On monday morning, we received a small piece of paper saying that we can now fetch the package at the local post office. So I did, but the postmen couldn't hand me the package, unfortunately, because the recipient address had magically changed to the CEO of our company. (Remember it was a private order from my private account.)

So I called the number which was written in the confirmation email from a company SIP phone to complain (041/259 00 88) — refused. I retried with my cell phone, which said ”The number you dialed is not valid.“

Now I had a look at the web site for the telephone number, but unfortunately it was the same unreachable phone number.

So I sat down and wrote a very irate fax telling them to keep the package and remove all of my customer records (so they wouldn't mix anyone else up with me and disclose personal information), and sent it to the fax number of Steg. It came back — invalid number. So I wrote ”Fraud?!“ on the fax in big letters and faxed it to all Steg stores in the German part of Switzerland (the fax was in German, otherwise I'd have sent it to the french stores as well).

Later in the evening, while I was attending SwiNOG Beer Event, the Steg people called up our office and reached Sandro who told them that they are not very likely to get me back as a customer. I concur.

Windows, for example, is somewhat like Germany. It will confront you with a large amount of bureaucracy in order to approve your immigration, and will sometimes refuse it claiming blatantly that you're a terrorist. If problems arise, you have to find someone to pay to fix them, who will usually be an immigrant. On the other hand, it lets go of you rather easily. If you attempt to immigrate into other operating systems, it may force you to choose either one.

MacOS (Versions 10, earlier and later) can be compared to the US. You have to be rich enough to immigrate in the first place. Your appartment comes with a record of the latest speech of the President himself. When you're finally there, everyone will keep iterating how everything is shiny, but looking out into the streets you quickly realize that there are many things seriously wrong. Despite borrowing various things from other countries (the Statue of Liberty is a glamorous example), they aren't really connected. Nevertheless, everyone will tell you how much they believe in their country. When emigrating, you're declared to be one of the greedy Germans, no matter where you go.

Solaris is like the british empire. When you immigrate, you first have to come to a much higher level. But then you are granted access to the most high-valued ressources of the entire Empire, and the Lords themselves will invite you to discuss their matters with them. When leaving, a message of regret is sent after you.

OpenBSD, on the other hand, is a lot like Finland. You are welcome to join the country, but don't expect anyone to approach you with immigration forms. During your life, you will have to fix a lot of things on your own, and if you're doing that well, people will whisper words of thank to you when they're sure nobody listens. In the end, however, if you emigrate, everyone will say it's good riddance. (But most will not mean it.)

NetBSD has very strong parallels to Greece. You are welcomed warm-heartedly and people will bring cookies and other food and hard drinks. You're being asked by emigrated brits if you would care for tea. During your life, everyone keeps making jokes about problems, and one day someone comes up and fixes it. Since the majority of inhabitants is old and bearded, you use to meet for sitting on a bench and laughing benevolently about the mistakes of your own and other countries. People are assoicated with the things they do, if you need help in a specific area there is always a Mister or Miss Specific Area, who will be rather difficult to get hold of. Sometimes you're even referred to the wrong Mister Specific Area, because most of the time their name is Matt. When emigrating, people give you presents for the way and don't worry, as they know you will return either way.

/upgrade /usr/pkg/bin/screen /usr/pkg/bin/irssi

…and your session will be running inside screen.

As it turned out, they were apparently all waiting for a train to take them to their training camp.

Firstly, every chat window contains a blue bar on top which contains a status logo, the name of the person one's talking to and the avatar of that person. It's huge, blue and in the way. To turn it off, one has to enter the Mozilla-like configuration editor (Edit → Preferences → Advanced → Advanced Configuration Editor).

The option to turn off the blue bar is named hide_chat_banner. Also, the option to start all windows in compact mode by default has no ”compact“ at all in its name in case you're considering it: it is named always_hide_chat_buttons.

Destructive Pessimism

Most people know the destructive pessimism very well. Even the most cheerful people usually had a phase of depression at least during their puberty. In destructive pessimism, people stop believing in the sense of their life, their actions and everything surrounding them. As a consequence, these people find it useless to act at all.

The cognitive aspect is also very discouraging. Destructive pessimists don't perceive positive developments and events at all. Maybe they became too ordinary to be perceived, but in any case these people act like they never happened. Bad events however are perceived as an affirmation and frustration.

Constructive Pessimism

Constructive pessimism however, the type of pessimism I tend to adhere to, does not have the expectation of everything to fail. The pessimistic assumptions in constructive pessimism are way more moderate:

• You cannot expect other people to do work. They most likely won't. They will overestimate their capacity and capability or never get to the job in the first place.
• If something can fail, it will. This is basically a moderate version of murphyism. However, this principle leads to concepts like redundancy, thus it is an important part of the philosophy of engineers.
• Too few people make bad decisions. Individuals tend to oversee aspects, so consulting an adequate number of people is always a nice idea. Too many people however tend to have problems comunicating.

… and many more, but you get the idea. So the general rule is to have low expectations, as opposed to expecting failure.

Other than the destructive pessimist who drowns in lethargy, constructive pessimsts draw their energy from their pessimism. The conclusion from the above assumptions is that it is best to do the job on one's own, and that one should verify every single component for proper operation. This principle is reflected for example in the rules of Extreme Programming.

The differences are also very serious in the cognitive dimension. If a constructive pessimist perceives failure, it was what he expected, so it does not come as a deception. He prepared for the failure, in fact. If, however, he succeeds, then he is very positively surprised and perceives the success as such. Thus, disappointing a constructive pessimist is close to impossible, while the world is indeed full of positive surprises for them.

As a conclusion it may be repeated that there are indeed different types of pessimism, and that not all of them necessarily lead to apathy. Indeed, pessimism can be quite inspiring.

First, we create a file to test with:

$ echo test > testfile
$ sha1 testfile
4e1243bd22c66e76c2ba9eddc1f91394e57f9f83
$

Then we create a process to hold the file open:

$ tail -f testfile &
$ test

Then we delete our test file:

$ rm -f testfile
$

Now we determine the PID of the process which holds our file open:

$ ps waux | grep [t]ail
tonnerre 5962 0.0 0.0 44 616 ttyp8 S+ 10:45PM 0:00.01 tail -f testfile
$

The remaining question is: which file descriptor is the one we're looking for?

$ ls -l /proc/5962/fd
ls: 8: Bad file descriptor
total 2
crw--w---- 1 tonnerre tty 3, 8 Mar 29 22:45 0
crw--w---- 1 tonnerre tty 3, 8 Mar 29 22:45 1
crw--w---- 1 tonnerre tty 3, 8 Mar 29 22:45 2
-rw-r--r-- 1 tonnerre staff 5 Mar 29 22:45 3
lr-xr-xr-x 1 tonnerre staff 0 Mar 29 22:45 4 -> [kqueue]
prw------- 1 root wheel 0 Mar 29 22:45 5
prw------- 1 root wheel 0 Mar 29 22:45 7
$

The only normal file here was 3, so let's get hold of it!

$ ln /proc/5962/fd/3 test
$ sha1 test
4e1243bd22c66e76c2ba9eddc1f91394e57f9f83
$

Congratulations! We got our file back.

Congratulations and best wishes for the next 150 years!

Do you need to rescue your segment of fresh products from expiration by selling? Now, this task is as simple as writing a mail in Outlook.

Certainly, no product can influence the volatility of the market. It is not a question of the product in use whether or not you can manage to sell your fresh products before they expire. Normally, in the end of the day, a small amount of fresh products is still left, because in order to serve all customers, there must be slightly more offer than demand in this sector.

So evidently, the point Microsoft is trying to make is that Outlook's behavior when sending mail is rather volatile and that it never really works out fully except in really rare cases.

On the other hand, Outlook is known to send weird documents instead of E-Mails, such as, for example, HTML format or even RTF and MS-TNEF. Also, Outlook tends to bug out when encountering various attachment formats, such as, for example PGP signatures. This means that it is not really usable as a mail program, and best replaced with a different mail product, such as, for example, Claws Mail.

Since the advertisement explicitly declares the usability of the two applications as equivalent, this means that Microsoft has given itself a pretty bad evaluation of its new productivity suite – the notion of being barely usable.

Up to this point, all attempts to upgrade to OpenLDAP's BerkeleyDB backend have failed. There was always the same error: when the database has been filled with some data, any LDAP search request would crash the LDAP server. The stack trace usually ended in some call instruction or some other instruction immediately following a call.

In an answer to NetBSD PR 37997, I was reminded by Christos Zoulas that the problem might actually be no crash at all but an issue with the rlimit facility of NetBSD, so I experimented a bit with the stack limit.

By default, NetBSD imposes a limit of 2 MB on the program stack. However, not even 4 or 8 MB seemed enough. A stack limit of 32 MB however solved the problem entirely.

It seems that OpenLDAP attempts to avoid locking problems between threads by putting all information on the function local stack. This only works well with a low amount of data or with low parallelism. However, in the case of an LDAP server, shared data structures would indeed be desirable.

LDBM itself does not use so much stack space, so it did not trigger the stack space limit. However, with parallel requests being handled by multiple LDAP threads, iit would undoubtedly only be a matter of time.

Let's see how well the 32 MB stack limit works...