Say you rent a box somewhere on the Internet. You installed Debian stable on it because you want it to be nice and stable and run a few daemons that are useful to have online. Could be to hold your vast music collection, family pictures, or use it as remote …

The night was clear, we would not be playing Bomberman in the VLT control room that night. Clear skies and a sub-arcsecond seeing meant we would have a full batch of data to process every hour or so until the next morning. Once the calibrations had finished, the telescope operator …

I used to work for a company where IT issues could only be reported by email. No hotline: send an email, get a ticket number back, expect somebody to call you about the issue and negotiate a solution with them. Of course, it makes it a lot more fun to …

Just finished Who moved my Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. A quick and interesting read about how to be prepared for change and how embracing change in your life can make a real difference.

The followed metaphore is about four characters faced with a life-changing situation: they live in a maze …

We now have official confirmation that the C++ standardization body is made of extra-terrestrial beings come to Earth to prevent humanity from reaching the singularity stage. By creating C++ and making it appear as …

One of my home PCs just got into trouble lately. Survival time after booting was a couple of minutes, after which the whole thing froze hard, forcing a manual power-off. Does not look like an OS failure, it would die with a bit more blue elegance. Opened the box, found …

To the question: "Why do we do things this way?", you often get three different kinds of answer:

Argument by Longevity

"Because we have always done things this way", also known as "It is known."

Argument by Numbers

"Because everybody does it this way, there must be a reason."

Argument …

Just saw this on Imgur. For sake of completeness I will just quote them here:

xkcd 963 nailed it once again. How much fun is it to have to open one of the zillion Unix config files on your Debian box and start tweaking until it finally works? The graph could just as well show "Time since I last opened wpa_supplicant.conf", or "/etc/network …

My kids were bored on one of these unkind-weathery Sundays so we decided to invent a new war game. Creating the game from scratch took us most of the afternoon and we had to modify rules several times to make it balanced. This is what we ended up with.