Ever had to read documentation that wasn’t well written, was full of gaps, or just didn’t make a whole lot of sense? I’ve created a word for documentation like this: cryptomentation. Because it’s documentation that’s cryptic.
A somewhat related random quote:
“Why would there be documentation? It’s called “code” for a reason.” -Unknown
You’re probably familiar with this quote:
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” ― Albert Einstein (src)
This past week I’ve had to deal with windows servers, something I neither excel in nor do I have the desire to excel in. So, to put a bit of a geeky spin on an Einstein quote, I rephrased it as this:
Don’t judge a penguin by its ability to clean a window.
I understand being strict and having the usual rules; need an upper and lower case character, a number, a special character, and a minimum password length. It just makes good sense to have a complicated passwords.
However, I’ve ran into a few places that limit the length of the password. What? Limit the length of the password to 12 characters? Are you kidding me? If I want a 30 character password, then I damn sure should be able to have one. Things such as Password Safe exist for that very purpose.
You know what a password length limit screams to me? Storing it in plain text. The only logical reason I can think of to limit the length of a password to such a short length is the field in the database for it isn’t very big. Hashes can get quite long, even more than 30 characters, so if you ever run into an authentication system that doesn’t accept long passwords, don’t use it.
Every spring my yard is visited by wild ducks:
This morning, my front yard was visited by a dead duck. It’s likely that is was the same one in the above picture, as it was taken just last week. What an appropriate start to April Fool’s Day – having to grab the shovel and find a dumpster. We were all sad.
Oh and, I didn’t take a picture of it dead, that would be morbid and just plain gross.
How many best buy employees does it take to checkout?
Continue reading The long and drawn out checkout at Best Buy
…when your screen name was your online identity. There was no expectation that you give your real name, though you could if you wanted to. This nostalgic feeling rushed into me as the response to my centos wiki edit permissions request came back stating that I needed my name as the username, not my online alias.
As if my online screen name identifies me any less than my actual name?
He’s been in the cube next to me for months, and I’m starting to feel bad that I didn’t share any doughnuts with him on his first day. He arrived one Saturday morning as we were doing some data-center housekeeping. Despite being one of those employees that simply “takes up space”, he’s obviously here to stay.
This evening I wasted a bunch of time on what turned out to be a simple problem. I really hate it when that happens.
I fixed a bug in tpe-lkm where users weren’t seeing all of their processes, and updated my servers with the new module. Suddenly, my phone starts buzzing off the desk; nagios was complaining that some daemons were down. This data is retrieved via snmp, and upon further investigation, I noticed that the daemons were in-fact up.
So it was a snmp problem.
Continue reading An agent, auditor, and bodyguard walk into a bar…
I’ve noticed that I have started to put on some weight (again). The last time my weight started to go up, I counted calories, and managed to get the weight down and stable for a little over a year. This time, however, I’m going to do something different about it.
In the spirit of the various “Occupy” protests lately, I’ve decided to start my own private protest:
Occupy Kitchen
Bottom line up front; the GPL license is viral.
I have had a lot of discussions with people about software licensing, and it amazes me how few of them really understand them, especially the GPL. I’ll do a quick comparison of licenses:
EULA: sharing is evil BSD: sharing is not evil GPL: not sharing is evil
Continue reading What some (many?) people don’t understand about the GPL