The Grumpy Old Techie » fun

Cool Tech from Hack a day

Grumpy Old Techie — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:23:46 +0000

Hack a day serves up a fresh hack each day, every day from around the web and a special how-to hack each week. Have fun reading, I certainly do.
Hack a Day

Beach stereo
Easy IM-ME flashing
Steam powered tank
Sponge music
Low Cost Killer Robot
DIY scratch controller
Update: Nintendo DS camera control
Hardware jailbreak eases reboot pains
Coffee powered Car-puccino
50MHz to 100Mhz scope conversion
Jeri makes integrated circuits
Noisy Super 8
Game glove learns your weakness
R2D2 build video
Will this mouse get me kicked out of the coffee shop?
more....

Tags: fun, hack, hack a day, Tech, technology

If you can read this, thank your sysadmin

Grumpy Old Techie — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:33:19 +0000

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day

You may ask “What is a System Administrator?”

The answers you will find at http://www.sysadminday.com/ are as good as any. Being a System Administrator is a somewhat stressful job and turns you into a cynic very quickly (see http://www.sysadminday.com/time.html ) and you start hanging out in places like the scary devil monastery. Your (l)users also stop talking to you mainly out of fear of hearing the truth because the last time they complained about not getting e-mail you answered “Well, maybe nobody likes you anymore”

Why does one stay a System Administrator then if the stress is so much. You will find the answer in the scary devil monastery FAQ

Sysadmins are driven by a desire to _make_it_work_. We loathe non-functioning
pieces of crap. Similarly, we hate seeing equipment working at substantially
below its potential due to moronic admin decisions.

Doesn’t this mean we should shun sysadminning, then? Well, as you will
see from discussion in ASR, we have this tendency to drift into the job.
It starts when you’re given a machine on your desk which crashes every
five minutes, and you know how to make it crash only once every five days.
You get given the root/administrator password. You end up fixing someone
else’s machine too. As word gets out, you have more and more people
calling on you for basic computer administration assistance every week.
Eventually you get told that your sysadmin work is more important than
what you were doing before. Since you seem to be the only person in your
company who is doing any work, you have to agree.

After a while, you quit and go to work for somewhere else, where you’re
promised you won’t have to be a sysadmin.
But the machine on your desk crashes every five minutes…

Tags: asr, computer, crash, e-mail, fun, luser, Mac, mail, scary devil monastery, stressful job, sysadmin, system administrator, system administrator appreciation day, user, work

Running those legacy apps

Grumpy Old Techie — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:48:23 +0000

Yesterday Andrew McGill posted the message below on the Gauteng Linux User Group mailing list. Because he is not blogging I’m doing it for him. What he is describing is one of the biggest frustrations people have with so called new and improved software.� more....

Tags: Apple, blog, crash, fun, ICT, licence, linux, Mac, mail, microsoft, open source, software, sysadmin, systems, user, vista, war, windows, work

All Software sucks!

Grumpy Old Techie — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 14:45:12 +0000

Wordpress, the software I use for this blog is great and has a wonderful plugin system that allows people to add functionality that is not originally included in wordpress. Unfortunately many of the available plugins are not so wonderful and often do not work as expected (advertised). more....

Tags: authentication, bad idea, blog, e-mail, exchange, fun, internet, ldap server, mail, mail server, memo system, mere mortals, open source, open source system, openldap, optimist, plugin system, postfix, runes, software, suck, systems, upgrade, user, vista, war, widows, windows, work