Behind the mask.

[reddragdiva]

• In the UK, you can actually bill cold-callers £10/min for calling you, and win before small claims court.

• The Caturday video to beat them all: Russian cat circus.

• skud: No, I still don't want to work for Google.

• RationalWiki: Pigeon chess.

• NewsTechnica: Chuck Norris facts, updated. Yeah, wrote one this year.

• Rocknerd: Party Fears #6 scanned and online; So what was Maxicut?

From Jeeves on RationalWiki: "The Answers Research Journal has really outdone themselves this time. In their determination to figure out how many mammalian 'kinds' there were on the ark, the crack geneticists on staff at AiG turned to the most up to date scientific methodology, using google images and figuring out which animals look kind of similar. The best part? Check out fig. 18. That's a fucking stuffed toy."

Christmas is coming! And oh fuck we're broke. SHINY MODERN LUMPS OF COAL FOR ALL!

arkady has successfully brought the broken cello back to life! And promptly broke the top A string ...

The most exciting thing in my life of late has been moving my assorted sites to new hosting, as we finally abandon the shitty un-upgradeable old box we've been camped out on the past several years. Cheers to hawkeviper and elpenguin. This does mean I will no longer have the root prompt on lemonparty.org. O NOEZ.

Rackspace don't offer an email smarthost, and recommend you smarthost with Sendgrid. Don't bother — the latter uses bureaucracy as protection against possible spammers showing up and will keep you waiting for days. Rackspace just bought Mailgun (and will do a coupon code if you ask) or you can just check your IP isn't in the blackhole lists and see if a test email to GMail works, as I did, and chance it.

(I did manage to break James' previous VM. How to bugger Debian: upgrade udev on a slicehost with unupgradeable kernel. FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT PISS COCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. Instead of going through advanced geekly contortions to get it back, we just went "fuckit", declared it "storage" to get the old files off it and pushed a button to create a shiny new Ubuntu 12.04 VM. It's always nice when "KILL IT WITH FIRE" is actually an option.)

rationalwiki.org is ticking along pretty stably now. Ickiest part of administering MediaWiki: fixing broken math display. (Did it, but.) Until the box gets hammered by something and promptly collapses in a heap, like happened this morning. Yeah, best be getting on with making it FastCGI.

I will note that a sysadmin who sets server timezone to anything other than UTC is in a state of sin and must be redeemed by cleansing flame.

Screenshots my dad's way: take a photo of the Skype video screen with his DSLR. With flash.

Comments

[greylock]

Well, I never thought I would read a Die Monster Die interview in my life.

[ideological_cuddle]

I will note that a sysadmin who sets server timezone to anything other than UTC is in a state of sin and must be redeemed by cleansing flame.

Says the guy who lives right next to UTC...

Hardware clock, yes, that should be UTC. System timezone, who really cares? It should be whatever is most convenient for the people banging away at a shell.

[ewx]

syslog always used to log in localtime without a timezone indicator. If logfiles are the most important consumers of formatted timestamps on a given host then that might well be a good reason to set a system timezone of UTC (or at least something without DST!)

[reddragdiva]

Yes, I'm thinking servers. My desktops are set to GMT/BST, but servers have to be set to UTC or the sysadmin in question must be killed.

(and this is the regard in which GMT is not UTC)

[reddragdiva]

I'm thinking servers, hence "sysadmin". Specifically that rationalwiki.org's apache logs in local time (EST/EDT or some such pish) but other logs are in UTC. What on earth. NO.

[ideological_cuddle]

How long are you keeping those logs, though? I don't know about you but I am not generally keeping anything I expect to refer to for more than a week or two.

So while DST may be an inconvenience, it is a minor inconvenience compared to having to try to think ten or eleven hours off.

[ewx]

It's not really about how long you keep them, the problem is that the timestamps are ambiguous for an hour in the autumn.

[ideological_cuddle]

The sysadmin (i.e., me, on the systems I manage) may find it considerably easier to think in his or her local timezone than something which is ten or eleven hours off.

Absolutely, having the host timezone set to EST when you're in London or Melbourne is the worst of both worlds. But I do not agree that this is a hard rule, though it is certainly an easy policy to set if one lives at UTC+0.

[ideological_cuddle]

I'm happy to take a week twice a year when I have to think for a moment about whether this was pre- or post- changeover in return for not having to think in a timezone which is radically different from my own the rest of the year.

As I said earlier, it's much easier to insist on such a rule when you live so close to UTC anyway.

(And yes, BST, etc, but even so an hour is an entirely different thing, you're not dealing with "was this today or yesterday?" every time you look at a log, which may not be very frequently.)

[reddragdiva]

Trust me when I say that BST has been enough of a PITA in practice that at work we had to make doing everything in UTC, and labeling it as such when reporting on failures and suchlike, an actually documented practice.

[ewx]

How do you propose to tell whether a given timestamp in the ambiguous period is before or after the change?
In the case of logging what I'd prefer to see is the raw time_t logged (ideally to at least millisecond precision), then you can easily turn it into a human-readable time in whatever timezone and calendar you like post-hoc.

[ideological_cuddle]

In an environment where it matters a great deal I might well run the system in UTC and change the user timezone. Where I'm working right now it really just doesn't matter enough.

Then again in an environment where it really matters I don't much like just keeping the logs under syslog on random hosts -- my preference is throw it all in to a tool like Splunk.

(I say "a tool like Splunk" because it's quite possible people have done work on an open-source equivalent and I just don't know about it.)

[bob]

logstash + kibana

[tcpip]

I think that guy who billed the cold-callers is setting a very good example which we should all follow.

This said, I tried the same on a collection agency a couple of years ago, but they didn't bite. Short story - I had provided documentary evidence that I had paid a bill (a Visa statement). They couldn't find it. I said, "I'll charge you X to find it again, and resend it, or we can take it to court".

Sadly, they didn't respond after that.