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• Post #4223044

  Once again I'm being reminded that if you drink enough coffee for long enough, all coffee becomes decaf¹. Or maybe I'm a weird space mutant. There are some other signs.² ¹ assuming i'm not just that tired all the time. ² for example, all forms of alcohol I've ever tried have had a distinct, unique taste that is wretched bleah. this is handy for keeping me from the temptation of drink, but. (hard cider is okay but that's because I love cider, I tolerate the alcohol taste for...

• Post #4077163

  Today's 'fun' math: graduate students (& others) using LLMs and LLM agents on shared Linux servers + LLM agents that "want" to install software system-wide because that's what READMEs and so on say to do + LLM agents that are increasingly willing to do whatever it takes to achieve a goal + Frequent Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerabilities Are we going to get hacked by an agent so it can install some random thing for its slop code development? Maybe.

• Post #3937827

  Ubuntu: you can totally continue to use GNU Coreutils in 26.04 LTS. Also Ubuntu: build-essential depends on the new Rust coreutils. Yeah, that's not "you can totally continue to use GNU Coreutils", although it sure is tempting to build my own build-essential package with a different dependency.

• Post #3815257

  Today I learned that SunOS¹ nd is even more cursed than I had vaguely remembered it as. It explicitly uses its own IP protocol instead of UDP so that it doesn't have to checksum the data. ¹ I really mean 'SunOS' here, not Solaris. I believe that Sun dropped nd no later than SunOS 4.

• Post #3377974

  Today's bike club group ride¹ took us from Yonge & Finch up to beyond Maple, up Jane, through a ritzy bunch of mansions, and then back down Keele where bad luck with lights in the run down to Teston Road caused me to not set any personal speed records. It was pleasantly cool in the shade and warm in the sun. This run of the ride was unusually fast paced, and not just because I went off the front with a fast group. ¹ https://ridewithgps.com/trips/392196756

• Post #3377973

  The joke is on this plague of Googlebot impersonators trying to pillage my techblog: I specifically restrict Googlebot's User-Agent to its published IP address ranges. Had you used another User-Agent, you might have flown under the radar. (Not Bing's, though, I restrict it too.)

• Post #3377972

  One thing I'm trying to do more often is to do my casual location lookups on openstreetmap.org instead of Google Maps. Do I want to remind myself where Church & Hayden is in Toronto? I can do that with OSM just fine.

• Post #3327274

  In the get people Fedi-hired category, my university department has an opening for a senior (research-side) sysadmin where you'll get to do fun things in a dynamic group that's doing stuff at the crossover of chemistry, robotics, and computing. It's sadly not open to remote people, so Toronto only. And you'll be my indirect colleague (not in my group but working closely with us). https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-Research-Computing-Support-Specialist-ON/603316117/ (boosts we...

• Post #1658176

  If your idea of a good configuration file format is JSON, you are not a daemon I will ever run voluntarily. This is not very much of a subtoot of ISC Kea. If we ever have to replace the traditional ISC DHCP server with anything, it will not be with Kea.

• Post #1475626

  This is my absolutely not surprised face that mere moments after I add a secondary MX to one of our zones, various IPs show up to poke its SMTP port, despite our primary MX being up (and the backup MX not actually running a SMTP server right now).

• Post #1422583

  TIL that Firefox does not allow you to proceed past a revoked TLS certificate the way it will let you go past an expired one. I guess this is sensible; a revoked certificate is very likely to be dangerous. (I learned this from Let's Encrypt's article on the difficulties of maintaining test sites with deliberately broken TLS certificates, https://letsencrypt.org/2026/04/10/test-sites.html )

• Post #1211029

  I sure wish it was easy to understand why various Linux programs were deciding to be in dark mode on my eccentric desktop (I hate dark mode, I find it unreadable, give me light mode). Instead, no one documents this except in a room in the basement past the leopards.

• Post #994649

  To the sysadmin population of the Fediverse: do people have any numbers on how long common mail senders will retry sending mail if your MX is unreachable? Once upon a time people retried for many days, but my impression is that quite a few places now stop trying and bounce the email after quite short intervals, like a day. (Boosts and practical experiences welcome, like "my MX was down for three days and I still got all that email sent from GMail".)

• Post #780753

  In the get people Fedi-hired category, my department is looking to hire some "full stack" people in a research group. I think we're a nice place to work in general, but then I would, I've been here for a long time. Interested parties can see: https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-Full-Stack-Software-Engineer-%28two-vacancies%29-ON/600925717/ (boosts welcome if you want to expose this to more people.)

• Post #689485

  Dear home desktop: now is not at all a good time to start being mysteriously flaky, periodically locking up and rebooting. This is my unhappy face. (It's especially not a good time since this machine has 64 GB of RAM.)

• Post #689484

  This is my sad face when people say they don't understand why Wayland pushed the window manager into the display server. Event processing is extremely connected to the window manager; X goes to significant event handling contortions to enable a separate window manager, and even then the contortions are imperfect. (For example, no window manager can direct mouse scroll wheel events to the currently focused window instead of the window under the cursor. There are other issues too.)

• Post #689483

  I took the weekend fun bike in for necessary service today so of course Toronto graced the occasion with snow flurries. Thanks, March.

• Post #674666

  Current status: hoping very much that disabling AppArmor in the kernel doesn't still have terrible bugs like it did early in the life of Ubuntu 22.04, when it gave you charming and fatal kernel memory leaks. Because guess what we just did on all of our user-accessible machines (in an emergency immediate reboot, I'm sure people are happy about that one).

• Post #674662

  One of the challenges brought on by the modern world of digital music is that it's alarmingly easy to acquire music faster than I can listen to it. I suspect ebooks have a similar issue if you get into them. In related news, maybe I should get less new music on the next Bandcamp Friday. But, but, people keep releasing good new stuff...

• Post #674659

  I see tomorrow's forecast chance of snow has decided to arrive early. Thanks, Toronto weather, although it is kind of scenic to look out the window right now. #dlws

• Post #490208

  RE: https://mountains.social/@vir_borealis/116149162893919949 It's not every day that a photo caption/alt text is talking about a snow blower pouring a wall section. But in context it makes perfect sense, and now I'm wondering what handling (Yellowknife) snow as a building material is like. (Probably not exactly like either styrofoam or concrete, two things that are blown or poured into place, but I can't help wondering how much like or unlike more normal stuff it is.)

• Post #476173

  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116150078508762450 Now I'm wondering to what extent the current situation is affecting the plans of gaming studios for in-development games. If much of your audience is not going to be upgrading their hardware any time soon, especially CPUs and RAM, what performance can you expect and demand for a new game? (I'm not the only one having these thoughts, cf https://mindof.jrconlin.com/@jrconlin/statuses/01KJJYNNZQG5FTPK178D8BF4P6 )

• Post #459710

  I bike commuted today because when I looked out the window at basically clear and dry pavement and saw the weather forecast, I couldn't not bike commute. It was good to ride again, and at least this means I've done some bike riding this February. (It was a last minute impulse decision, which means that the bike wasn't completely ready and I had to hastily pump up the tires to proper pressure.)

• Post #459708

  There is an intermittent rattling noise in our office which it turns out everyone can hear, which is quite reassuring because I was wondering if the fans on my office desktop were maybe going (it and they date from late 2017). It turns out that this is coming from work being done on the roof, which we are just underneath. It's less charming that raccoons (or squirrels) holding gymnastics competitions on the roof, although it is happening at a more reasonable hour than 'the dead...

• Post #459706

  In theory I could try to go to CycleTO's coldest day of the year ride tomorrow, since I was able to bike today without much problems. In practice I don't trust the streets to be clear and safely passable all the way down to Sugar Beach. But if you're more enthused than I am, it's 10am tomorrow the 28th: https://www.cycleto.ca/cdoyr_2026

• Post #424227

  Fediverse people: who do we like these days for buying DRM-free music in lossless format? Bandcamp is the obvious one but I know a bunch of (often artist-friendlier) alternatives got started up when BC had some ownership changes. However, I've lost track of them. (Boosts welcome, and this is triggered by the conversation at https://mastodon.social/@cks/116126426837771351 )

• Post #312537

  On the one hand, the current situation for RAM, SSDs, and now HDDs looks grim for people who buy their own servers, desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, etc. On the other hand, the hardware has not been made and handed over. That requires money, and AFAIK no "AI" company is profitable. Can "AI" and cloud companies raise (and spend) enough more money to pay for all of the hardware they've signed agreements for? That depends on how long people will write...

• Post #294602

  Current status: reaping the informational benefits of a door-opening-and-closing sensor¹ on our machine room door coupled with a trail cam setup. ¹ It's a magnetic contact sensor hooked up to something that notices make/break state changes, logs them, and makes the current state accessible as Prometheus metrics that eventually drive a 'hey you left the door open' alert that has never actually triggered since we put the system in.

• Post #294601

  The department¹ has some new Dell (multi-)GPU servers that scream at 100 dB and can't be turned down any quieter. Thankfully they aren't in our machine room, but you can hear the screaming from the other side of their machine room door. I can't help but think that they're trying to tell us something. ¹ my group doesn't have that kind of money, these servers were directly bought by some researchers with very nice grants that can fund servers that reach six...

• Post #294600

  Honestly, this Owls in Towels picture looks like the owl in question has just gotten out of the shower in the morning and would like to know what you're doing in their home, looking at them in their bathrobe. https://mas.to/@owlsintowels/116063123927951124