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An obsessive collector noticed something strange in his 11,000 postcards.
James Brouwer has been collecting postcards for more than 30 years. His collection numbers over 11,000; images of old-age homes, ugly restaurants, onlookers, and 1960s advertising are neatly organized in boxes in his Canadian home.
But James started to notice that some of his postcards — dozens, in fact — appeared to have the exact same sky. Looking even closer, he noticed that the same-sky postcards were all made by one publisher: Dexter Press out of West Nyack, New York.
Dexter Press was once one of the largest publishers of “chrome-era postcards” — postcards made from color photographs became popular in the 1940s. By the time James started collecting in the 1980s, “chrome cards” were mostly overlooked by collectors, and could be bought cheaply in flea markets. It wasn’t until he looked through a lot of these cards that he noticed the same sky repeating itself.
You can explore Brouwer’s full postcard collection online.
Darkroom is a history and photography series that anchors each episode around a single image. Analyzing what the photo shows (or doesn’t show) provides context that helps unravel a wider story. Watch previous episodes here.
You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This past Monday, Facebook experienced an outage which lasted almost six hours. This had rattle-on effects. Facebook's pile of services all failed, from the core application to WhatsApp to Oculus. Many other services use Facebook for authentication, so people lost access to those (which highlights some rather horrifying dependencies on Facebook's infrastructure). DNS servers were also strained as users and applications kept trying to find Facebook, and kept failing.
CloudFlare has more information about what went wrong, but at its core: Facebook's network stopped advertising the routes to its DNS servers. The underlying cause of that may have been a bug in their Border Gateway Protocol automation system:
How could a company of Facebook’s scale get BGP wrong? An early candidate is that aforementioned peering automation gone bad. The astoundingly profitable internet giant hailed the software as a triumph because it saved a single network administrator over eight hours of work each week.
Facebook employs more than 60,000 people. If a change designed to save one of them a day a week has indeed taken the company offline for six or more hours, that's quite something.
Now, that's just speculation, but there's one thing that's not speculation: someone effed up.
IT in general, and software in specific, is a rather bizarre field in terms of how skills work. If, for example, you wanted to get good at basketball, you might practice free-throws. As you practice, you'd expect the number of free-throws you make to gradually increase. It'll never be 100%, but the error rate will decline, the success rate will increase. Big-name players can expect a 90% success rate, and on average a professional player can expect about an 80% success rate, at least according to this article. I don't actually know anything about basketball.
But my ignorance aside, I want you to imagine writing a non-trivial block of code and having it compile, run, and pass its tests on the first try. Now, imagine doing that 80% of the time.
It's a joke in our industry, right? It's a joke that's so overplayed that perhaps it should join "It's hard to exit VIM" in the bin of jokes that needs a break. But why is this experience so universal? Why do we have a moment of panic when our code just works the first time, and we wonder what we screwed up?
It's because we already know the truth of software development: effing up is actually your job.
You absolutely don't get a choice. Effing up is your job. You're going to watch your program crash. You're going to make a simple change and watch all the tests go from green to red. That semicolon you forgot is going to break the build. And you will stare at one line of code for six hours, silently screaming, WHY DON'T YOU WORK?
And that's because programming is hard. It's not one skill, it's this whole complex of vaguely related skills involving language, logic, abstract reasoning, and so many more cognitive skills I can't even name. We're making thousands of choices, all the time, and it's impossible to do this without effing up.
Athletes and musicians and pretty much everybody else practices repeating the same tasks over and over again, to cut down on how often they eff up. The very nature of our job is that we rarely do exactly the same task- if you're doing the same task over and over again, you'd automate it- and thus we never cut down on our mistakes.
Your job is to eff up.
You can't avoid it. And when something goes wrong, you're stuck with the consequences. Often, those consequences are just confusion, frustration, and wasted time, but sometimes it's much worse than that. A botched release can ruin a product's reputation. You could take down Facebook. In the worst case, you could kill someone.
But wait, if our job is to eff up, and those mistakes have consequences, are we trapped in a hopeless cycle? Are we trapped in an existential crisis where nothing we do has meaning, god is dead, and technology was a mistake?
No. Because here's the secret to being a good developer:
You gotta get good at effing up.
The difference between a novice developer and an experienced one is how quickly and efficiently they screw up. You need to eff up in ways that are obvious and have minimal consequences. You need tools, processes, and procedures that highlight your mistakes.
Take continuous integration, for example. While your tests aren't going to be perfect, if you've effed up, it's going to make it easier to find that mistake before anybody else does. Code linting standards and code reviews- these are tools that are designed to help spot eff ups. Even issue tracking on your projects and knowledge bases are all about remembering the ways we effed up in the past so we can avoid them in the future.
Your job is to eff up.
When looking at tooling, when looking at practices, when looking at things like network automation (if that truly is what caused the Facebook outage), our natural instinct is to think about the features they offer, the pain points they eliminate, and how they're better than the thing we're using right now. And that's useful to think about, but I would argue that thinking about something else is just as important: How does this help me eff up faster and more efficiently?
New framework's getting good buzz? New Agile methodology promises to make standups less painful? You heard about a new thing they're doing at Google and wonder if you should do it at your company? Ask yourself these questions:
Your job is to eff up.
The more mistakes you make, the better a programmer you are. Embrace those mistakes. Breaking the build doesn't make you an imposter. Spending a morning trying to track down a syntax error that should be obvious but you can't spot it for the life of you doesn't mean you're a failure as a programmer. Shipping a bug is inevitable.
Effing up is the job, and those eff ups aren't impediments, but your stepping stones. The more mistakes you make, the better you'll get at spotting them, at containing the fallout, and at learning from the next round of mistakes you're bound to make.
Now, get out there and eff up. But try not to take down Facebook while you do it.
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The Games the Indians Played
Lavine
1974
Submitter: This book uses outdated and culturally insensitive terms like “redskin.” It contains a decent amount of research from when the author was a teacher on a reservation. He interviewed many of the indigenous people there and I’m sure meant this to be a teaching tool about the culture, but it is a really old book that is now falling apart. Plus, it just gives off vibes of “oh, let’s look at the white man’s view of the savages’ primitive games.”
Holly: I’ve been learning a lot about collection diversity audits recently. While libraries may solely be looking for the percentage of materials about and by BIPOC, they need to use the opportunity to weed inappropriate materials like these. Please, please, don’t just count it as “diverse” and leave it in the collection! Look at the materials closely and audit the content while you’re at it.
The post Games the Indians Played appeared first on Awful Library Books.
Cowboy Who?I only got 3 :(
The forecast for the week ahead is pretty straightforward and locked in, so we’re not going to take up too much of your time this morning. Expect lots of sunny skies and somewhat drier air through about Saturday, after which the onshore flow returns. Some slight rain chances return late Sunday or Monday.
Some readers have groused that this isn’t much of a front, and I’m here to tell you there’s a reason why we characterized it as a weak one. The truth is, we’re mostly just seeing a northerly flow rather an abundance of colder air. Nevertheless this flow will have a salutary effect on our humidity levels for awhile. Today should be the driest day, with dewpoints dropping into the 50s, and accordingly I think Tuesday night and Wednesday morning will see the lowest temperatures for the week. Highs today should be in the mid- to upper-80s, with lows tonight dropping to about 60 degrees for inland areas, and low 70s right along the coast.
Rinse and repeat. These will be sunny days, with highs in the upper 80s and lows in the 60s for most. The air will not be super dry, but it won’t be sultry and humid either. Take what you can get in early October, I say.
Saturday should more or less see a continuation of the weather we see most of this week, albeit with slightly rising humidity levels. Sunday should feel more like “Houston,” as the onshore flow resumes, and dewpoints start to climb toward 70 degrees. Highs this weekend will be in the upper 80s to 90 degrees, with mostly sunny skies. A slight chance of showers returns Sunday night.
Most of next week looks warm, with highs near 90 degrees, but right now there’s no real signal in the models for too much in the way of rainfall. When is the next real cold front coming to Houston, you might ask? Right now there’s a pretty decent signal in both the European and GFS ensembles for something about 12 days from now, circa October 17. But that’s a long, long, long way out for us to have any confidence in the model forecasts. So we’ll just have to wait and see.
“More lockdown please.”
“Mom look bad. Need bath. Why sleep clothes? Hmmm?”
“Mom pants please walk.”
Looks at large hole in the yard next to Mom
“Cat did it. Walk now?”
“Why Mom sleep all day? Mom never go on walk. Need more walk. Please.”
“All done ‘please’ button.”
Looks at Mom
“Dad settle.”
“Why this house? Want big house. Want luxury.”
When mailman drops mail through door slot
“Soon destroy you. Bye. Bye.”
To the mailman, with whom mom is sleeping
“Walk now. Bed later.”
“Dog want more walks. Or else. Frame Mom, hmmm?”
To Dad
“Mom play. Play stranger bed.”
To Mom and Dad, who are arguing in the kitchen
“Dog home all night. Very good boy, no murder.”
To Mom, who is on the couch glued to a news report about a missing mailman
“Concerned. Where Mom friend? Walk now.”
To police inspecting the house
“Am good boy.”
To Mom’s lawyer
“Dog home all night. Cat is alibi. Mom blood on hands.”
Looking at Mom’s ankle monitor
“Now who can’t go on walk?”
To Mom, who is peering out the window where photographers and reporters lurk
“Humans miss mailman, hmmm?”
As Mom cries in bed at night
“Dad gone. Dad happy now. Mom alone with dog.”
Offering treats to jurors before trial
“I learn quid pro quo. Mom bad, yes? Jury humans like treats, yes?”
In courtroom during Mom’s trial
“Play park! Mom hide friend. Friend sleep. Friend sleep with bones. All done, friend.”
At cat
“Why cat no help?”
The post Party Time Flies appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
The post Dragon appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.
This post, update: a coworker prayed for my fiancé’s death so we didn’t invite her to our wedding … and now there is drama , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
Remember the letter about the person who prayed for a coworker’s death, leading to a bunch of drama when she wasn’t invited to his wedding? Here’s the update — which apparently resolved before I had even printed the letter here.
I wrote to you recently about my fiancé, “Ted,” who was in a car accident with his coworker, “Bob.” Their coworker, “Sally,” confessed to Ted that she had prayed if God had to let one die, she hoped it would be him. Thank you SO much for your great insights, advice, and quick response.
An update: Fortunately, this resolved very very quickly! The morning after I wrote you, Bob privately asked Ted if they could talk about the situation with Sally. Turns out, Sally does have a crush on Bob. When they returned to work after the accident, she told Bob that the thought that she might lose him made her realize she loves him. Bob said he told her he is happily married and not interested. He said that since then, she has been driving past his house repeatedly, calling his home and hanging up, sending weird texts (some continuing to be suggestive or expressing her love while others are angry, almost threatening) despite his asking her to stop.
Ted ended up telling Bob about his bizarre conversation with her. Bob said he would quietly talk to others on the team to explain why Ted didn’t want to invite her to the wedding. But Bob also decided it had all become weird enough that he needed to talk to their manager to give her a heads-up. I don’t know what happened after his meeting with the manager, but that afternoon, it was announced that Sally is no longer working there.
Ted is actively looking for a new job. We read your advice and the comments together. Ted agrees that he should’ve talked to Sally directly about how much her comments upset him. And that he should’ve given at least a vague explanation to the others as to why she was the only one excluded. We both have now learned the hard way that from now on, we need to keep boundaries between our professional and personal relationships.
Ted especially appreciates all the supportive comments regarding therapy and says he is going to make an appointment to see someone. This has definitely been a learning experience and we both sincerely appreciate the help! When you’re caught up in drama, getting an outside perspective is SO valuable. Thank you!
Sincerely, No Longer Sad
I cannot let this letter go so I wrote back and asked, “What happened with all the drama on the team? Did people end up finding out why Sally hadn’t been invited, and have things calmed down?” The answer:
Apparently Bob told everyone all that had occurred. All but one of the women has apologized to Ted, saying they should’ve known he wouldn’t exclude Sally for no reason.
Still—you were SO right. We shouldn’t have excluded one couple with no explanation! No one has heard from Sally, but someone from security came to clear out her desk. I guess based on her bizarre behavior with both Bob and Ted, she’s struggling right now with some sort of mental health issues and I hope she gets help.
Hovertext:
The really weird thing is the blue-haired person hadn't heard any of the previous conversation.
I appreciate a horror movie that doesn’t take itself seriously. Take The Velocipastor, for example. That movie is so bad that it’s incredible. It knows that there’s no way to make a serious film about a pastor that turns into a murderous velociraptor, so it leans into the ridiculous…hard. So, when someone mentioned a scary movie about furries, I needed it on my computer and into my eyeballs. Furries are a misunderstood fandom, to be sure, so I needed to know what a furry-themed horror movie would entail, and boy howdy, was it interesting. Let the fur fly as we dig into LONE WOLF.
LONE WOLF was is directed by J.D. Marmion, and is co-written by Marmion with Jordan Rivera, Sam Cunningham, Domenica Schatzman, and Victoria Schatzman. It follows Charlie (Jane Gardner) and her friends (played by Kennedy Wunderle, Alexandra Dustin, and Victoria Danylko-Petrovskaya) are furries and they are set to get dressed up for Furry Con but, unfortunately, they get kicked out when one of the girls gets hammered and barfs on the most popular furry there. Thankfully, his brother (Robin McIntosh) invites them to a party where he’ll be. Of course, they all go. Now, for the B story, Charlie’s sister disappeared a year earlier. Also, there’s a C story about how a college mascot got burned nearly to death and now he’s on a rampage to kill furries. If you think that’s a lot of storylines, you’d be right.
If you look at LONE WOLF for what it is, an extremely low-budget horror film about people who wear animal costumes, then you’ll probably get a kick out of it. There’s nothing extraordinary about the film quality, the acting is atrocious and the sound mixing is SO off, you can’t hear anyone talking half the time but that soundtrack BLASTS your eardrums straight out of your ear canal. But even with all of that, it’s still kind of fun. Truly, LONE WOLF would have been more effective as a short film. A lot of time is used to fluff the clock: a lot of dancing at Furry Con, a lot of dancing at the furry party, a lot of furry dancing as everyone gets murdered. There’s a lot of dancing.
There’s one random moment at what is supposed to be an intense fight scene between our lead and the killer where it turns into some weird music video with a fade over of someone singing and a band playing. It’s so damn bizarre but kind of fits? The most interesting bits happen after the 57-minute mark and the best actor in the entire movie is the Lone Wolf (Tohmas Howery) and he doesn’t say a single damn word.
This review sounds like I don’t like the movie but that’s not necessarily true. It’s terrible but in a fun kind of way. There’s something pure about horror like that. You can tell people were having fun when they made it so, it almost makes you have fun watching it. If you like ridiculous horror with bad effects and even worse actors but you see the pure indie-ness about it and appreciate it, I think you’ll get a kick out of LONE WOLF.
LONE WOLF will be available on VOD and Digital from High Octane Pictures on October 5th!
The post [Movie Review] LONE WOLF appeared first on Nightmarish Conjurings.
Enlarge / Today's global Facebook and Facebook-owned-services outage appears to be the result of a flubbed BGP configuration change pushed by a Facebook engineer this morning. (credit: Sean Gladwell via Getty Images / Jim Salter)
Original story 1:26 pm EDT: Facebook—and apparently all the major services Facebook owns—are down today. We first noticed the problem at about 11:30 am Eastern time, when some Facebook links stopped working. Investigating a bit further showed major DNS failures at Facebook:
So, @facebook's DNS is broken this morning...
— Jim Salter (@jrssnet) October 4, 2021
TL;DR: Google anycast DNS returns SERVFAIL for Facebook queries; querying https://t.co/0BDgaIHmlr directly times out. pic.twitter.com/3GHJ3mW0P0
DNS—short for Domain Name System—is the service that translates human-readable hostnames (like arstechnica.com) to raw, numeric IP addresses (like 18.221.249.245). Without working DNS, your computer doesn't know how to get to the servers that host the website you're looking for.
The problem goes deeper than Facebook's obvious DNS failures, though. Facebook-owned Instagram was also down, and its DNS services—which are hosted on Amazon rather than being internal to Facebook's own network—were functional. Instagram and WhatsApp were reachable but showed HTTP 503 failures (no server is available for the request) instead, an indication that while DNS worked and the services' load balancers were reachable, the application servers that should be feeding the load balancers were not.
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Hovertext:
From the German 'Krüger' meaning 'tavern-keeper' and 'dunning' meaning to darken. In the sense of intelligence growing dim over a long discussion at a pub.
The Wine project has been around for years, allowing people to run (some) Windows applications on Linux, macOS, and BSD operating systems. It’s one of the best examples of open-source software development, but Wine can’t quite run on everything. Boxedwine, a newer project that builds upon Wine, aims to fix that — it can run on more operating systems, and even web browsers.
Wine isn’t an emulator — instead, it translates Windows API calls into POSIX-compatible calls. However, Boxedwine is an emulator. It uses an unmodified 32-bit version of Wine that runs in an emulated Linux environment. Boxedwine is written in C++ with an SDL interface, so it’s even more cross-platform than Wine. Mac and Linux are supported, same as regular Wine, but you can also run it on Windows. This could be helpful if you want to use older 16-bit Windows applications that won’t work in modern Windows, or if you just want an isolated environment that doesn’t involve setting up a Windows virtual machine. Boxedwine is also being ported to other platforms, including Haiku OS.
Boxedwine running on Haiku OS (source)
Boxedwine can also run inside of modern web browsers, thanks to WebAssembly and Emscripten. You can try out some demo Windows applications and games at boxedwine.org/demo, including Age of Empires (1997), AbiWord, and 3-D Ultra Pinball: Creep Night. Boxedwine is already at around 25% of the speed of the host system (according to the developer), and there’s likely a further decrease from running inside a browser, but basic applications like AbiWord are usable with Chromium on my PC with a Ryzen 5 1500 processor.
Even though Boxedwine in the browser isn’t practical enough yet for most situations, it’s still an impressive technical demo. The browser is running an entire Linux kernel, an unmodified copy of Wine, and the Windows application all on top — with no video streaming from a server involved.
AbiWord running inside Chromium 94 on a Ryzen 1500 PC
Boxedwine could become a fantastic tool for running Windows applications in the future, if performance can be improved. Since the x86 emulation is written in portable C++ code, it could be one solution to running x86 Windows applications on ARM devices, like Android tablets. Wine is already available on ARM Android, but it can only run Windows software compiled for ARM — there’s no emulation layer.
Here’s hoping the project continues to improve. If you want to give the desktop version a shot, pre-compiled Windows versions are available from the Boxedwine website.
The post Boxedwine can emulate Windows applications in web browsers appeared first on xda-developers.
Camping Manual – Camping Along Missions Trails
Tully
1970
Initially, I was unclear who the intended audience was for this book. There is actually very little camping info aside from a few activities. This book is for church groups or others looking to set up a Christian themed girls camp. Fair enough. I thought it would be more comprehensive with curriculum and schedules, but it is pretty light on the details. We have a few crafts and activities, but none of the hardcore skills that were mentioned in the introduction. A good chunk is devoted to finding the right staff. They even have a sample application!
Again, the info is light. While they insist on giving lots of training to camp counselors (good idea!), there isn’t much on HOW to do it. It reads more like a nice outline and lacks any of the detail that matters. I guess this is what the phrase “God is in the details” means.
Mary
The post Camp for Christian Girls appeared first on Awful Library Books.
Was it something I said?
Thesman
1988
Today we have another special teen title straight from the 1980s. 16 year old Bonnie is short. In addition, she was just dumped by her boyfriend saying she just looked too young. Evidently, boyfriend got embarrassed because the last time they went to the movies, the cashier asked if he wanted to buy her a child’s ticket.
Meanwhile, everyone at school is getting excited for the school fair and the fortune teller in the Oracle of Delphi booth. Bonnie’s BFF, Anne, was scheduled to do the bit as the fortune teller but ended up being sick. She asked Bonnie to cover. No one knew that Bonnie was covering and the fortunes she told took on a life of their own. All sorts of drama ensues as cute next door neighbor boy, Mitch gets obsessed with his fake fortune about Bonnie. Anne runs for school council president, a boy named Carson enters the picture, and her family adopts a dog. It’s non stop action from cover to cover.
This is really dated, but it actually was kind of cute. The plot is clever and Bonnie starts to figure out that she needs to accept herself the way she is.
Mary
The post Friday Fiction: Was it something I said? appeared first on Awful Library Books.
Hovertext:
This is my attempt to make the most idiotic joke that also contains the word 'triune.'
