Comic for Monday, January 24th, 2022
Jan25
on January 25, 2022
at 6:19 am
Haven’t forgotten about the Q&A, but also didn’t get to finishing it. This week also looks like it’ll be busy, so not entirely sure when it’ll be up. But it’s on its way.
We’ve seen Mium’s fascination with wearing dark glasses before, particularly when kidnapping heads of state, though the rational for it is probably a bit of a mix of column A and column B there, given that Mium does tend to change his hair color too.
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https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/3m0MxcU-X0DNmWTDSDbkRTw3iqA=/0x0:630×420/1200×800/filters:focal(0x0:630×420)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/assets/1945435/bluesbros.jpg
Though, really, Peter just gives the impression of trying to look like Aaron.
Just keeping things alive while waiting for next Monday. Pitchfork and torch bearers are easy to distract. LOL
Kally looks like Jane Bond and Peter looks like Columbo! Or maybe Kally looks like a well to do college girl and Peter looks like a college guy that eats Ramen noodles. Or Mutt and Jeff. Any other suggestions?
Page will probably be up tomorrow (Monday).
Hey Folks- going to miss the update this week. Sorry for late notice and the recent spotty record on these, just have had a few things vying for time at the moment.
hey pal, it’s ok. these things happen all the time. we’re not upset.
Nope. Pitchfork time!
We’re going to party like it’s 1699!
That’s almost a pitchfork party I can get behind. Except, looking around, I can see I’m entirely unprepared for it.
So first, we need to come together, right now, and build a barn.
Well, yeah. That makes sense. Gonna need a barn.
Plus then we get to have a barn raising party too!
And after the barn raising there needs to be a barn dance!
I’m not seeing any problems so far. Sounds like a good time to be had by all!
Page will be up tomorrow (but like, actually, this time).
I’m counting on you, Past. Don’t make Bob, Jim, TGape, and the rest of us write a new bootloader here in the comments. No one wants to see that.
But just in case, anyone who needs a primer / refresher:
https://www.apriorit.com/dev-blog/66-develop-boot-loader
Because let’s be honest, grub can be improved, and no one wants to go back to lilo.
Past,
Hopefully you have time for another question for Q&A. When do designer children and other Malsans develop powers? I’m guessing at puberty or at least several years old. I shudder to think of Kally as a crying baby with power. Maybe “Doll of Destruction” described her formative years as a child.
Hah, question discovered; pronunciation – Is her name Avi’ellah or something smoother like Aviyella or A-viel-ah? or another syntax that I didn’t guess? A lot of the names in the comic (especially those from central) have easily discerned pronunciations, but I’m less certain here.
Side note; does anyone else default to trying to write pronunciation like pronounce and throw in the excess ‘o’? I did it, let autocorrect fix it and then did it again the second time.
This is a serious question. I can think of three ways just to pronounce the first “A”. Long “A”, short “A” or “ah”. Also, which syllable is accented? We need to get the pronunciation correct so Naomi doesn’t punch us through a wall for teasing her little sister! LOL
I just figured it was pronounced Aviella.
Oh, Jim will have me go all phonetic. Sigh. Where’s the fun in that? Ah v ih eh l ah. Sorry for not using the official pronunciation symbols; somebody decided my Linux distro didn’t need a keymapping that was both clearly named and provided easy access to them.
I would pronounce it like you suggested. However, it is a possibility that Malsans pronounce “e” as a long “a” like in Hawaiian language. That would make the little version of Naomi pronounced as Ah v ih AY l ah.
This is serious! I don’t want to get punched by Naomi! Worse yet, ILA might take exception to teasing Naomi-friend’s little version! Let’s send a black haired guy in a black suit over to greet mini-Naomi. LOL
Ubuntu? I blame it on systemd.
1. Not Ubuntu. I tried it for a while, but their style of system administration is just too different from mine. Not that any actually *match*, but there are other distros that are not as different.
2. The issue predates systemd. I’ve been using Linux since before kernel 1.2.8 (though probably not much – that was the latest stable when I first looked under the hood.) I’ve never seen a Linux keyboard map that really handles pronunciation symbols well. To be fair, I’m not entirely sure what that would look like, which is part of why I haven’t made one.
Alright. I have to know. What is the preferred distro for TGape?
Please don’t say Gentoo!
Oh, fsck that crap.
I mean, the *concept* was interesting. But the people running that distribution didn’t seem to understand that people actually try to do things with their computers, and they want them to work.
– Their system administration ideas were actually worse than Ubuntu.
– They systematically turn off automated testing. So stuff builds, it gets released, and it fails all over the place. This was an absolute showstopper for me, because I used functionality in my shell startup files that broke under Gentoo, due to deviations that also caused the shell’s unit tests to fail.
I pointed out that my problem was demonstrated by the unit tests, and they basically dismissed it as nothing. “We don’t run those. They report a lot of problems that aren’t an issue.” Um, I just said I can’t even log into a terminal on my computer because of a problem that is an issue. It’s real easy to reproduce, because there’s a unit test already written for it.
As far as what distribution I *really* prefer? I actually don’t know, because that thing I said about having things I want to do with my computer besides build distributions? It’s also things I want to do with my computer besides testing distributions, and there’s so many distributions out there, I don’t think one person could adequately evaluate all of them and stay current, even if that was their full time job.
It’s not my full time job. So I’ve settled with something that kind of mostly works for me. It’s more based on what we use at work than it is on my personal preference, so it’s one of the more businessy distros. Though, to be fair, in my experience, businessy preferences tend to be a better match for what I want in systems administration anyway. I think it’s because it’s preferences made by people who actually do systems administration, rather than wanting to sweep it under the carpet and forget about it.
The exact distro is probably less important than you think.
Y’all see what he did to me there, right? Y’all are witnesses! Big long post… never answered me.
I can’t stand it. I’ll make up an answer just to have some closure. I’m going to assume you use CentOS.
The distribution really doesn’t make that much difference, except for certain cases.
Some are easier to find help on. Sure, sure Linux is Linux is Linux. Except when the person with the problem is in just over their head, and they can’t tell if things aren’t quite displayed the way the documentation they found says because it is a different distro, different version, or simply doesn’t apply to their question.
Have 30+ machines and want some level of automation? A smaller number of distros (1 is a small number! ) makes mass updates easier.
Gentoo. Nuff said. Okay, not really. I loved that distro, right up until the day (2008? 2009?) when they switched the default behavior of apache without a word in the change log. And all of my servers stopped cold until I found the line I needed for EVERY vhost.
But yeah, in the usual case, the distro is mostly just flavor.
I’ll not argue with that assumption. It could be right.
I’d dropped Gentoo before 2008. I hadn’t ever put it on any production machines. From their decision to base everything on a programming language named after a comedian group to their lack of concern that it took 30 seconds just to run `emerge help` on my computer, it seemed pretty clear from the start that it was something I’d need to carefully consider before trusting my career to it.
Also, management at work wasn’t open to using Linux at all yet. That shift wouldn’t happen until some time after 2008, when we reorged so the worst boss I’d ever worked for was no longer in charge of the group I was in, and we instead reported to a guy who wouldn’t retire soon enough, but at least wasn’t malicious, toxic, or into power games.
Gentoo was interesting and had potential, but it clearly need a lot of help, and it only took a few months to determine that the people in charge weren’t really interested in the kind of help they needed. That said, it did take a few years before I finally admitted that they also were actively opposed to the kind of help they needed.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you *like* spending all of your time getting your upgrades to compile, rather than using your computer for things like playing games or being productive, Gentoo was a *great* distribution, and probably still is. It’s just that I like doing things besides updating my computer.
To be fair, it probably didn’t look like it at the time, given that I had Gentoo, Red Hat, CentOS, SuSE, Yellow Dog, Slackware, Ubuntu, Debian, and a few other distros I’m blanking on installed on that same machine, so there were basically always updates to apply whenever I booted into one of them. I can’t remember if Yggdrasil was still around then or not.
As insane as that was, it did come in handy to have at least one completely separate working distribution on that same computer, because when I couldn’t log in to my normal user account… I also couldn’t log into any of my other user accounts, including root. Switching to an older kernel didn’t help, I needed to use a root disk that had a different compilation of that shell. Fortunately, I had plenty of options to choose from.
0 is a smaller number of distros. But somehow, it doesn’t seem easier to keep 30+ machines updated with automation when using 0 distros. Of course, I could be wrong. I’ve only tried keeping a maximum of two Linux boxes up to date with 0 distros. And it’s possible that having some hardware consistency could have also helped.
To be fair, you didn’t say that your 30+ machines had any hardware consistency, and it’s technically possible to have 30+ machines without having an appreciable amount of hardware consistency. It just feels to me like the more machines one has, the more likely they are to be similar to one another.
Just containerize everything and ignore what distro or hardware it runs on.
I mean, I run Raspberry Pi OS (ARM64) containers on my Intel iMac. If that isn’t Mium-level magic, it’s getting pretty close!
My experience with containers has generally been positive, but definitely far away from being a generalized solution. Rather, with respect to upgrades, now you’ve got a host to be concerned about, as well as the containers.
There are indeed simplification that come with using containers, but at the cost of additional overhead in knowledge and management. Even the networking behind more complex.
Great when they work, extra headaches to troubleshoot when they don’t.
It sounds like our take away from Gentoo was similar. I would consider trying a fork under different management, but the main branch can die off and be forgotten.
I’ve been blessed to work in Linux friendly environments since about 2002. Much of that has been a a result of only considering those environments as viable employment.
As to hardware consistency, by the time I was juggling that many “servers”, we called them “instances”. For the most part they were AWS EC2 instances, a smaller number of similar products from other vendors, and a few remaining pieces of physical (and not homogenous) hardware.
Not quite as elegant as Bob Kerns containerization suggestion, but still a significant improvement over running the actual hardware. Usually.
Same caveats though. Running VMs on someone else’s hardware still means extra knowledge, extra troubleshooting headaches, etc.
But as you scale upwards, those trade offs become ever more favorable.
Why bother thinking when your best friend is functionally omniscient
She Who Had No Name has been named Aviella! Golly gee whiz Beaver! Nobody else seems to have noticed that yet!
@Decker: Yes, you are, but since the comments display newest-to-oldest, “firsr” is one of the last comment anyone sees.
Such are the breaks around here. ^^
And Naomi showing she has been observant and taken levels in Ila wrangling. She’s definitely muscle for team Peter but any attempt to attach the word ‘dumb’ before hand definitely needs asterisks to show that its a relative statement, not absolute.
Miss “proof that designer children aren’t always smarter” Atarah? Naaah …
I’m loving the loop of weirdness that Kally Comments on. That is the favorite type of commentary.
Also I have seen no other comments yet so I will assume I am first commenter of something in existance! Whooooo! I needed that rush.
It’s a good couples dynamic. Same as how Peter’s mom just rolls with Aaron threatening Mium as a work thing. Of course, Kally’s not exactly the most normal person herself, and that’s also fine.
What I do appreciate is how from interactions like this we really can’t tell if they’re just going on a date or are off to go do something absolutely ludicrous like “kidnapping heads of state.” The more I look at it, the more that casual disregard is truly a generational thing, as I mentioned. It makes me wonder what sorts of crazy things Peter’s mom has done. I suspect that she’s not just good at working with physical hardware, but that Peter learned coding and hacking from her.
The entire family is crazy. Crazy awesome. To the point that random people know their name. Mium and Illa actually fit right in. Hmm, thought. Since Mium is made up partly by Query, and Peter made query, doesn’t that make him a Kepler as well. I know he was using the model number as his last name, but now that he has more than one running around he should really consider changing his last name. It would both make sense and be hilarious. I mean, even Peter’s not going to be immune to his mother when she finds out….
Bit all over the place with this one, but it’s early and no coffee yet. :/
Why would either Mium Efaite or Mium Ephive want to change their surnames? Their surnames are awesome. Next thing you know you’ll be saying that Ila Eftin should change her surname, too. (I’m guessing their mother remarried or something.)
My guess is they’re going on a date. On this date, they’re going to do something else awesome that will surprise me.
I do not understand the rush to be first. Life isn’t a race. You don’t get any rewards for being first, only from being the best. Yet people rush to be first to the redlight even if it just means they get to sit, wait, and waste more gas. It still takes the same amount of time. You also don’t want to be first at sex. No special rewards for being first to work, and no one cares about the first to do any other task, only that its done the best.
I know “garbage in, garbage out”, but this is my first “weirdness in, weirdness out”
lol