The Lone Sysadmin

• Use Non-Specific Status Updates to Keep Your Home Safer – Safety – Lifehacker
  Good advice! People forget that when they post that they're gone lots of people can see that, and sometimes not just their friends. It's also a good idea to remove your birthday from Facebook and all the other social sites for identity theft purposes.

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• Scouts banned from carrying knives – Times Online
  This is ridiculous. You can't keep people from stabbing each other, so you ban knives? You can stab people with pens. Should we ban writing?
• Dishwasher Detergent Soak Cleans Dishes Overnight – Cleaning – Lifehacker
  I'm getting caught up on my serious RSS backlog and I see this. Is soaking dishes to make them easier to clean actually news? Man, we're getting pretty damn dumb as a species.
• ‘Known Software Bug’ Disrupts Brain-Tumor Zapping | Threat Level | Wired.com
  It isn't surprising that these sorts of bugs exist and are not fixed rapidly. The FDA approval process works against rapid releases of software for devices like this, or pacemakers, or insulin pumps, etc. Discover a bug? Well, better hope it doesn't kill someone in the years it'll take to get it fixed.
• The Risks Digest Volume 25: Issue 82
  Interesting post about Toyota cars accelerating out of control, and good observations about how changing long-standing user interface standards has unintended consequences. Traditional cars have several ways to stop acceleration or disconnect the power from the drivetrain, but new cars remove many of them. Where's the clutch on a Prius?

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“Hey Bob, you do desktop support, right?”

“Well, not much anymore, but what’s up? I can probably help, or ask someone.”

“I’m getting accused of hacking my work computer because I changed the desktop background.”

<stunned pause>

“Hacking? You’re serious?” I have some personal experience with stuff like this, getting accused of hacking a network because I knew how to use the Novell “attach” command. Scandalous, I know.

“Yeah. I set it to one of your photos, actually. Our IT morons are claiming I had to break in and change some security setting on the computer to do it. I just right-clicked and picked ‘Set as Desktop Background.’”

“Um, okay. Well, if these are the same guys you told me lock down the printers so you can’t print in the afternoon to certain printers it wouldn’t surprise me that they tried making it so you can’t change your desktop. And if they’re the same guys that you told me let your main file servers be down for a week because they don’t believe in redundant disks it’s not surprising that they didn’t do it right.”

“Yeah, but what do I tell my boss? They’re sitting in her office waiting for her to get back from a meeting.”

“Tell her that you wish your IT guys would help you do your job, rather than torturing and persecuting you for using something they claim was disabled. Maybe you set it before they disabled the function; I bet they didn’t think of that. Frankly, I’m surprised they have time to pester you, are they neglecting their printer Nazi duties?”

“Yeah, no kidding. You think that’ll work?”

“Last time I stopped by your boss had her kids on her desktop. It was the topic of conversation, actually — her kids are all giants. If they’re sitting in her office her monitor probably went to sleep, so they can’t see it.”

“Oh my god, that’s great! Heh, I guess we’re all a bunch of hackers. Maybe our next project should be hacking the payroll system to fire these idiots.”

Moral of the story: if you ever find yourself disabling your users’ ability to change their desktop background you should find something more productive to do, you soul-crushing fascist.

Popularity: 2% [?]

• RRDtool Announcements – RRDtool 1.4 – higher Performance and cool Features
  rrdcached seems like a cool thing. My organization has a long history with rrdtool, as we run what might be the largest single-machine MRTG instance around.
• KS2009: How Google uses Linux [LWN.net]
  Why is it that anybody doing anything serious with Linux is mangling the kernel on their own? Google, Red Hat… I guess that's the power of open source, but I think it's a downfall in some ways, too.

Popularity: 1% [?]

• Barbershop Songs are Fun! | David Choi Music
  David Choi's cover of Fireflies is great. I have a lot of respect for the amount of time it takes to put something like that together, and it's really well done. This guy is on my list of people to see next time I'm out west.
• Block sizes, think before you decide » Yellow Bricks
  Good recommendation for VMFS3 block sizes. I've been formatting all my datastores as 8 MB blocks, so I have fewer problems growing them in the future.
• Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge – Torontoist
  Firing your editors is a moronic move. Editors are awesome.
• ALL NEW! Star Wars Gangsta Rap: Chronicles | Star Wars Gangsta Rap | Atom Originals | Atom
  Funny, safe for work.
• ZFS Deduplication : Jeff Bonwick's Blog
  ZFS deduplication is going to be awesome, mainly for the potential of building your own storage appliances via COMSTAR.
• Don't Upgrade Your Hackintosh Netbook Just Yet – NetBooks – Lifehacker
  People who know anything about Apple should have expected this, and with the Psystar thing going on expect more lockdown of OS to specific Apple hardware.
• Getty Images Blog » Blog Archive » Life at Combat Outpost Zerok
  Interesting, medium-length article on one outpost in Afghanistan.

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If you haven’t checked out Ninite, by all means go do it.

All those Windows 7 machine rebuilds in your future just got a whole bunch easier.

Installers like these require a certain level of trust, though, and history has shown that eventually they will bow to pressures to make it less simple, show ads, or even start silently installing toolbars and other spyware. Here’s hoping that the folks at Secure By Design can resist those things and keep it as easy to use and useful as it is right now.

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My apologies, the Delicious blog poster seems to be going nuts and posting the same things multiple times. I’ve disabled it for now.

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• Dislike 0.2 Adds a Disapproving Dislike Button to Facebook – Facebook – Lifehacker
  I wish there was a dislike button. Then I could take all those passive-aggressive statuses people have and give them the thumbs down.
• Ryan Gordon Halts FatELF Project
  "It looks like the Linux kernel maintainers are frowning on the FatELF patches," he writes, "Some got the idea and disagreed, some didn't seem to hear what I was saying, and some showed up just to be rude." The Linux community needs to grow up. FatELF would have made distributing commercial binaries a lot easier, and the user experience of running them a lot better. The problem is that the Linux community doesn't care about their users, or what their users are trying to get done. If they did we might have a decent Linux desktop by now, with actual apps. They wonder why people choose Windows. It's because the people behind Windows actually want to help you, the user, do something with their OS. And as such when I download a Windows app there's a really good chance it'll run on any version of Windows I have. Yes, making that work is hard. But it's necessary if you want anybody to use your OS. And now, the guy that was VOLUNTEERING to do all that hard work has given up. Thanks guys.

Popularity: 1% [?]