Monkeys on mailing lists

I am on several mailing lists. One in particular, sunmanagers, is for people who work with Sun hardware and software. People who are on these lists are systems administrators, IT managers and so on...

The IT world is fairly small - I know this from working in Edinburgh, and when I worked in the USofA it was just as small a world over there too.

You would think then, that people would exercise common courtesy when posting to a list that contains people who you might be asking for a job in the future? Apparently not. People regularly ignore the FAQ, jump in with a question which has been asked and answered countless times (RED State Exception) or do not extend the courtesy of not bombarding the entire list with "I am out of the office" messages. I don't care that you're in the south of France banging your secretary. Really.

Another thing is people asking questions that Google will tell you the answer to, or things that if you just tried the command, or the man (that's the manual) page would tell you what you needed to know.

Here are a few examples I have saved for a rainy day...

Subject: FC help

Dear managers,

Please put down some resources which can be used/referred for FC storage administration/Troubleshooting on Solaris.

TIA

Please go and fuck yourself. Would you like me to do your homework for you too? How about telling me (roughly) what vintage of hardware you have, at least, before asking us to re-write various online resources regarding Fibre Channel storage...

Subject: Linux has psrinfo command- Any equivalent for Solaris.

1. Folks, Linux has psrinfo command- any equivalent for Solaris.
I am trying to know the # of CPUs, and their utilization at any given point in time.

Errr, maybe psrinfo would work. I don't know, I just typed the fucking command, and, like, there it was. (And yes, for utilisation, you'd want something like top, or prstat).

Subject: please remove me from this list. Thanks!

unsubscribe

Another personal favourite of mine - every email from the list comes from mailman, which has mailing list info IN THE EMAIL which tells you how to unsubscribe. How fucking stupid do you have to be? (Freecycle is bad for this too, but it's populated by techno-weenies, not people who are supposedly paid to be technologically literate, and run systems costing tens to hundreds of thousands!)

Subject: Questions

Question 1: I backup several files using tar. How can I restore an specific file from that tar backup?

How about... uhhhh, man tar? Here's an excerpt from the man page:

x Extract or restore. The named files are extracted
from the tarfile and written to the directory
specified in the tarfile, relative to the current
directory. Use the relative path names of files and
directories to be extracted.

And the classic:

I have posted some Sun questions since a couple of years in sun managers and I want to delete those messages , please can you point me to the right steps to do it ?
This is all the links that I have found on sunmaagers portal :

Nope, your dumb questions should stay there for all to see... There are several archives of the mailing list, so your stupidity will haunt you for a long time.
Bill tells me this is a fairly frequent occurrence too - with not just individuals, but companies and government departments requesting dumb questions being taken off the list archives - do these people not know how the internet works?

That all said, I am still subscribed to the list, and it is still a fantastic resource for people in my line of work. I've had a few fairly obscure questions answered on there, and apparently have helped some other poor sysadmins too. As much as I may have ranted a bit, sunmanagers actually has one of the best signal to noise ratios of any list I have ever seen! My thanks go to John DiMarco and Bill Bradford for running it.

Smoke... and mirrors.

The Hootsman on Sunday gleefully reports: "Smoking's hidden death toll revealed"

SMOKING causes hundreds of thousands more deaths each year than previously thought, dramatic scientific research has revealed.

Dramatic? This must be the first time I have heard scientific research being described as that, so whilst my bullshit detector and bogometer have both just pegged at 11, clearly, they want us to think this is serious stuff...

A study, led by experts in Glasgow, showed heightened chances of dying from cancers of the colon, rectum and prostate, as well as from lymphatic leukaemia.

We're a' doomed!

Dr David Batty, of the Medical Research Council Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, based at the University of Glasgow, said: "What this study shows is that smoking is linked to more kinds of cancer than previously thought. It's important to remember that cancer is not a single disease and that the various kinds of cancers are different illnesses so you couldn't necessarily assume that smoking was linked to them in the same way. What's unclear is how exactly smoking causes these cancers."

Let's just run that one by again - "What's unclear is how exactly smoking causes these cancers".

In other words, they do not know!

What I suspect their statistics show is that a great swathe of society since the 60's, since apparently, most people did. If someone then got some disease, and they were of that vintage, then the chances of them having smoked would be quite high - and that there's not necessarily a causal link between them...

It's just too funny

I have just shat myself laughing at this:

Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable on Amazon for $500.99 (USD)

But, isn't that just a CAT5E cable?

No! Clearly it is somethign much more...

According to the reviews, some people are reporting this cable is capable of moving bits so fast that it causes the attached equipment to collapse into a singularity such as the one in Patrick Carroll's house...

"Since then, I can't find the cat, and my entire set of VAX/VMS 4.7 documentation (DEC Will Rise Again!) (Mmmmm, orangey!) has gone missing.

Another reviewer (Momo the Barbarian) wasn't so lucky and didn't escape in time...

"As I write this email, a small black hole is tearing through the space time fabric of my living room, consuming everything in its path (including my former pet Chihuahua, Wolfgang). A simple warning to prevent me from having reverse cabled my new joy for experimental reasons would have also spared me the horror of bidding adieu to 20 years woth of collecting (yes my cabbage patch dolls and hummel figurines are now faint memories of the past, for this dimension anyway). I bid you all adieu as I now see my walls dissolving... goodbye cruel worl"

Dan's Tech Reviews has another take on product:

"There's a lot of negative reviews of this cable. I say, why? It's clearly worth the money.

I sense you're skeptical.

Here's proof: Just 1 minute after pressing the button to order this, I had 7 phone calls from insanely hot women, and got 7 dates out of it. Coincidence? I think not.

I have a hot date for the next week, every night, and you don't. Why aren't you buying this cable?!"

Other reviewers have taken a different path on the piss-take, here's one from Jeffery A. Chabotte:

"A coworker had recently bragged to me about buying these cables, and when i told him what he was really buying, he was shocked.

He hadn't shown up to work for the last couple days and the boss got in this morning, he said that the guy's wife "found him in the garage, hanging by a noose made of some sort of speaker wires he had just purchased".

R.I.P. - Frank Grimes.

I guess these cables are pretty rugged."

Sadly, some people are humourless bastards, who are taking this all very seriously -

"$500 for a cable? Get a grip, Denon. Completely dishonest. I'll never buy any of your products again."

No, sir, I believe you should get a grip, and see that this is an utter piss take, and you should be posting something suitably funny as a review... Read all of the reviews, since most of them are pants wettingly funny. Remember, don't have coffee or any other liquids in your mouth while reading these. Your keyboard and monitor will suffer.

42 days

Apparently that bill has been passed.

We're allowing them to piss our historic rights up the wall here. We might as well tear up the Magna Carta, and every other right that has been fought for by our forefathers.

But it's all ok, apparently, as you can be compensated if you're wrongfully arrested.

I wonder, if they arrest you on suspicion TERRRRR, and you're released after the 42 days are up, can you claim 42 days of your life back from these illiberal cunts? Oh, you can get some sort of compensation. That's just fucking great. I'd want the time back. But they can't do that, can they?

The government didn't do this when the IRA were blowing up people doing their shopping.

I am horrified and ashamed to call myself British.

Haymarket doom

The BBC reports that traffic chaos is about to hit Haymarket - as if the current closure of Shandwick Place wasn't enough already.

Cllr Phil Wheeler, transport convener at the City of Edinburgh Council, said: "Edinburgh remains very much open for business while work goes on and every effort is being taken to ensure that access to businesses for customers, services and deliveries is retained".

Aye, apart from businesses being fucked by this... Like the Caley being demolished.

You can be damn sure if anyone else wanted to demolish a grand old building like the Caley, they'd be told to fuck right off, but since it's for the trams, oh that's ok then. Bastards.

Interestingly enough the links at the side of the article show...

How green are the trams?
Trams 'will help airport grow'
'A place where firms want to be'
'Unique benefits' of trams
A better experience for visitors
'They will aid passengers'

Nothing mentions the fact that the people of Edinburgh didn't have an option to say "shove your trams up your arse" or "spend our money on something we actually want". For the money, we could have a huge reduction in bus fares. We could have the roads fixed so buses and bikes and cars can get about the city without falling into massive holes where repairs have been botched. We could send all the cuntcillors off on a holiday so they'll not be here to bother us with their pish.

Coolest thing - a remix of Radiohead

A chap on a mailing list posted this remix of Radiohead, Nude, from their album "In Rainbows".

For comparison, the original version of Nude is on YouTube

Ordinarily I hate Radiohead - all they seem to produce is music to open a vein to. I make no apologies to Doctorvee, who along with a load of other people, seems to like them...

That remix has to be the coolest thing I have heard in a long time - mostly because it appeals to my inner geek. Hard drive speaker array... Sinclair Spectrum... Epson Dot Matrix Printer, HP ScanJet... An old GPO Oscilloscope. What isn't there to like?

Spam stupidity

So I got a bounced message today.

X-SpamTest-Envelope-From: ANGRY.STEVE@his..other.domain.example.com
X-SpamTest-Group-ID: 00000004
X-SpamTest-Info: Profiles 2969 [June 02 2008]
X-SpamTest-Info: {Headers: Spam B3: spamware from}
X-SpamTest-Method: headers plus
X-SpamTest-Rate: 100
X-SpamTest-Status: SPAM
X-SpamTest-Status-Extended: spam
X-SpamTest-Version: SMTP-Filter Version 3.0.0 [0255], KAS30/Release

So, your spam software detected this message was spam, and that the Envelope From header was likely forged... And it STILL bounced to ME. What kind of utter fucktardedness is that?

Backscatter from forged email headers can be even more of a problem than the spam its self. It's ordinarily not in our interests to /dev/null mail from postmaster or mailer-daemon because they are used legitimately to alert users and admins to stuff not working!

People writing anti-spam software need to be smarter. A lot smarter, otherwise they are only making the problem worse.

And as for ppp83-237-226-3.pppoe.mtu-net.ru, you may go and fuck yourself. With a cactus. A big, spiky one.