Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

@TheGibson I was one of the sysadmins at a university in a previous life. We had a very diverse set of systems, and a lot of computers spread across the entire campus. They were all centrally managed, and we had a whole lot of scripts to make common tasks easier.

One day, one of the printers in one of the offices two buildings away was replaced, the new one slightly different than the old. We went there to check that it's working, and it prints and all that, standard procedure, even though all printers were connected to the uni's Samba network. It was simply easier to go there and do a test print, in case anything goes wrong. Calling them on the phone was a hassle for everyone involved.

We had Procedures in place, and one of them was to do a test print from a remote machine to make sure everything's properly connected. We didn't have laptops, so the only way to do a remote print was to log into a unix system back in our department, and do a test print from there. We had a script for that, too! You gave it an office name, a printer name, and a set of files, and it sent the print jobs to the targeted printer, one file at a time, waiting for each to finish before starting the next.

I logged into a unix system, and used one of our scripts to do a test print: tools/test-print foo.txt -o office -p printer

A few seconds later, the printer started to print. So did the other printer in the office. And all other printers on campus. All other printers connected to the network. There were about a thousand printers involved in this. Some of them in another city.

You see, I was - and still am - a Linux guy. I'm used to being able to mix named and positional parameters. Whoever wrote this script wasn't. It looked for options first, then started to print the files given as positional parameters, one by one, waiting until the print job finished on all affected printers.

If no printer was specified, it defaulted to sending to all printers in the office (there was usually only one printer in an office, so this made it easier to do a test print). If no office was given, it defaulted to all of them (this script was originally written when there were only two offices on the network).

Oops.

It turns out my code was fine. I was running my program wrong

I'm decentralizing myself! Last week was the end of ~4.5yrs at Protocol Labs.

Wild and fascinating times with a rad group of people committed to a vision of a resilient internet with people at the center.

Thanks to Juan Benet for making Protocol Labs a place where uncertain and very-long-term work could happen. I'm very grateful to have been given the opportunity to do it.

Private jets are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions in the past three years than Uganda, a country with a population of 46 million. But tell us again how it's "humanity" as a whole who has caused global heating...

@KaiHeron
#degrowth for the Global north NOW