Haven’t seen RTFM casually dropped in conversation online in… um… a while…

You’ve been hanging out on the intartoobz at least as long as I have. Circa the paleolithic era, or so…

sed harbors no demon beasts, in my experience.

On the other hand, by default using sed -i is where the demons come in.

No, sed, NOT in place. Not the first time. Show me what you want to do based on the instructions I gave you, and then we’ll talk about letting you play with the real data.

As part of a much larger project that was all-in on Java to begin with, I’ve used Tomcat to serve pages and PDFs/office doc formats rendered based on a postgres backend and FreeMarker templates.

For these purposes, you don’t want that level of complexity (or Java) but the general premise and template libs should be available in nearly any sane web programming language.

It’s amazing how many companies rely on a crazy amount of FOSS libs, etc.

In the relatively recent past, a boss who I had software PMd for across numerous years had the unmitigated gall to ask me for a list of licenses for “all the software we used.”

I literally laughed in his face, explained open source and the rabbit hole such a question goes down, and he just couldn’t (wouldn’t) get it.

Unfortunately, the biz side of the house doesn’t like “yeah, it’s all legal, but fuck you if you think I’m documenting every piece of code in every library in a ten plus year old code base, allllllll the way down.”

Thank you for the TL;dw. Sincerely appreciated.

A hard timeline on commit strikes me as less than ideal.

People are people. They have issues, they screw up, but they still write good code.

Seems like a brutal metric that encourages minimal commits without real change.

Used it in a pinch once, and realized how incredibly awesome it is. Now, it’s my go-to.

Haven’t tried data and files on same stick, but…. Now I want to.

Not aware of a FOSS 1:1, but that sounds like Ghost or your blogging platform of choice.

Except WP, if self hosting, IMHO. Wordpress == PHP == trouble and risk. I don’t mean to malign WP specifically, but if you’re a noob, you want to avoid exposing PHP to the public internet - especially if there’s any possibility you’ll eventually forget about maintaining and upgrading.

Just too damn easy for some threat actor to come along and exploit a vuln you missed, in the software or the web server or WP.

That said, years of WP taught me that, roughly, you want “pages” linking to “posts” ( == chapters). In theory, the former is a permanent reference and the latter is dynamic to some degree.

In reality, the existence of search engines before enshittification means the two have been conflated frequently.

Pages would often get links in a sidebar or menu. Posts might get buried much farther down, but can also be linked to. They’re often, but not always, time—specific.

“2023 NY [financial product] Guide” (page) might well link to a years-old post about subrogation regarding an attempted BBQ of a random wild animal that went wrong and caused a fire, because it’s a positively classic example of the same that makes a great deal of sense to most people, even if they don’t understand terms like subrogation.

Post/page are distinctions that WP makes, but are abstractly relevant to setting up abs any CMS (which is what you want, Content Management System) so that you (ideally) never have to figure out how or where to link something, its just native. Changing the structure means changing the URLs which is annoying at best, and fraught with peril at worst.

Above 2023 xxxx Guide page, would be https://example.org/NY-Xxxx-Guide and that way you DGAF about the sidebar links, for instance. Link it once, and then you only have to update 50 posts with the year and/or some change in the data, which can be done programmatically in the db as a trivial exercise. “UPDATE page SET title = (SELECT title FROM… WHERE ‘2022’ in title TO ‘2023’;”

Disclaimer: do not run that query as copypasta, it’s meant to illustrate a point and not to exhibit valid SQL on any db (Not least because I intentionally left out at least one closing paren and simplified a bit. I’m a PG guy, and I am 100% certain it would fail as written, but fully expect anything approaching the standard to reject it. But you get the idea, update 50 states at once with a fairly simple query, once a year.

Lots going on here, but go for a modern CMS and repeatable updates, not a legacy product with a bunch of tech debt accumulated. Build it clean, plan it out first, and know whatever DB is backing it fairly well.

Migadu has been amazing. It “”just works,”and there’s no reason to deal with any of the crap that comes with hosting email.

They are affordable, and provide exactly what they claim to provide.

Email is not - IMHO - worth the trouble to self host. There are too many hard stops where email is required as login, etc to bother.

I enjoy hosting and using a variety of services. But I’ve no desire to bother with something I can ship out to folks who live and breathe that particular service.

Only reason dd hasn’t bitten me is that in my head, if and of make perfect sense as input and output.

Doesn’t mean I won’t make that error tomorrow, ofc. But I tend not to alias except harmless stuff to avoid that very problem.

I have this exact use case on a work machine, because the proxy flat refuses to prompt for the login, just goes straight to deny.

I own neither the proxy, nor the steaming heap of code that lives behind it, and I’m grateful for that every single day…

That’s the one I had in mind.

If the clock is off (bad CMOS battery, as others have noted); and there is a password “max age” setting that’s intended to be far, far, far in the future…

Well, your clock being off by a few hundred years might well trigger the (intended never) expiration setting.

Malware is a possibility, but I lean towards the date being the cause rather than an effect.

That was exactly my take.

Regrettably, these folks are in no way equipped for a cyberwar.

All the less so for their deps etc.

I expect my - and anyone’s - employer to pay health insurance, and to keep that data safe. Customers are fine here as far as u can tell, but if you tell me that you’ll cover some amount of risk and then you reneg,were rightfully going to have a humdinger (see OCMS) of a war on that one.

If you insure my health risk, fr where I sit, you also insure the risk of my data that I handed over so you could insure the risk, in the first place.

Try it all. Keep good notes.

Some service names are marginally misleading, but understanding what it does and how it bills does two thing: Helps you avoid overbilling; and also ensures you “get” it.

Properly secured and understood, S3 + immutable saves my ass more than o once because could prove that as of x bi-hourly backup, PG reflected some given status.

In other words, “I did not fuck that specific thing up, and as of the last time I was in good faith awake, it looked like x. Let’s look at logs/code, bc last I saw it, it mapped perfectly to reality.”

The bit about “keep good notes,” above, is for future you.

“Oh yeah I played with that random AWS service a few years back, wish I could recall the outcome,” vs “Mind giving g me a sec to have a look at my notes, I’ve seen this before!”

That translates to execs as “Yep, I follow, and u have ref material from the last n times I solved this problem, so I’m your guy, I just need a sec to locate the details of the last round before I straight up commit to an answer.”

Gut feeling: Nope.

Further reflection, for those who remember a certain video game in the CGA error (not V, C)

“Here’s tae us, who’s like us, damn few, and they’re all dead. “

It just freakin’ works, which is a real benefit in our world.

Appreciate you pointing out those examples - while one could argue errors in judgement, going with what one knows allows for getting stuff done NOW.

Have to say, FB and G examples resonate most with me because while Java is hardly “rapid,” given a well-defined objective I can bang out PHP or Python to accomplish it quickly, and then iterate efficiently.

That was doable long before the idea of iterating quickly / failing big / etc entered the public consciousness. Just not in Java…

Yes - you’ll be well-served by the ThinkPad line in general. My first permanently dedicated Linux machine was a T430 and true to form things largely “just worked.”

That was enough years ago that I might well have needed to seed the network drivers on the usb key, and that was the worst of it.

They’re tanks, and the hw is generally easy and fairly intuitive to swap out the usual memory and HDD.

IIRC my first distro on that was Debian, had plenty of docs about the intersection of the distro and ThinkPad line.

Mint should be perfectly fine given that.

I will say that I try not to do fresh installs on unfamiliar hardware w/o some other available form of connectivity, my phone mostly is quite sufficient for the purpose. It’s just easier not to risk putting myself in a difficult position in the first place.

You’re in for some fun.

Are they based out of the PNW? Now that I think about it, I may actually have interviewed with them at one point.

ETA: Yeah, pretty sure it was them, they’re PT and have a 425 DID for sales, and the company name is wholly unrelated to the product. Had forgotten about them entirely, and would have had the same reaction as OP to getting that email now.

And it probably is the sw product the email was referencing, since Bartender is capitalized.

Boxes that physically live in my home are mostly Manjaro. They’re also not externally accessible from the internet.

Anything in the cloud I standardize on Debian. Two distros and consistency makes maintenance much easier.

Anything in a container runs whatever it was built on because porting a docker compose file from, say, Alpine to anything else is just not worth the time and energy.