The Vent and Rant Thread

[PeterT]

@Hitch: just remember that RAID only protects against hardware failure (and even then only if you have an active monitoring tool to warn you of a single drive having failed); it provides no protection against files being deleted.

Spoiler:

I know full well that you are aware of both those points, but you and I both know that some reading this thread won't know

[cromag]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I used it starting in 1986. I used it in "Wordstar Mode" where it mimicked the keystrokes of one of the other two popular word processing programs of the time, Wordstar. Without costing Wordstar $$. I still use many of the same key combinations (Ctrl-K-this, Ctrl-K-that, CtrlQ-this, etc.)

Text editing, however, is done entirely using my preferred Vi clone - gVim.

I used "Portable Wordstar" on my old Epson Geneva portable, but I never left anything in Wordstar format.

I love vi -- but I learned on ed, and I have some ed commands hard-coded into my fingers which makes vi even faster. I still use it for quick notes and outlines.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by wodin

My 5400 sf lot assesses at $450K without the house, Zillow estimates the total value at $700K. That for an average fifty year old house on a postage stamp sized lot in a middle class neighborhood.

So yes, the scarce resource is land.

One of the places in NYC I enjoy visiting when there's an opportunity is the Society of Illustrators (http://www.societyillustrators.org/). The Science Fiction Writers of America held their annual Authors and Editors bash there for a while, and it was a bit maddening - do I talk to folks or gawk at the stuff on the walls? The Society has originals by anyone who was anyone in American illustration in its collection, and you can see originals by Norman Rockwell, N C Wyeth, Arthur Rackham and many others.

The first year SFWA had its event there, the manager was talking about the history of the place. It had originally been a mansion in the "robber baron" days, and the fourth floor library was where a famous politician back when had trysts with his mistress. The Society apparently acquired the building for about $20K back during the Depression era. You couldn't touch it now for $20 million.

(SFWA left because it simply got too crowded, and the building does not have an elevator and is not ADA compliant. There is a narrow stair to the second floor where the bar and outdoor roof garden section is that will be a challenge for many attendees. At the last SFWA function there, a couple of friends were about to leave, and were thinking about making a farewell goodbye pass through the crowd, but weren't sure they'd be able to. I said "It's easy. KY Jelly." Another mutual friend seated nearby said "No. YA Jelly!" I mentioned that later to SFWA's former Executive Director, and she laughed and said she'd have to think about getting tubes labelled YA Jelly as party favors if the event was there again.)
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I have the original word files from every book I've ever written. Including the ones that were done on PCWrite. Gawd knows how I'd ever actually READ them. But that's 27 years of book files.

You can still find PC-Write, and it is possible to run it on a current flavor of Windows.

If you want to read those files it can be done.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I used it starting in 1986. I used it in "Wordstar Mode" where it mimicked the keystrokes of one of the other two popular word processing programs of the time, Wordstar. Without costing Wordstar $$. I still use many of the same key combinations (Ctrl-K-this, Ctrl-K-that, CtrlQ-this, etc.)

Text editing, however, is done entirely using my preferred Vi clone - gVim.

I learned WordStar back in the days when it was the second text editor you learned on a PC, because what you liked might not be available on the machine you had to use but WS probably was. I stayed fluent because many subsequent editors either used WS key assignments or could be told to. I had Gnu Emacs customized to use WS key assignments to avoid retraining my fingers.

I have gVim here, but under Windows normally use Notepad2-mod, a fork of Florian Balmer's open source Notepad2. Notepad2 uses Neil Hodgson's Scintilla edit control, which provides syntax highlighting and code folding. It can be set via a registry hack to replace built-in Notepad. It invokes instantly, and provides as much power as I normally need.

At the moment, I'm poking at Mitchell Foicica's TextAdept, intended to be a minimalist and highly extensible editor. It's cross-platform, and available for Windows, Linux, and OS/X. TextAdept uses less than 2,000 lines of C for the framework, and uses the Scintilla edit control. It also uses the Lua script language, designed for embedding in other programs, and the editor functions are implemented in about 4,000 lines of Lua. You can modify the Lua code used from within TextAdept (and Mitchell is explicit that you can shoot yourself in both feet. )

There's even a third-party package to make TextAdept more like Vi
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Nope, not excessive at all. (Note: my job is backup!) I'm fretting about re-using tapes that are >3 years old, even though I've saved quarterly tapes from that same bunch. I'm just re-using the months in between the quarter-saves. And fretting about doing so, even though we don't PROMISE that much history, and even though I have the quarterly tapes! And even though the data is presumably still present on the tapes I'm saving TODAY. How many people want a file that was deleted 4 years ago, and didn't exist long enough to be on a quarterly tape??

But I like to keep lots of backups!

I was the backup admin in a previous job. We used NetBackup, and a nightly job dumped to tape. One issue we ran into was that we couldn't do full backups, because the time window wasn't long enough. We had to do incrementals.

An annoyance for me was that I'd always get a call "Oops! I accidentally deleted file X from directory Y. Can you restore it from backup?" just after the nightly tapes had been handed over to the driver from the offsite back storage provider. I worked around that for a while by simply holding the tapes a day before handing them over. But the outside auditors came through, and my boss told me we had no choice and had to send the tapes off next morning, and never mind the inconvenience for the users. (My boss was a nice guy, but not inclined to argue with higher, even when he arguably should have.)

NetBackup could backup to disk, and backup that to tape, which was what I wanted to do. My boss agreed, but we didn't have the server assets to do it at that point.

In an earlier iteration, I was doing backups of a local Unix server, and dreaded restore requests. The first question was what we called the job on the system, since I was searching for named files. What would the file names be? Another was that almost guaranteed, the cassette tapes we used would be flaky for the restore we wanted, and the backup software was less than optimal. (IIRC, it was a find to generate the list to be backed up, piped to cpio to generate an archive to dump to tape.) I inherited the setup, and had to deal with it.
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Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Glorfindel

Hitch: sorry, that was me trying to be funny after reading your spoiler

DUH! See, this is what happens when I'm up waiting to hear from bloody A***** at 4:00 a.m. I'm so slow on the uptake! sorry, Glor. :-) (I'm smiling now!)

Originally Posted by CRussel

I have the original word files from every book I've ever written. Including the ones that were done on PCWrite. Gawd knows how I'd ever actually READ them. But that's 27 years of book files.

Charlie, you never--never--cease to amaze and impress me. All this, and an author, too? Sheesh!

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Nope, not excessive at all. (Note: my job is backup!) I'm fretting about re-using tapes that are >3 years old, even though I've saved quarterly tapes from that same bunch. I'm just re-using the months in between the quarter-saves. And fretting about doing so, even though we don't PROMISE that much history, and even though I have the quarterly tapes! And even though the data is presumably still present on the tapes I'm saving TODAY. How many people want a file that was deleted 4 years ago, and didn't exist long enough to be on a quarterly tape??

But I like to keep lots of backups!

I once, in my prior life, built a very large, fairly famous 5-star resort. I was the "fixer of all things," in addition to being the Project Manager. (Of course, inarguably, that's what a PM does, any-damn-way.) I kept ALL the project files--not just the construction, but the land acquisition, acquisition loans, construction loans, etc.--for ages. I finally called the entity in question, and said, "okay, look, guys: it's been 25 years since we opened the hotel. I have <insert list of banker's boxes of documents>. Are you sure you don't want any of these?" And when they insisted, no, they didn't, I had a shredding truck come by. We had something like 170 banker's boxes shredded into itty-bitty bits. Crosscut. Those of you in the biz know what's coming next: sure as s**t, not 3 months later, I had a call "Hitch, do you remember the terms of the XXX agreement by and among XXX, YYY and ZZZ?"

Fortuitously, despite shredding, I did recall the terms. My recall for these types of things is well known in my old circle of acquaintances and clients, so I "had it" for them...but not on paper. If I croaked, (or, for that matter, didn't pick up the damn phone) they'd be hard put to come up with those answers now. Don't ask me anything about what I did when I was age X or Y or whatever; but deal terms? Zoning Entitlement cases? Construction contracts? Change Orders? Yup, those I can remember.

Originally Posted by PeterT

@Hitch: just remember that RAID only protects against hardware failure (and even then only if you have an active monitoring tool to warn you of a single drive having failed); it provides no protection against files being deleted.

Spoiler:

I know full well that you are aware of both those points, but you and I both know that some reading this thread won't know

You are SO right, Peter. I have the active monitoring, of course, and I've rebuilt a few RAIDS in my time. But...it makes me feel a bit more proactive about backups (as if I needed to be, but obsessive is obsessive), and it's a bit like having a nice wubby. :-)

Glad to know that I'm not the only one here with the all-consuming Backup Compulsion!

Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

You are SO right, Peter. I have the active monitoring, of course, and I've rebuilt a few RAIDS in my time. But...it makes me feel a bit more proactive about backups (as if I needed to be, but obsessive is obsessive), and it's a bit like having a nice wubby. :-)

RAID has uses and limitations. I had a RAID setup on a previous version of my desktop: the motherboard I used would implement RAID if you had multiple drives. I had a pair of SATA drives, and chose to stripe them, so they were seen as one big drive by the system, rather than mirror them as normally done. It spread disk reads/writes over two drives, and sped things up nicely. If I'd had four drives, I could have done stripe+ mirror, but I didn't.

At employer -1 we had a RAID failure on both sides of the array. The machine involved was an old Sun system originally acquired by a company my employer acquired, and used to host an Oracle database they used. It was old enough that the failing drives were 2GB units. Fortunately, Sun still had some and field service could repair the hardware, but it cost about $10K and the services of a high level Oracle consultant to restore the data.

The machine was part of my world as the main *nix admin, but I made blindingly clear to the user department that I knew just enough about Oracle to be dangerous, and was not an Oracle DBA. I was responsible for the machine it ran on, but dealing with it was their problem. Of course, the Oracle DBA they once had was long gone, and the guy who originally set it up for them was too. It was a disaster just waiting to happen, and it did. When I was asked what the problem was I said "Old hardware that should have been replaced years previously".

There was nothing about what the user department was doing that required Oracle. I was pushing to get the database migrated to SQL Server, where we actually had DBAs and developers in house who could work on it. (That would also migrate it to the Windows Server side and get it out of my world, which would be a plus from my side.) I believe that was the game plan, but was laid off before they got there.
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Dennis

[Blossom]

I got a letter from the IRS today claiming we owe for 2014 taxes due to a 1099c from a junk buyer for a debt that doesn't really exist. I am so tired of these people. In 2008 they tried to take us to court we hired an attorney who demanded proof of the debt and what it was. They couldn't show any documentation. They dropped it. It appears supposedly in 8/2014 they charged off this fraudulent debt and sent a 1099c which we never got.

The IRS is giving us till April 13 to respond. I just want to scream. We have no income. My husband hasn't had a full time job since April 2014 other then temp jobs to pay rent and utilities. We've had to borrow from relatives to just keep from being homeless. He has been job searching for a very long time. It's his age I think. He went back to school and got his bachelor degree but at 41 no one seems to want to take a chance and he is too old to keep working at high speed production jobs. He has tried but he can't keep up anymore. Stress and jobs like that have taken a toll on his health.

I'm sitting here trying to get up funds for our utilities bill as our savings has been depleted and he has not worked at all since Christmas eve when his last temp job ended. Now I get this in the mail and at this point have no clue what to do.

Thanks for letting me rant.

[Cinisajoy]

Blossom PM me please.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Blossom PM me please.

Done.

[fum]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I have gVim here, but under Windows normally use Notepad2-mod, a fork of Florian Balmer's open source Notepad2. Notepad2 uses Neil Hodgson's Scintilla edit control, which provides syntax highlighting and code folding. It can be set via a registry hack to replace built-in Notepad. It invokes instantly, and provides as much power as I normally need.
Dennis

Thanks for the pointer to notepad2. I work with very large files (>4gb) of xml, and I need to "see" the file from time to time. This is the first one I found, that is highlighting the xml-tags, and can read the large files. (And free :-))

[Freeshadow]

I use notepad2 too.
Even for a non-coder it's a good choice.
I'm always safe on the encoding side and when need arises, the syntax highlighting is helpful especially when you work with code files as a not coding person.
(e.g. used it to translate rkomars comix viewer to Polish)

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Blossom

He has been job searching for a very long time. It's his age I think. He went back to school and got his bachelor degree but at 41 no one seems to want to take a chance...

I always get so angry when reading stuff like this. A 40-41 year old who completes a bachelor has shown that he can start and complete a complex task, and is able to quickly learn new things. Someone like that often has 15-20 years of work experience, and has to work for another 25 years at least.

But no, at 41 you're 'too old'. Yeah, you might be too old to start out as a construction worker, but as a knowledge worker or some sort of managing position, you're not even halfway to your pension.

I'm doing a master, just because I want to, but sometimes I wonder if it's of any use. It looks like companies only want to hire people up to 40 and then discard them, except if you're some sort of big-shot manager, project leader, or politician. Then you can suddenly keep working until you're 78 and age never is a problem.

Good luck, and I hope the tide turns for you and your husband as soon as may be.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Hitch

DUH! See, this is what happens when I'm up waiting to hear from bloody A***** at 4:00 a.m. I'm so slow on the uptake! sorry, Glor. :-) (I'm smiling now!)



Charlie, you never--never--cease to amaze and impress me. All this, and an author, too? Sheesh!
Hitch

Only about 35 books or so...

But all computer related. Very different than what's typical here.