Garrett Wollman

I fix networks and other stuff with computers inside for MIT CSAIL. Bi cyclist, cismale. More frequency = better mobility. Emergency backup account for @garrett_wollman on Twitter.

Public Key

npub1ytc2mzamfyuvqpyvfv9ffxpz46rj8qj9f7huylwe0d6sh0jr5cfsrfz7k3

NIP-05 Address

wollman_at_mastodon.social@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsz9u9d3wa5jwxqqjxykz55nq32apersfz5lt7z0hvhkagthep6vycpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qj8uwj3

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1ytc2mzamfyuvqpyvfv9ffxpz46rj8qj9f7huylwe0d6sh0jr5cfsrfz7k3

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Last Notes

2024-07-26 20:22:54

For some reason, it never seems to occur to American TV announcers that they could just shut up.

2024-07-20 20:08:43

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@npub18hd…kf64 To any browser vendor who makes it possible to "disable paste", you are a bad person and should feel bad.

2024-07-19 14:03:15

I hope someone is keeping track of who is reporting #Crowdstrike outages so that the public knows who their customers are and can reevaluate business relationships accordingly.

2024-07-11 01:48:58

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@npub1rv4…ft5j Why did I immediately think of a particular Windows volume license key?

2024-07-02 03:41:07

Every election is the most important election of my lifetime.
This will continue to be the case until the fascists are comprehensively defeated.
I do not expect this to happen in the decades I have remaining. It is, and has always been, the work of generations.

2024-07-02 02:52:24

Every year the White House has to give Congress a list of all of the people working in the president's office, what they do, and how much they get paid. Considering the cost of living in DC I'd venture to say a number of the people on this list are seriously underpaid.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/2024-July-1-Report-to-Congress.pdf

2024-06-30 16:13:23

TIL: while the US version of the Simple Minds compilation album _Glittering Prize_ doesn't include the song "Glittering Prize", the rest-of-world version does, as a sensible person would expect.

2024-06-14 18:12:40

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@npub104e…r4uy How does that affect the *a priori* estimated time to complete a self-test? There's no prior experience on which to base an estimate, it has to be something supplied by the manufacturer.

2024-06-14 15:47:47

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@npub104e…r4uy In the factory they were programmed with different self-test time estimates?

2024-06-14 15:17:25

Can someone explain to me why new, identical hard drives report different time-to-complete for the extended self test, varying by as much as six hours?

2024-06-09 02:11:37

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@npub1rv4…ft5j I had completely forgotten about HD-DVD until you reminded me. Hopefully I can forget again soon.

2024-05-27 02:41:40

Unpopular opinion: it is OK if software is actually stable and does not require large amounts of ongoing maintenance.

2024-05-18 23:39:13

OK, I'm going to be spending four whole days in London in August on my way to Glasgow. Obviously I'm not going to be able to see remotely close to "everything" but what shouldn't I miss? No interest in the Mountbatten-Windsor family. So far I have on my list the Greenwich Observatory, South Kensington museums, British Library, London Transport Museum... what *non-touristy* things should I see? Railway stations/termini? Monumental feats of civil engineering? Notable buildings?

2024-05-16 01:40:16

In SCOTUSblog today: "The legislature ultimately chose the 2024 map, Landry and the H.B.1 challengers contended, over other proposed versions because S.B.8 achieves the legislature’s political goals – specifically, protecting the districts of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Rep. Julia Letlow at the expense of Rep. Garret Graves, who had supported Landry’s opponent."
As if those goals were in any way legitimate.

2024-05-10 05:24:49

@npub104e…r4uy You know what's worse than autoconf? autoconf used as a part of the build process of a linux kernel module, because the linux kernel developers refuse to maintain stable interfaces.

2024-04-15 12:59:05

There is truly no need ever for military flyovers.

2024-04-09 13:05:30

Over and over again, the linux world's creation of `/var/lib` just hurts my brain. There are no libraries here!

2024-04-09 03:44:34

Colleague had a ticket a few weeks ago from a user who had set up their own private NFS server very much contrary to our recommendations. Disks failing left and right. Luckily it was on ZFS, so it just went offline rather than eating itself. Unluckily it was on donated hardware with one of those awful "hardware RAID" controllers with 1:1 mapping. Colleague put the drives into a spare chassis we had been saving and it imported without error. Friends don't let friends use "hardware RAID".

2024-04-08 17:00:04

Why do people have so much trouble with the command-line syntax of `ln`? It's the same as `cp` and `mv`, deliberately so. But people find `ln` much more confusing.

2024-04-05 05:24:15

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@npub104e…r4uy On the other hand, they're not making any more.

2024-04-05 02:48:19

Planning my trip to the UK in August. I can get DL points but be stuck on a boring A330, or I can fly BA and get to take a B777 or A388, neither of which I have taken before (or likely will again).

2024-03-08 04:51:40

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@npub178r…qekt On C-SPAN before the event they were saying Biden's departure from the White House was delayed by protesters. Is that typical?

2024-02-22 21:39:58

How did all of these fantastic young musical talents from the 90s become so old?

2024-02-18 20:30:03

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@npub178r…qekt "renovated" meaning "we made the rooms smaller" I guess?

2024-02-09 18:14:31

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@npub1upk…tcwy I had a situation the other day where I had a local branch (with changes) that was based on top of a remote branch, and I wanted to create a new local branch based on top of a new remote branch but with all the changes from the old local branch. I said "argh!" and pulled at my hair because I'm pretty sure `git rebase` can do something like that, but ended up just reading the log and doing a `git cherry-pick` instead. (The old local branch will be forgotten eventually.)

2024-02-08 16:27:31

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@npub1hvd…9sq9 @npub1sdt…96z3 @npub1psd…9sr7 I spent 20 years of my vacations driving around the country taking pictures of these things and talking to the engineers who maintained them. Couldn't maintain much interest given what's happened to the industry over the past decade.

2024-02-08 16:18:53

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@npub1hvd…9sq9 @npub1sdt…96z3 @npub1psd…9sr7 It's a one-kilowatt "graveyard" AM station, so it's almost certainly a 199-foot unpainted unlit guyed steel tower. The report that I read said the transmitter was stolen, which wouldn't be hard (modern 1-kW AM transmitters are about 6U rackmount units, just remove the cabling from the back and walk away with it) at which point the tower would no longer be hot and you could take it down relatively easily.

2024-01-27 00:41:16

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@npub1src…fms4 @npub1uv3…ajye What they want (well, what their management and shareholders want; corporations do not have desires) and what they are morally entitled to are entirely different propositions.

2024-01-22 00:33:14

Tonight I made the meatloaf from Diane St. Clair's THE ANIMAL FARM BUTTERMILK COOKBOOK. Of course being scatterbrained I didn't calculate the nutrient values until after I finished all of the prep work (it's in the oven now), and it turns out to be right around 600 kcal per serving, which means I'm going to be well over my target for the day. (If I had planned better I could have had a smaller lunch.)

2024-01-20 02:09:49

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@npub178r…qekt And these generally originally ran on 25 Hz power, like many other industrial loads of the time, which is why 25 Hz was an obvious choice for the New Haven and later Reading and PRR electrification schemes.

2024-01-19 06:11:05

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@npub1sdt…96z3 @npub1uuv…zpxv @npub1gm7…j3a6 @npub1074…z2j6 And he had a rather unique way of speaking, his own jargon that didn't sound like the usual techspeak, with the falsetickers and truechimers and all the rest. But fundamentally grounded in control theory, not marketing psychology.

2023-12-21 17:30:54

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@npub1e9x…tdmt @npub1vu7…nmuv @npub1psd…9sr7 "Commercialization" is the biggest cost! What comes out of academic and government research is targets and mechanisms, sometimes an actual chemical substance (or natural product). A drug manufacturer still has to optimize the chemical structure, figure out how to manufacture it in quantity, figure out the best formulation/delivery system, and take the result of that through three phases of clinical trials to prove that it's both safe and effective.

2023-12-21 03:35:58

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@npub1vu7…nmuv @npub1psd…9sr7 80% of promising, well-founded, evidence-based drug candidates fail after they get to the clinic, often after setting a billion &currency_unit()s on fire. The windfall from 2/10 successful drugs cross-subsidizes the 8/10 failures. Find a way to fix that and you're well on your way to lower prices and lower profits. That probably involves the public assuming more of the risk of drug development.

2023-12-20 14:50:33

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@npub1upk…tcwy -man macros are pretty terrible, but -mdoc macros basically solved this (and provide semantic markup!) thirty years ago. I think RMS's objection had as much if not more to do with the fact that TeX was Free, whereas [nt]roff was a proprietary AT&T product. Although for some reason TeXinfo's syntax was made to look like Scribe instead of TeX.

2023-11-25 22:07:57

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@npub1sdt…96z3 @npub178r…qekt @npub14c2…umaq I wrote a web page tracking all the AT&T divestitures and mergers and back-double-somersault-corporate-restructurings and whatnot, and but after 2014 I just gave up. (And the various companies' investor-relations web sites became a lot worse as a source information about past business combinations and spin-offs.) There were nine companies that still existed (and hadn't yet gone bankrupt) in 2014 and I'm sure there are fewer now.

2023-10-23 23:00:17

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@npub1f2y…m58m I don't really have much experience with what my mother has been cooking since my parents moved away and I only visit them once a year at Thanksgiving. It was much easier back when they lived close by and I could visit for Sunday dinner. The ones we're really going to lose are my grandmother's; now that the family Christmas party has gone by the wayside there won't be any big gatherings that would justify making them.

2023-10-23 22:17:21

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@npub1f2y…m58m Awwww....
I don't have any recipes like that from my mother (who is an excellent baker), because everything she does is either from memory or from cooking magazines. It's only in the last few years that she's gotten around to clipping the recipes she likes out of the magazines, rather than keeping entire back issues and searching through them on the basis of the cover. Three decades of Bon Appetit dragged from house to house until they finally had to downsize.

2023-09-22 22:40:52

Got the latest COVID shot today, but I still only have 4G. Had to wait about 45 minutes at Walgreens; the person administering the vaccinations said that the reservation system double-books them. No confusion over paperwork and the Walgreens computer still had my insurance data even though I haven't filled prescriptions there in about a decade.

2023-05-07 18:20:46

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@npub1h4f…aupf prep.ai.mit.edu has been an alias for ftp.gnu.org for a *really* long time, decades at least, so I'm not surprised the old directory structure has been rototilled. After all, FTP was something you did interactively; there was no consideration back then of a need for pathname stability.