Lyle Seaman

networking, security infra and filesystems kernel hacker turned application programmer, SRE and engineering manager, Lyle traded tilting at windmills for viking at Vikings but couldn't catch any.

Mar 2023

Time For (a cool change)

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Without much ado, five minidoozies follow.

If it isn't one thing it's another, for our regular Argle Bargle. "I looked outside. Everything was soggy and I could hear claps of thunder. How long will it last? Click on weather and... um... Fire Weather? I can think of only one way I'm getting a fire going in my backyard right now and it involves a flamethrower." It's better than tornadoes!


Phoning One In

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Many years ago, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the United States was criscrossed by a riot of regional railroads. Gradually, these were acquired or merged until now there are only about a half-dozen major national railroads. In a similar fashion, at the birth of the public Internet, there must have been thousands of community Internet service providers. It seemed like every town had its own entrepeneurial enterprise, with some racks of modems in an office somewhere. Those quickly got snapped up or forced into bankruptcy, as legacy cable telecoms companies leveraged their existing monopolies into a new line of business. Which brings us to this week's Error'd. Enjoy(?) it.

First up, Adrian McCarthy grumbles "Getting help can be difficult when your regional monopoly internet service provider cannot assemble a functional web site. Note that the understandably required Description field in this online support contact form is disabled."


Filling

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We got quite a few irregular submissions this week from regular contributors. Which is to say routine contributors. We're not qualified to make judgements about whether or not anyone is what what most folks would call normal.

First up, Isaac D. is struggling with localization, kvetching "Apparently this number format is ALIVE and WELL in parts of India and Afghanistan, but us poor Australians on desktop browsers also seem to be visually assaulted with it. I wonder if the Zuck will pay me $1,00,000 for reporting it or do real country borders mean nada in the Metaverse? ;)" This would ordinarily be controlled by some operating system or browser configuration, would it not?


Nothin Doin

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IBM Profs was introduced in 1980 including both email and calendaring support. Online calendaring is now old enough to have grandchildren, but we still can't get the simplest things right.

As our friend Romeo rhetorically wonders "Million dollar question: What calendar does Microsoft use?"


It Seats Zero

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Automotive afficionado Mike S. proudly relates "My first and only car has been a classic 1965 6-cyl Ford Null. I've always loved it but it does crash from time to time, even though I've received many pointers on how to avoid that. I've considered getting an Infiniti and then would divide my time between the two." Avoid pointers, Mike.