Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

I'm practicing a backup using dump(8) & restore(8). dump gave me progress reports including eta, but after an hour restore is giving nothing.

My home's 'Net service is randomly disconnecting again, and now Mastodon is freezing & crashing. I guess I should be thankful it isn't eating enough load to overheat my CPU like TweetDeck does.

I've been irritable all day, & I have no idea why. It wasn't just programmer news, but that didn't help. I think most of it was seeing a brand new error during a support call, on site in a hot room. It was so hot that stepping outside into the Summer sun actually cooled me down.

BRB, making illegal copies of the software sheriff. (wrt lb)

...And it's official. GitHub sold out to Microsoft: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/

Apparently, it happened: GitHub sold itself to Microsoft. We'll know for certain tomorrow, I guess. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/3/17422752/microsoft-github-acquisition-rumors

This won't shake the programming world to its very core at all, no-sir-ee! Microsoft and GitHub are talking about selling GitHub to Microsoft. http://www.businessinsider.com/2-billion-startup-github-could-be-for-sale-microsoft-2018-5

Facebook is killing the controversial 'trending' news section: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-trending-news-section-from-homepage-2018-6

Good riddance to bad rubbish! :3

Hmmm. This is a shortcoming of Mastodon: If a profile spammer follows you from another instance, then when the other instance's admin deletes the account, no unfollow propagates. I have a spammer ghost following me.

How? Well, FreeBSD's chown(8) manpage says this about -R:

Change the user ID and/or the group ID of the file hierarchies rooted in the files, instead of just the files themselves. Beware of unintentionally matching the ``..'' hard link to the parent directory when using wildcards like ``.*''.

Guess what matched & why it took so long.

Remembering that time I discovered an upward directory traversal bug in a NextStep version of the chown command & wound up owning several dozen user accounts without ever touching a keyboard.

Somehow, my home dir wasn't owned by me anymore, so a sysadmin got root & ran `chown -R arielmt *` in my home dir, but the other user still owned dotfiles, so the sysadmin ran `chown -R arielmt .*` & took a long time to notice it was taking too long to run.

LB reminds me of the customers who wanted me to repair their desktop PC after they pulled straight out on the CPU heat sink with so much force that, when the CPU pins finally gave, the still-locked ZIF socket came part-way off the motherboard.

I'm still tinkering with with my desktop icon theme.

I decided I don't need a tall xload because I'd only need to know if the load average gets above 4.0 or 5.0, not necessarily how much above.

I also decided that a wider xcal would help me reread date info a lot quicker. (I just realized I'll have to widen it more for "September.")

Combine those together, & that let me move xclock closer to the corner, too.

(Wallpaper is the left part of "Chakats at the Onsen")

Swiped from https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/999616307241906176 on birdsite:

NPR has the best creative solution. (You can shortcut it by replacing "www" with "text" in the URL.) https://computerfairi.es/media/_7qtaotMWoqCRAl_vqU https://computerfairi.es/media/pgoIMpkj0wtCx3WaMEg