From the one that cut you.

[reddragdiva]

• The Met Police engage with bloggers! They phone them at work to tell them to shut up.

• NotN: Scientists surprised to find men attracted to women with big tits; New warning on "perfect vaginas" (not written by deathboy, but certainly channelling him).

The IT dept say my Ubuntu laptop will cause "broadcast storms and spanning tree collapses." It's not entirely clear how a device on a single connection can cause a spanning tree to collapse; we'll be asking for a detailed technical explanation. We did ask if it "might induce a FUDstorm." We know they run Ubuntu themselves. My boss is defending this assiduously — "we're a Unix department, a Unix laptop is appropriate, Windows isn't" — mostly because he'd quite like it himself, as would several others in the department.

I have new headphones. Skullcandy Ink'd. Apparently they are hip with the kids. Also decent headphones. Wish I'd gotten ones with a side-entry plug. Also, left and right aren't marked. Very good noise blocking for the Victoria Line.

Comments

[pndc.livejournal.com]

My fix for unlabelled or unreadable headphones is to stick a figure-of-eight knot into one of the cables to make it identifiable. Simple and effective.

[bob]

surely at this point you just shout bullshit very loudly and ignore them.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

They probably think your laptop is automatically going to act like a mad router. Which SunOS 3 and 4 tended to, back in the 80s. And they're retentive drones, but I repeat myself.

[misterfallen.livejournal.com]

JVC Gumy ones would have been cheaper. And likely better. And almost certainly more durable (I accidentally caught one in a door-jam and it still functoned perfectly).

[reddragdiva]

I got a CD marker and put a bit of black on the left one.

[reddragdiva]

Well, we do pay them to supply and support our desktops. However, ignoring them is certainly the strategy going forward.

[reddragdiva]

How can it act like a mad router with one connection?

[reddragdiva]

Yeah, many people have experienced these ones sounding fantastic, blocking outside noise really well and being made of cheese. I basically needed some in a hurry.

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

broadcast storms and spanning tree collapses

I smell an excuse calendar at work!

[reddragdiva]

We did surmise that they were using an out-of-date BOFH Excuse Calendar.

[bob]

a bofh one would be more inventive.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Some systems in the past have had a feature that the logic runs like this:
Packet enters system via an interface, goes into kernel.
Kernel checks if packet is not destined for the host and packet forwarding (i.e. be-a-router) is on.
If so, kernel looks at its routing table to see where to route that packet.
If no specific route, use default route.

Note the lack of a check for "did it come in this interface?" so the packet can go back out the interface it came in, especially if there's one interface and it's the default exit.

If packet is a broadcast, you can imagine it comes back again. As does any packet on a not totally switched net.
You can get surprisingly large amounts of network out of surprisingly slow CPUs this way...

I expect the only systems with this feature that are still operate are in museums.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Maybe someone nicked all the really good pages.

[hawkeviper.livejournal.com]

Is the DHCP for the network controlled by a windows domain controller? If so, they're probably alluding to the fact that under certain circumstances windows dhcp shits itself so badly that it destroys all network connectivity. This all because a device that doesn't speak active-directory got plugged in and requested an IP address. It's a wonderful system. Absolutely amazing watching an entire network of windows machines pop up with 'there is an ip address conflict' one after another.