jimsalter

jimsalter, 8 hours ago to random

Good(ish) news, everyone!

I got off my ass and set up a vhost on a different webserver for the (bare) practicalzfs.com. It just redirects to discourse.practicalzfs.com for the moment, but that's enough to give it its own SSL certificate so nobody who types in the barename gets a cert mismatch error.

Baby steps? :)

jimsalter, 26 days ago to random

The really "fun" thing about getting one of your sites false-positive detected as a malware site is that pretty much all of the engines use EACH OTHER as data points, so once one of them flags you, all the others immediately follow suit... but they generally DON'T follow one another in terms of REMOVING false positive detection results.

So if eg Kaspersky sneezes, you have ten or more badly documented and completely different removal request procedures to follow.

jimsalter, 1 month ago to random

Y'all ever get a fractal question? One that seems simple at first glance, but the more you pay attention, the deeper the layers you've got to address actually go?

This morning at Practical ZFS--if you'll pardon a car analogy--essentially, a Proxmox user wanted to know "how can I wash my car?" and I discovered that I first needed to walk them through every stage of Johnny Cash's Cadillac, THEN we could talk about the carwash:

https://discourse.practicalzfs.com/t/hard-drives-in-zfs-pool-constantly-seeking-every-second/1421

jimsalter, 1 month ago to random

I think AI music generation has reached a similar level as AI image generation. Behold, "sad girl on piano sings the MIT license" as generated by suno dot ai:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/mit-license-text-becomes-viral-sad-girl-piano-ballad-generated-by-ai/

jimsalter, 2 months ago to random

I notoriously disapproved of #BG3 during Early Access, but #Larian fixed every complaint I had--the final release is IMO the best licensed D&D CRPG of all time.

I respect the integrity it took to step away, and I can't wait for their next project.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/03/weve-done-our-job-baldurs-gate-3-devs-call-off-dlc-and-step-away-from-dd/

jimsalter, 2 months ago to random

Can any #actuallyautistic folks following me chip in on something?

I was having some shower thoughts this morning, and it occurred to me that stimming is likely essentially the same neural impulse as instinctive dancing to music is in neurotypicals.

Like, sure, we have plenty of DELIBERATE dancing in neurotypical society, and it serves any number of purposes, but I'm talking about the automatic, unforced impulse to nod your head, tap your toes, shake your ass to a beat.

jimsalter, 2 months ago to random

Windows Server 2022: DISM Error 1168, the key could not be validated, and your attempt to activate using this license has been cancelled

Also Windows Server 2022: yeah you're licensed and activated just fine, why do you ask boss?

pics related.

image/png

jimsalter, 2 months ago to random

People are so quick to be like "don't hoard your health potions and scrolls, use them, it's what they're there for!" And yeah, admittedly, I frequently finish an RPG with 100+ unused health potions alone.

HOWEVER.

I am a child of the 80s, goddammit, and I grew up with two different types of RPG: the kind where you could always grind to get more loot, and the kind where there were only so many monsters in each area.

You ever gotten to the end of a game with NO consumables at ALL?

Yeah.

jimsalter, 2 months ago to random

There's certainly more than one reason I strongly prefer free and open source operating systems and other software. But this ONE would frankly be enough, all on its own.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/what-i-do-to-clean-up-a-clean-install-of-windows-11-23h2-and-edge/

This is the face of enshittification.

jimsalter, 4 months ago to random

Hey everybody! PSA:

Both 2.5admins.com and practicalzfs.com are currently offline, due to their entire datacenter also being offline, possibly due to extreme inclement weather.

We have full backups, and are monitoring the situation at the datacenter to determine if/when we give up on them and spin up a new host elsewhere.

jimsalter, 4 months ago to bluesky

I don't think I realized how easy it was to block entire Masto instances as a user--not just as an instance admin--until today. It's literally two clicks and done.

So there's DEFINITELY no need for anyone to lose their mind over commercial ventures offering Fediverse integration. If #Bluesky or #Threads or whatever shows up in your timeline and you don't like it, just find any post from any user on that platform, click the hamburger menu, and click block domain: DONE.

jimsalter, 6 months ago to random

You can give a Microsoft person a main ballroom to speak in, and they can give an excellent talk on #WSL... But you can't get many of the Linux conference attendees to show up for it. ☹️

#UbuntuSummit

A selfie showing Jim sitting at the front of a nearly empty ballroom

jimsalter, 6 months ago to random

Confession: I still browse r/zfs on Reddit every few days. I try never to respond there anymore, because principles are principles, but it's HARD seeing people's questions go either unanswered or--worse, and all too frequently--very, very badly mis-answered.

It feels like extremely bad form to continue to advertise Practical ZFS there on Reddit, but please... if you have ZFS questions, go to https://discourse.practicalzfs.com/ for answers. Reddit is a festering corpse.

jimsalter, 6 months ago to random

I bought a 200W charger last week which puts my Galaxy tablet in "Super Fast Charging" mode when plugged in... which, I discovered, has a different sound effect.

"Super Fast" charging mode has essentially the same sound effect as regular charging, but with a ton of lilting reverb added. It makes the tablet sound excited to get plugged in, which is a little weird.

Anthropomorphization, away!

jimsalter, 6 months ago to random

Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo reports in depth on the bug we brought up in this week's @25admins : people with multiple user profiles on Android 14 devices are being locked out of their main profile.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/android-14s-ransomware-data-storage-bug-locks-out-users-remains-unfixed/

jimsalter, 7 months ago to random

Adventures in a long-untended facility network with no administrator-level access continue. Progress is made! Terrible over-bent optic patch cables are replaced! Network latency is down... WAY down!

If you're interested in the details--or would just enjoy a good sea story--I wrote them up here: https://jrs-s.net/2023/09/30/adventures-in-network-repair/

image/jpeg

jimsalter, 7 months ago to random

Y'all, I don't know what we said to give everyone the impression that Allan and I didn't know that hard drives (like floppies) originally had larger platters, but I promise, we knew.

The first hard drives I used were Winchester style 5MiB drives the size of small office copiers, attached to TRS-80 Model II business machines.

The heads rode on air cushions, and if somebody bumped the table, the head would plow into the platter. That's where "drive crash" comes from.

@25admins

jimsalter, 8 months ago to random

Once again, my childhood home state is determined to make me embarrassed for having ever had anything to do with it.

jimsalter, 8 months ago to random

Your brain is a pattern recognition engine, and it just recognized a pattern that it likes.

jimsalter, 8 months ago to random

I'm probably never going to write the actual article I'd originally intended these charts for. But if you want to see the difference between latencies between #OpenZFS and #btrfs on an eight-drive system that's creating and replicating automated snapshots regularly, here ya go.

We're looking at fio random access, limited to (simultaneous) 8MiB/sec read and 23.0MiB/sec write. The system has eight 12TB Ironwolf rust drives, in four ZFS mirrors vs one eight-wide btrfs-raid1.

image/png

jimsalter, 8 months ago to random

Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance.

Salter's Corollary: Any sufficiently advanced ignorance is indistinguishable from malice.

jimsalter, 8 months ago to random

Listening to myself talk about SSH keys, as I "proof-listened" the most recent @25admins episode, I tried to hear it with newer ears, and it reminded me how long it took to grok public/private key infrastructure.

It occurs to me that we missed a MUCH better naming schema. Your private key is just a key. Keys are private by nature. Your public key is a LOCK. Locks are public by nature.

In that metaphor, you install your lock on a server so that your key will unlock it.

jimsalter, 8 months ago to random

So I just restarted my machine, and um excuse me whatteth the absolute fuck?!

jimsalter, 8 months ago to random

jimsalter, 8 months ago to random

It's been griping me for YEARS that #syncoid can only give a progress bar for the CURRENT replication task, not for the entire job (when it involves multiple datasets).

The problem is that it relies on an external program for the progress meter, which means you can only meter the one task at a time.

That's gonna change real soon. We gonna have simultaneous progress bars for the current task, and for the ENTIRE set of tasks:

https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/perlpv/