Archive: February 4, 2023

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Mastocoms II

Saturday,  02/04/23  10:53 AM

Well, it's the morning after (I enabled comments via Mastodon), and while nothing appears broken, no comments have yet been posted; the crickets are lightly chirping.  Par for the course, I guess; you-all have more interesting things to do than read about my comments and probably, haven't even noticed yet.  Staying tuned ...

Saw this great George Carlin quote this morning, from Dave Winer.

Couple of thoughts about comments:

  • Yes, need an instant-relay-to-Mastodon, so new posts show up right away.  On the list.
  • Would be nice if the original post (here on my blog) showed whether there were any comments, and even nicer if it remembered the last time you visited (already does this) and showed whether there were any new comments.  On the list.
  • What would I do if someone posted a "horrible" comment?  Slash, irrelevant comment.  I'm relying on Mastodon to filter, and presumably they would do if it were henious in some obvious way (porn for example, or bad language).  But what if one slips through?  The commenter "owns" their comment, should I leave it?
  • Final thought: personal attacks, either on me or on another commenter, are out of bounds*.  So yeah, gardening.

* of course nothing at all keeps someone from linking to me and posting anything they want, nothing I can do.  This is the great thing and the hard thing about the Internet.

Your comments on all this are most welcome :)

[Update 2/5/23: actual comments have been posted, yay, and have figured out a way to show #comments for each post, yay]

Meanwhile I am off to visit my boat! - a nice day, first in a while ... yay.

 

virtual boxes

Saturday,  02/04/23  09:09 PM

One of the cooler pieces of software out there is Virtual Box, now from Oracle.  (I say "now", but Sun bought Innotek and then Oracle bought Sun in 2010 ... so not that recently.)  It is free, yay, and let's you run just about any operating system under just about any other one.  For example, I have an Intel PC running Win 10, and using Virtual Box I have Windows XP, Win 11, Win Server 2008R (long story there), Red Hat Linux (Fedora), Ubuntu 20.02 LT, Ubuntu 22.10, ... and (!) OS X Catalina, and OS X Big Sur.

They all run pretty well, and while the performance isn't "native", it's certainly good enough to do real work.  And it sure makes testing easy - you can have different combinations of these running at the same time, and they can all talk to each other and behave as separate machines.

So that's nice ... and tonight I bit the bullet and upgraded Virtual Box to v7.06.  Which meant a whole round of booting each guest operating system and checking for problems, and upgrading the "guest software" which Virtual Box installs to run seamlessly (e.g., display and network drivers).  After a big round of "doing stuff", all is well.  Kind of amazing but all of this software is free.  The biggest problem is actually the oldest system, Win XP, which needs to have license keys etc.  (I had an old MSDN license so I have legit license keys.)  The newer stuff is just download and use and free.  Incredible.

Oh, and so why did I do this?  Well ... I made a change to the CSS on my blog, and wanted to check the appearance in various browsers on various platforms :)

 

 

 

Saturday,  02/04/23  09:34 PM

Making a filter pass...

Beautiful day outside - yay - even went to the harbor and checked on my little boat, but did not got sailing, sigh, and my plans for sailing tomorrow are iffy too.  Stay tuned.  Anyway it felt today like the corner has been turned on winter, whatever Punxatawny Phil might have said...

Oh, and we saw 80 for Brady tonight; cute, worth a watch.  Poignant considering he just retired, but still ... cute.

Russell Beattie: My job search.  "Despite making an effort, Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) still absolutely hate my resume in either PDF or DOCX form. I've tried to reformat the damn thing a few times - making it simpler and re-arranging job title and employer, etc. but the systems are just random as hell and make a total hash of it."  I've been looking for a new job too, and have worried about this; very few recruiters see your resume "native", and it's hard to know how it looks after the great ATS filter.  Good luck, Russell! 

The painting is DALL-E: "Impressionist painting of someone looking for a job."  But really, they'd be behind a keyboard :)


Wow.  Astronomers Just Discovered 12 New Moons Orbiting Jupiter.  That makes 92, [perhaps temporarily] beating out Saturn's 83.  "Nine of the twelve new satellites are found in the far-off moon clusters that orbit Jupiter retrogradely, or in the opposite direction of the inner moons."  Suggesting they are captured asteroids... 


The OK computer.  A nice reminiscence of the Lisa, on its 40th (!) anniversary.  I never used a Lisa, but I had a Xerox 850 - with a mouse! - and I so remember the first Macintosh.  I still have my old Mac SE, Hen3ry; I should boot him to celebrate :) 


The next de-extinction target: The dodo.  "The dodo was a large (up to 1 meter tall), flightless bird that evolved on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. As European sailors reached the islands, it quickly became a source of food for them and the invasive species that accompanied them. It went extinct within a century of the first descriptions reaching Europe."  Well, cool, and good luck with that!  (And you did watch Jurassic Park, right?) 


heh



Virgin Orbit: Facts about the novel air-launch provider.  "In the increasingly competitive commercial spaceflight sector, Virgin Orbit is known for its horizontal air-launch system in which an expendable two-stage LauncherOne rocket is carried to around 35,000 ft by a modified Boeing 747-400... Virgin Orbit says this mobile launch method allows for faster mission preparation compared to more conventional ground launches."  Rooting for them, but seems hard. 


Visual Capitalist: the rise and fall of music formats.  Supercool.  Interesting how there was a big drop after CDs peaked at the turn of the century, but now streaming has risen even higher.  Would be interesting to know whether a larger percentage of the revenue is now going to artists, and also, a Pareto of how many are getting how much (are the stars getting richer?) 

 

 
 

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