goofballs

I will be the first to admit that systems administration is a protection racket: pay us, or something *bad* will happen to your network. Of course, the fact that bad things do happen to servers and networks -- worse, if you host a site on the internet you invite all sorts of badness from bored teenagers to Chinese government-funded hacker farms -- keeps us systems administrators out of jail for extorting money (our salaries) from companies for protection. As if that's not bad enough, us systems administrators are notorious for erecting barriers between developers and their masters, dumb management, and critical production systems that the systems administrators are tasked with maintaining. QA, regression testing, staging and peer review are just some of the tools in the "stymy development" tool box systems administrators use to slow down the development cycle from "pretty fast" to "reckless, stupid abandon". Developers, who know in their hearts that th...

Some of these posts are delightfully unhinged. Ah, drugs. Working on other projects for a while, we will return to Goofballs in the future.

The three laws of Arthur C. Clarke: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The third law applies best to how most people perceive what I do for a living. I will try to dispel magic in lieu of science, and I will try to do so semi-chronologically. In the early 1980s I had been given a number of Apple computers which were either on loan from or purloined from the law offices of my father; some he bought, outright, seeing my interest in computers. Nevertheless my very first command-line interpreter (CLI) was the built-in Apple BASIC interpreter that all Apples came with, on 5.25” floppy disks. A typical program might look something like thi...