Im letzten Job hatte ich nen Kollegen. Klassischer Metalhead mit langen Haaren, Bart, langer Kerl. Zum Weltfrauentag isser immer im Kleid auf die Arbeit gekommen. Total grossartig. Ich bin da noch zu verklemmt für.

Aber vllt kauf ich mir zum Christopher Street Day und zum Weltfrauentag Haarkreide und lauf ein paar Tage mit langen Regenbogen-Haaren rum. Haha.

DOTA auf Warcraft 3 Basis ist der Grossvater von LoL, DOTA2 und anderen vergleichbaren Spielen. Das Anzuschauen weckt gerade echte Nostalgie an komische wirre Starcraft I und Warcraft 3 custom maps. Gute, wenn auch wirre Zeiten.

I mean to a certain degree, I can understand if people find a problem with Poetterings approach of doing things !CORRECTLY!. Like, systemd-resolved resolving A-records with multiple addresses ina deterministic fashion because it's not defined not to be deterministic, and because actual load balancing would be better. It's not wrong, but it's breaking everything. And it got patched after some uproar. And there are a few things like that.

But at the same time - I don't think people appreciate how hard doing process management right on linux can be, especially if the daemon to run is shitty. Like, init scripts just triggering the shutdown port on a tomcat - except the tomcat is stuck and not reacting to the normal shutdown port and now you have a zombie process and an init script in a fucked up state. Or, just killing the main process and for some reason not really removing the children, now there's zombies all over the place. Or, not trying appropriate shutdown procedures first and just killing things, "because it's easier" - except my day just got harder with a corrupt dataset. Or, just trying soft and "Pwease wexit Mr Pwocess" signals and then just giving up. Or having "start" just crash because there was a stale PID from an OOM killed process around. Man I'm getting anxiety just thinking about this.

And that's just talking about ExecStart and ExecStop, pretty much, which I have done somewhat correct in a few init scripts back in the day (over months of iteration of edge cases). Now start thinking about the security features systemd-analyze can tell you about, like namespaces, unmapping syscalls, masking parts of the filesystem, ... imagine doing that with the jankyness of the average init.d script. At that point I'd start thinking about rebooting systems instead of trying to restart services, honestly.

And similarly, I'm growing fond of things like systemd-networkd, systemd-timesyncd. I've had to try to manage NetworkManager automatically and jeez... Or just directly handling networking with network-scripts. Always a pleasure. Chucking a bunch of pretty readable ini-files into /etc/systemd/networkd is a blessing. They are even readable even to people rather faint on the networking heart.

And even password based disk encryption can be defeated with 2-3 physical accesses if an organization wants to hard enough. Keyloggers can be very, very sneaky.

At that point you'd have to roll something like Yubikey-based disk encryption to be safe, because this re-establishes control over some physical parts of the system. Until they find the backup Yubikey you had to not lose all data by losing the primary key you're carrying around to maintain control over it.

It's not a battle the defending side can win.

Ich glaub du bist da auf halbem Weg zu einem legendären Powermetal-Song. Die unschlagbare Eichhorn-Kavalerie auf Seepferden des Hering-Königreiches der südlichen Nordsee! Zittert vor ihrer Macht! Mat? Maat? Ach. Zittert vor ihrem mächtigem Maat!

Catan just feels weird. The thing is - and I kinda validated that recently by watching highlevel competetive play of the catan base game, but: You only have like 2-4 meaningful decisions in a game. The rest is just follow through and dice.

And these things aren't that hard to see at a decent level. And when you make these decent decisions, you mostly just win. Even with the robber, there's limited counterplay to these good initial choices. This makes it hard to play casually as well once you know the good things.

Wow. I'm not particularly sensitive, but that seems like the right amount of very bright strobe that gives me headaches in concerts, especially at night in the dark. That's very much the level of trying to find out a way to get to the roof to unplug it.

And that skeleton of a system becomes easier to test.

I don't need to test ~80 - 100 different in-house applications on whatever many different versions of java, python, .net and so on.

I rather end up with 12 different classes of systems. My integration tests on a buildserver can check these thoroughly every night against multiple versions of the OS. And if the integration tests are green, I can be 95 - 99% sure things will work right. The dev and testing environments will figure out the rest if something wonky is going on with docker and new kernels.

Ich muss immer noch drüber lachen. Paar Jahre zurück hab ich 2-3 unsere Firmen-Standorte besucht.

Die Niederlande waren grossartig. Man konnte nen Grossteil der einfachen Sprache verstehen und mit ein wenig Nuscheln und Platt verstanden auch andere einen gut genug.

Und dann kamen wir nach München. Da hab ich mich irgendwann auf Englisch verständigt. Weil.. nei. Wat?

I just enjoy the scene of the oldtimers strutting in like true chads and showing the youngsters how to take care of the big lady. It's so wonderfully corny. And it's such wonderful bullshit, and when you learn how many hands were necessary to run such a ship, it's even more fun.

I'm more of a specialist and a rule lawyer.

I mostly have a small collection of games ranging from easily explained to really huge. Like, I have Flashpoint, or Pandemic, or Betrayal at the house on the Hill. All of these are games you can understand well enough in 1-2 rounds of going if you know boardgames a bit. And then there are things like Junta, Arkham Horror, Eldricht Horror, Battlestar Galactica, considering to get the new dune game. Those are great, but a lot harder to get into.

But that's a quality my current gaming circle likes. I can pick up a lot of rulesets and digest them decently quickly, because I've played a lot of games, and a lot of complicated games over the years. Like, if you've dealt with MtG and Dominion, you've seen 90% of deck building concepts and rules. Some P&P RPG experiences in 2-3 frameworks cover a lot of ground for a bunch of game rules. You kinda learn how rules tend to be written, how rules tend to be designed, and how rules are usually intended to be and that helps processing rulesets quicker.

A bit from an ops-side, but I think it applies. I think pair-work, pair-programming, pair-troubleshooting is a tool for specific situations. It's amazing in some places, and an exhausting waste of company resources in other places.

Like, if we're in a hard situation with many unknowns and possibly horrible consequences of mistakes. Critical systems down, situation is weird. Or, implementing config management for something entirely new. Or, trying out new code structures, ideas. That's when being two is great. You can bounce changes you make to the system off of your copilot, so you can be very safe while being fast. You can have two opinions about shaping a piece of code and APIs. You can iterate very quickly if necessary.

On the other hand though, there are things that require deep thought. Like, I had to figure out how 4-5 teams use an infrastructural component, what's the live cycle of the component, when to create it, when to delete it, how to remove it. It ended up being twelve lines of code in the end, but like 1 phone call every two lines of code, and an hour of thinking per line of code. Pair programming would not have been compatible with this.

Or, the third kind, is crunch work. The best way to do crunch work (besides automating it) is to just put up headphones, find flow and hammer it down. Have it reviewed later if necessary. But why would we need 2 guys following the same runbook for the upteemth time?

It's a great tool to share knowledge and to handle critical tasks with high error potential and I wouldn't want to miss it for that. But it can be overused in my book.