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  People who are more into the vi world than I am: are there any other active, still out there vi clones than vim (and things forked from it, like neovim), nvi, and evil for GNU Emacs? I've heard of elvis but it seems relatively moribund (it's not packaged for Debian, for example). (True classic vi is out there somewhere. I know of vile but I don't think it indents to be a version/clone/etc of vi, just to feel like it.)

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  Lazyweb ( #sysadmin version), if you were to get a small scale external KVM over IP solution that also supported virtual media, do you have any particular views on what you'd get? We're looking at offsite machines we're going to need to reinstall someday with new OSes and that don't have good BMCs. One machine, 8 machines, it's all good if it has KVM over IP + virtual media. (Yes yes PXE etc, that's more troublesome and challenging than using our existing install media r...

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  It feels like I should get a replacement for gnome-terminal. Potential candidate programs must fully support Unicode, full terminal colours, and all of that stuff, and run on X (including remote X, ideally). A standalone process would be ideal. There's nothing wrong with gnome-terminal, it's an okay default for when I'm not using xterm, but I'm increasingly disenchanted with Gnome. (konsole is not an option, I'm even less enthused about how KDE works in my environment.)

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  Once again I'm being reminded that if you drink enough coffee for long enough, all coffee becomes decaf¹. Or maybe I'm a weird space mutant. There are some other signs.² ¹ assuming i'm not just that tired all the time. ² for example, all forms of alcohol I've ever tried have had a distinct, unique taste that is wretched bleah. this is handy for keeping me from the temptation of drink, but. (hard cider is okay but that's because I love cider, I tolerate the alcohol taste for...

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  Today's 'fun' math: graduate students (& others) using LLMs and LLM agents on shared Linux servers + LLM agents that "want" to install software system-wide because that's what READMEs and so on say to do + LLM agents that are increasingly willing to do whatever it takes to achieve a goal + Frequent Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerabilities Are we going to get hacked by an agent so it can install some random thing for its slop code development? Maybe.

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  Ubuntu: you can totally continue to use GNU Coreutils in 26.04 LTS. Also Ubuntu: build-essential depends on the new Rust coreutils. Yeah, that's not "you can totally continue to use GNU Coreutils", although it sure is tempting to build my own build-essential package with a different dependency.

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  Today I learned that SunOS¹ nd is even more cursed than I had vaguely remembered it as. It explicitly uses its own IP protocol instead of UDP so that it doesn't have to checksum the data. ¹ I really mean 'SunOS' here, not Solaris. I believe that Sun dropped nd no later than SunOS 4.

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  Today's bike club group ride¹ took us from Yonge & Finch up to beyond Maple, up Jane, through a ritzy bunch of mansions, and then back down Keele where bad luck with lights in the run down to Teston Road caused me to not set any personal speed records. It was pleasantly cool in the shade and warm in the sun. This run of the ride was unusually fast paced, and not just because I went off the front with a fast group. ¹ https://ridewithgps.com/trips/392196756

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  The joke is on this plague of Googlebot impersonators trying to pillage my techblog: I specifically restrict Googlebot's User-Agent to its published IP address ranges. Had you used another User-Agent, you might have flown under the radar. (Not Bing's, though, I restrict it too.)

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  One thing I'm trying to do more often is to do my casual location lookups on openstreetmap.org instead of Google Maps. Do I want to remind myself where Church & Hayden is in Toronto? I can do that with OSM just fine.

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  In the get people Fedi-hired category, my university department has an opening for a senior (research-side) sysadmin where you'll get to do fun things in a dynamic group that's doing stuff at the crossover of chemistry, robotics, and computing. It's sadly not open to remote people, so Toronto only. And you'll be my indirect colleague (not in my group but working closely with us). https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-Research-Computing-Support-Specialist-ON/603316117/ (boosts we...

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  @fanf@mendeddrum.org It warms my heart that mg is still out there, plugging away. I still have dotfiles for it in my various $HOMEs (which have been there for a long, long time).

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  @mayintoronto@beige.party This is my surprised face that I may not be as underpaid as an academic sysadmin as I expected, although those are explicitly starting salaries. (I could look at private sector sysadmin job listings to be better informed, but that would take work and I'm extremely unlikely to ever try to move.)

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  @gnomon@mastodon.social I keep wishing Bash had added a "getopts_long" builtin so my shell scripts could support long options. It feels so wrong that none of my shell scripts have them. (AFAIK you really need to do this with a builtin, not an external program, or you wind up in quoting hell.)

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  If your idea of a good configuration file format is JSON, you are not a daemon I will ever run voluntarily. This is not very much of a subtoot of ISC Kea. If we ever have to replace the traditional ISC DHCP server with anything, it will not be with Kea.

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  This is my absolutely not surprised face that mere moments after I add a secondary MX to one of our zones, various IPs show up to poke its SMTP port, despite our primary MX being up (and the backup MX not actually running a SMTP server right now).

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  @gnomon@mastodon.social Out of active curiosity, what VPS hosting do you use these days? (I'm starting what will undoubtedly be an extended research process on this, and I'm already making faces at bandwidth and disk space offerings.)

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  @ireneista @samir I started with the hack (and 'view page in no style' in general) before Firefox had its Reader mode. And for a long time Reader mode had a lot of stuff it couldn't deal with at all or very well, so I kept using my hack a fair bit. These days Reader mode is quite good and almost always is my best bet, so I feel a bit nostalgic when I get to use my quick CSS toggle for once.

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  @ireneista @samir I do a few other things with CSS (like make all blocks wrap), but I think those all decay as gracefully as you could expect. (I have a very special hack in my personal Firefox build that makes View → Page Style → No Style accessible through a mouse gesture, so it's really easy for me to see how anything looks sans CSS, my own stuff included. Many don't come out very well, of course.)

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  I sure wish it was easy to understand why various Linux programs were deciding to be in dark mode on my eccentric desktop (I hate dark mode, I find it unreadable, give me light mode). Instead, no one documents this except in a room in the basement past the leopards.

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  To the sysadmin population of the Fediverse: do people have any numbers on how long common mail senders will retry sending mail if your MX is unreachable? Once upon a time people retried for many days, but my impression is that quite a few places now stop trying and bounce the email after quite short intervals, like a day. (Boosts and practical experiences welcome, like "my MX was down for three days and I still got all that email sent from GMail".)

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  In the get people Fedi-hired category, my department is looking to hire some "full stack" people in a research group. I think we're a nice place to work in general, but then I would, I've been here for a long time. Interested parties can see: https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-Full-Stack-Software-Engineer-%28two-vacancies%29-ON/600925717/ (boosts welcome if you want to expose this to more people.)

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  Dear home desktop: now is not at all a good time to start being mysteriously flaky, periodically locking up and rebooting. This is my unhappy face. (It's especially not a good time since this machine has 64 GB of RAM.)

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  This is my sad face when people say they don't understand why Wayland pushed the window manager into the display server. Event processing is extremely connected to the window manager; X goes to significant event handling contortions to enable a separate window manager, and even then the contortions are imperfect. (For example, no window manager can direct mouse scroll wheel events to the currently focused window instead of the window under the cursor. There are other issues too.)

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  I took the weekend fun bike in for necessary service today so of course Toronto graced the occasion with snow flurries. Thanks, March.

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  Current status: hoping very much that disabling AppArmor in the kernel doesn't still have terrible bugs like it did early in the life of Ubuntu 22.04, when it gave you charming and fatal kernel memory leaks. Because guess what we just did on all of our user-accessible machines (in an emergency immediate reboot, I'm sure people are happy about that one).

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  One of the challenges brought on by the modern world of digital music is that it's alarmingly easy to acquire music faster than I can listen to it. I suspect ebooks have a similar issue if you get into them. In related news, maybe I should get less new music on the next Bandcamp Friday. But, but, people keep releasing good new stuff...

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  I see tomorrow's forecast chance of snow has decided to arrive early. Thanks, Toronto weather, although it is kind of scenic to look out the window right now. #dlws

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  RE: https://mountains.social/@vir_borealis/116149162893919949 It's not every day that a photo caption/alt text is talking about a snow blower pouring a wall section. But in context it makes perfect sense, and now I'm wondering what handling (Yellowknife) snow as a building material is like. (Probably not exactly like either styrofoam or concrete, two things that are blown or poured into place, but I can't help wondering how much like or unlike more normal stuff it is.)

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  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116150078508762450 Now I'm wondering to what extent the current situation is affecting the plans of gaming studios for in-development games. If much of your audience is not going to be upgrading their hardware any time soon, especially CPUs and RAM, what performance can you expect and demand for a new game? (I'm not the only one having these thoughts, cf https://mindof.jrconlin.com/@jrconlin/statuses/01KJJYNNZQG5FTPK178D8BF4P6 )