Posts by cks@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #B1Uk1oPezBxX2CxXKy by cks@mastodon.social
2025-12-22T03:41:38Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@drscriptt At one point we were told that it was theoretically possible to directly employ someone in a non-local jurisdiction but it would require the university's lawyers agreeing to sign off on it, which would require very senior leadership approval, which was effectively impossible. Having the person involved¹ form a single-person consulting firm and retaining/paying the firm was Much, Much Easier.¹ They moved back home but we wanted to still tap their expertise for a while.
(DIR) Post #B1Y0KqrOICrGrquVwO by cks@mastodon.social
2025-12-23T17:18:06Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Could I just remember 'apt-show-versions -u | sort' rather than looking it up in our cron job every time? Sure. I could also put it in a script to save myself the bother. (Will I remember the script? Maybe.)
(DIR) Post #B1Y0NHC9Lqah7fmD7g by cks@mastodon.social
2025-12-15T20:24:06Z
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Work has some computer toucher positions to fill that will be opening real soon now (... we hope¹), and I sort of feel that we should include "you don't have to use LLM/AI" in the position announcements. I'd certainly hope that it's increasingly a positive, given what so many companies seem to be doing.¹ The current people in the positions are leaving very soon and we'd really like to have their replacements overlap, or at least start right away, but ... university processes.
(DIR) Post #B1Y0NJDznxFvPyeiHI by cks@mastodon.social
2025-12-23T17:16:42Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
In case people are interested, my university general workplace has (just) now posted its latest senior sysadmin position (where the previous person in it got recruited by Engineering in the great cycle of life here). https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-DGP-Research-Computing-Support-Specialist-ON/598361317/Despite claims that you might work from home for this position, well, don't count on it¹. Remote work is not an option for (reasonable) reasons².¹ https://mastodon.social/@cks/115311500839814027² https://mastodon.social/@cks/115761145345455977
(DIR) Post #B1codqfmz8i486ZkKe by cks@mastodon.social
2025-12-26T01:22:56Z
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@CliftonR @grumpybozo It looks like there's a whole morass of various sorts of passthrough, but sadly it looks like there's nothing where you can easily say 'here is /dev/sdb, give it to the virtual machine'. (At least not in virt-manager, it may be possible with bare QEMU command lines if you want to wrangle them.)
(DIR) Post #B1eiPrYUhH9BP41zRg by cks@mastodon.social
2025-12-26T23:31:09Z
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@futurebird This is an interesting challenge, especially for 2 and 3:1. Solsbury Hill, Peter Gabriel. This lives rent-free in my heart, just because.2. '39, Queen. Such music, such lyrics, but. Even I didn't get it until I paid attention.3. "My Neighborhood Totoro" opening theme (Japanese original). The entire movie and its music live rent-free in my heart but there's a whole collection of reasons it'll never be popular (at least outside of Japan).
(DIR) Post #B1erpCMzLUk4mjnzFY by cks@mastodon.social
2025-12-27T00:54:55Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@fanf This is my face when developers are mystified why dev and ops are at odds about software deployment. It's all in who gets rewarded (and punished) for what, and what is and isn't under their control (IMHO).
(DIR) Post #B1iaxoWMSmCepxYFIe by cks@mastodon.social
2025-12-28T20:22:08Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
In a "that figures" thing, my home Linux desktop spontaneously rebooted today (not due to a power outage as far as I can tell). It's been up since November 11th so it was overdue for a kernel update and other things, but still.But if it's going to spontaneously reboot, doing so on a day when all of Toronto is braced for freezing rain power outages is certainly appropriate.
(DIR) Post #B1zQ31VvmpvWm1wzDc by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-04T00:57:16Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@dannyman @jef @resuna Almost everything can run CGIs if you try hard enough. But also, this is my face that some mad person committed https://github.com/pjincz/nginx-cgi
(DIR) Post #B1zoFvBZ1bsjoK6gsq by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-06T02:11:56Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
On the one hand, digital music has been great for the variety of genres and artists that are readily available and making music. On the other hand, digital music enables artist names like "░▒▓█𝔸𝕊𝕍𝕄ℝ█▓▒░"¹. I feel conflicted (and also sad for anyone tracking albums with a limited database schema, you're going to need UTF-8 and emojis in there).¹ https://vivariumrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/gothic-tech
(DIR) Post #B21WXPGzgKs4F74R8q by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-06T23:25:58Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Would I like to try a split (mechanical) keyboard? Sure, absolutely, everyone says they can be very nice, it would be interesting to find out for myself. Am I interested enough in the idea of split keyboards to actually buy one, sight unseen? Ha ha lol no. My current keyboard isn't perfect but it's also not that bad.Also, this keeps me from going down a giant rabbit hole that I know is lurking there, just out of sight of the corner of my eye.
(DIR) Post #B2LzvkgaVKavR4CYBE by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-16T20:38:38Z
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@mos_8502 My grim cynical view is that LLM output isn't subject to copyright *today*, but I'm sure that the LLM crowd very, very much wants to change that and what does and doesn't qualify is ultimately political.(eg, I think at the start of photography in the 19th century, the copyright status of photographs wasn't clear. Today we see them as clearly creative and worthy of protection.)
(DIR) Post #B2Ts1dAbq1p9EMlXVI by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-20T15:41:31Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
It has been '0' days since non-breaking space in email text wound up blowing up a program that did not accept UTF-8 encoded non-breaking spaces in its configuration file. This is my angry face at mail composition tools.
(DIR) Post #B2Ts1ikb5ea8XQdqnA by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-20T15:46:17Z
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I would really like an xterm option for 'convert U+00A0 to a space on paste'. Then I could set it and never have to care about this again. (Please don't tell me that other terminal emulators can do that, because unless they exactly duplicate all of the xterm behaviors that I'm extremely used to, I'm not interested, and I guarantee you that they don't.)
(DIR) Post #B2Y5syZ56F9myAor0S by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-06T23:06:21Z
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RE: https://fosstodon.org/@LibreQoS/115848718757642436Current status: doing extremely "I don't know what I'm really doing, I'm copying from a website¹" things with Linux tc to see if I can improve my home Internet latency under load without doing too much damage to bandwidth or breaking my firewall rules. So far, it seems to work and things² claim to like the result.¹ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/Cake/#configuring-cake² https://bufferbloat.libreqos.com/ via @davecb
(DIR) Post #B2Y5t0NSMR2wahObAG by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-22T16:31:19Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
I had occasion to do a big upload from home last night while I was writing last night's techblog entry over interactive SSH, and my interactive SSH session did not notice the upload at all. This is not what happened before I played with bufferbloat settings, so I think this is a successful set of settings that I want to make permanent.
(DIR) Post #B2YSRJFCv06FwXIf5c by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-22T20:28:53Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
The joys of modern email: "Has Microsoft decided to put all of our email on hold or are they having a global M365 inbound SMTP email incident?"(For about the last hour and a half, if it's an incident someone is having a bad day.)
(DIR) Post #B2ced6sEiIQR8Mmwxk by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-24T21:24:35Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@0xabad1dea It's always amusing to me that Odin doesn't want to go out for walkies and then doesn't want to come home from the park once he has gone out for walkies. Apparently his good memory for stuff he likes is selective or, like many of us, he just doesn't want to get up in the 'morning' even if there's good stuff out there in the day.
(DIR) Post #B2hXmWm1mCy3Umm1Z2 by cks@mastodon.social
2026-01-27T04:57:26Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
RE: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/115963889023105562I am so happy with this improvement to curl -J. I ran into the issue last November and was expecting to have to live with it for years, but here we are. Soon my blog entry on the problem will be obsolete.(People in my blog entry's comments came up with some clever ways to deal with the problem but it's all going to be gone soon, for certain values of 'soon' relative to LTS Linuxes (eg, Ubuntu 26.04 will probably miss it). Entry URL: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/CurlADownloadProblem )
(DIR) Post #B2sseq7ID9wEwjSFhg by cks@mastodon.social
2026-02-01T16:35:31Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@whitequark That U-Boot boot sequence makes me think of those not-exactly-jokes of "you ship your org chart". Which is vaguely scary if it is the explanation, how many fighting people and groups does Rockchip have internally?