#putty

Stand der Verzweiflung mit Windoof at W0rg: Es gab kein taugliches Keyboard-Layout und welche aus "unverifizierten Drittquellen" nachinstallieren darf ich nicht. Ich hab also .net und ein ziemlich mieses Microsoft-Tool installiert und mir sowas ähnliches wie #EurKey (nur schlechter) selber editiert. Deren #SSH-Clients kommen nicht mit der Smartcard-Auth meines AG klar? Also musste ich vom AG ein modifiziertes build von pageant (das Schlüsselverwaltungs-Ding von #putty) mit OpenSSH verknüpfen. SSH irgendwohin mounten geht auch nicht, also muss jedes Stück Software seine eigene SSH-Unterstützung einbauen. Wenn mir nochmal jemand verzählt Linux wäre frickelig, dann setzt es was! #Windows #rant

A further announcement related to #PuTTY: we are retiring the 'putty-announce' mailing list for release announcements. Today's release, 0.85, was announced by email to that list, but it's the last one that we will announce that way. Running a mailing list always involved a lot of work dealing with bounces from defunct addresses and email from ticketing systems that people had subscribed to the list. But now we've been starting to find that we're accused of spam, because people will leave a company, forget to unsubscribe from putty-announce, and after a few months, their ex-employer will turn their old address into a spam trap. As an alternative announcement mechanism, I've set up an RSS feed. See https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/updates.html (Of course, anyone reading this toot is probably receiving release announcements anyway via my Mastodon account! But if you were also using the mailing list, please spread the word that it's going away.)

Around 2000, when #PuTTY first started to become popular, it brought me more and more email. At some point it became hard to answer it all, and my inbox started to grow. Young and optimistic, I came up with a plan to fix this. I drew a line in my inbox (by sending myself an email with subject "---------"), and told myself that I'd keep the region below the line clear, and every few days, deal with a few messages from above the line, until eventually the line was at the top again. Of course, it didn't work at all. Soon enough there was a huge backlog even below the line, and the stuff above the line was all still there. The line became part of the problem, not the solution. It took a historian friend of mine to point out the fallacy. To answer more mail, you must spend more time answering mail. No amount of classifying, rearranging, or reorganising it makes there be less of it. You must either answer the mail or decide not to. (And once there's too much of it, only one of *those* is possible.) This is a post about management methods that respond to any problem by spending more rather than less time moving issues around the bug tracker or kanban board or what have you.