tweeted this. Time and time again, big content fools politicians into thinking their interest is in some possible way in the interest of anything else, and it's disgusting.

Forty year old fathers squeeze in a quick beer on the way back from the grocery store while the kids are napping. Or at least this one does.

The softs are throwing a Pi Day pizza party at lunch today. So I'm working from home.

I got tired of the tedium of navigating dropdowns and required fields to open and close user stories, so I wrote a script with the following syntax:

./ticket open TICKET TITLE GOES HERE
./ticket close <TICKET #>

I keep phones for two years, or try to anyway. Later this year I will hit that two year mark, and rather than excitement at the idea of getting a new phone, I find myself thinking that there's nothing out there that excites me at all. And also, my current phone is in no way deficient. It doesn't hold a charge like when it was new, but that's totally normal, and as degraded as it may be, it's still not a problem at all.

A powerful phone with a snapdragon and 6 or more GB of memory, that measures under 5" and doesn't have some bullshit OEM skin on it. To my knowledge, it doesn't exist.

Updated. Got my second monitor. The laptop itself is only kept open for the fingerprint reader.

!coding

I used to be a sysadmin, which meant I was in charge of quarterly server patching. My team managed about 2500 servers, running various flavors of linux and legacy unix. The vast majority(95% or more) ran Linux(SLES). Our maintenance window was always in the overnight-- 10pm to 6am --so the stroke of 10pm would be a massive cascade of patching commands sent to hundreds of servers.

Before I was brought into the process, it made use of the automation product we were tasked by mgmt to use: Bigfix. It's a real piece of shit. Though we had 2500 or so servers, this environment was dominated by windows. All our vcenter servers ran it, and more importantly, our bigfix nodes were all windows machines. That meant that while we're trying to patch, the bigfix servers would get patched by the windows team. This would cause lots of failed and timed out patching, because the windows admins never quite understood that taking down the automation infrastructure would cause problems.

As such, I got tired of depending on a bunch of button-pushing checkbox-clickers who didn't know shit about shit, so I started writing an ssh-wrapped patching system. By the time I left for my current job, patching had been reduced to a single command to initiate each group's patching and reboots, and an easy check to see when servers come back up. So usually, the way it worked out was that I would send patching orders to 750 machines or so, and within about 5 minutes, they would all be done patching, and within another 20 minutes all the ones that required rebooting but about 5 would be done rebooting.

The "all-nighter" which happened every time was waiting for oracle servers to run timed fscks against a dozen or so large filesystems per server, because they were all on ext3/4, which eats complete shit. Then, several hours later, as they finished, I would have to call the DBAs to tell them to validate their shitty servers.

Ubuntu, Openbox, vim, duckduckgo, Gmail, mailgun, digitalocean, xterm, libvirtd, remmina, polipo, insomnia, ulauncher, copyq, nextcloud, rofi, ssh, bash, Firefox, Firefox-Dev, Vivaldi, steam, itch, git, proton, wine, vlc, cherry mx brown and black, android, mint mobile, Asus, amd, ubiquiti, and plex.

What's in your workflow?

We just moved offices, and I got a desk by the wall, so I took full advantage.

ENE = Entitled New Engineer
M = Manager

EOE: "I've been here 6 months and I know how everything works. Can we talk about a promotion?"
M: "No, now begins the period wherein, through your labor, you repay us for overpaying you while you got up to this point."

Fucking corporate bullshit. My laptop, when plugged in, has no need for power saving settings. I leave it plugged in with the screen locked, when I'm not at the office. But if I ever change any power settings, the corporate rootkit changes them back to unreasonable settings about once an hour. So I put this on a 300 second while loop.

https://pastebin.com/ALET2wSa

Webex works great in firefox on linux now. That was the last thing I was using windows to do. So my siloed-off VM for webex can run linux now, and people will ask me WTF operating system I'm using when I share my screen.

A good way to avoid working for a bad company is that you can spot major problems in the interview and pre-employment phase. There are a number of things that indicate a bad culture that you can ask about right off the bat. Dress code, blocked websites, and work from home policy(or a lack thereof) can all indicate what kind of work environment to expect.

But the biggest one of all is a request for your salary history. If a recruiter or hiring manager wants to know how much you are or were making at a previous job, and will not allow the process to continue without the information, run.

Every job opening has a budget associated with it. The employer already knows what they want to spend on the position. They want to know what your current or previous compensation is or was, so they can perhaps save some money of that budget by offering you a very small amount more than the amount you tell them.

If they ask the question, I get suspicious, but then say, "I'd prefer not to disclose that. What is the budget for the requirement?"

If the person who asks you relents and tells you the budget, then all is well, in my opinion. But if they stick to the subject and insist on getting your salary history, then it indicates a culture of arbitrary subordination, which is not a healthy work environment. If it ever goes this way, I politely tell them that I'm not comfortable disclosing that information, and that I would like to withdraw my interest in the position.

Hollow Knight Silksoul! I'm gonna smash my face with anticipation!

Megathread over at r/hollowknight

#!/bin/bash

while :; do
ps -ef | grep -iq [s]ymantec && for i in `ps -ef | grep -i [s]ymantec | awk '{ print $2 }'`; do sudo kill -9 $i; done
sleep 1
done

We use jira at my company. It's great for me, because no ticketing system's UI is worth a shit, but jira's API is excellent. But we're switching to a new system that is an absolute piece of garbage. Every page is 100% Javascript, so no source can ever be viewed, and the URL never changes to reflect what's onscreen. If you know a ticket number, no URL will ever get you straight to it. You have to navigate multiple slow-loading 25MB piles of Javascript to reach what you're seeking. And most damning of all: the new system has an API, but our highest management is withholding access to it, claiming it breeds laziness.

Is amazing the kind of shit you have to swallow when your management has regular meetings with really really super extremely good-looking sales people.

Why doesn't steam have a, "don't throw me under the bus" option?

We have a three bedroom house that fits us perfectly, or did anyway. In the upstairs there is a master bedroom which my wife and I share, and two smaller bedrooms. One is my son's room and was his nursery when he was smaller, and the other is currently being used as my office.

We had a second child-- a little girl --in October. As she is still very small, she sleeps in a bassinet in our bedroom, but those days are numbered. She will need her own room within a couple months, for naps and for her to sleep all night on her own. That means my office will soon have a crib, dresser, and changing table in it, and I will be unable to use my computer after the wife and kids are in bed.

For this eventuality, I've been preparing what I call my, "table kit." Costco sells these really nice collapsible plastic crates. I have filled one with computer things, with the intention being that when my office is not available to me, I have a crate with everything I need in it, and can quickly set up at the dinner table. When I'm done, I can quickly tear down and pack everything up into that collapsible crate, so none of my equipment will "live" at the table.

My question is: what would you put in your table kit? I currently have a System76 Oryx Pro, a 23" LED display, displayport cable, power cables, mouse, keyboard, microUSB, and type-C cable, Bluetooth headphones, and I'm trying to decide whether I'll need a laptop stand. What would you pack?

I need to convert lots and lots of lengthy hard-coded entities into backend objects, as I'm tired of pushing new commits every time something superficial needs to change.

Also, I need to figure out continuous integration. The guy who was going to help with that just left the company, and I was using his eventual forthcoming help as an excuse not to take responsibility for learning about it myself.

I need to learn golang and start converting some code to it, to see if the performance compares to the perl that's currently in place. Perl is brilliant, but aside from me, only old people know it, at my office. That definitely creates a longterm supportability issue.

Out for a nice walk on a unseasonably warm morning.

If you're using the adwaita-dark gtk theme, you may have noticed that the text entry fields on lots and lots of sites make your text almost impossible to read, using firefox. You can fix that by creating/editing the, "widget.content.gtk-theme-override" key(in about:config), setting it to "Adwaita" and restarting firefox.

I'm not a fan of X display managers. I prefer to have my machine boot directly to the virtual console, and if I want to run X, I can start it with startx. Does anyone else do that? If so, what do you put in your .xinitrc?

A vendor gave us what is turning out to be a very stable storage appliance/software, so we're happy for that. But even so, disks fail. So we need an automated way to identify, troubleshoot, isolate, and begin ticketing against disk failures. Vendor promised us a nice REST API. That was six months ago. The temporary process of SSHing(as root) to every single appliance(60-200 per site, dozens of sites) to run vendor storage audit commands remains our go-to means of automation.

It's interesting that AAA games are becoming analogous to pop music, as they relate to the medium of which they are part. E3 is just a bunch of trailers for rushed sequels to existing, played-out franchises. The big price tags are almost universally not worth it, as these games typically release with major bugs, and often rely on grind-enforced microtransactions.

Meanwhile, indie games keep getting better, more innovative, and remain reasonably priced. Ubisoft, EA, Bethesda, Rockstar, and the rest of the big-budget studios can eat my ass.

It would seem that Australia just criminalized privacy. The world needs to watch, so this shit isn't repeated elsewhere.

If you have a system76 laptop and are frustrated with the battery life, like I was, maybe I can help you. Following a mishmash of instructions I found online, I've extended my battery life from about two hours to almost five.