Computers ⁽¹²⁸⁾

Brian Bilbrey October 1, 2015

Oddly Low-key Introduction

If you play in Apple's sandbox, you'll know that today was release day for the latest version of OS X: El Capitan. For a variety of reasons, I decided to upgrade on release day (admittedly after pulling a full, bootable, copy of my system using my favorite tool for the purpose, SuperDuper! Highly Recommended!). An hour or so to pull down the 6 GB download, another 30 minutes or so to apply the new OS, and my Mac Air was rebooting! Happily, I got a login prompt at the far end. That's always a good start. I typed in the…

Brian Bilbrey September 29, 2015

About daynotes.com

Carl Sanders wrote: Was wondering why www.daynotes.com was down. The registration for the site expired on 23 September 2015. It's in limbo for a while, then it'll go on the block. Daynotes.com was a domain purchased by, and leading to a website designed by, and originally maintained by Tom Syroid, back in September 1999. By sometime around the mid-naught'ies, Tom dropped off the Internet, and with few exceptions, has not resurfaced. A few times we tried to get the site registration transferred from his name (and with difficulty, since the email address he registered with exists no more), so that…

Brian Bilbrey September 20, 2015

Ch-ch-changes

Computational changes, at least... During the past week, I migrated all of the public sites (including this one) from a machine running Scientific Linux (SL) 6 (an RHEL respin out of CERN), and onto a different box running FreeBSD 10.2. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, SL6 was pretty slow to get updates from Red Hat and rebrand them, and release them to the world. I'd initially gone with SL because CentOS was suffering that problem. Then CentOS was picked up directly by Red Hat, and has become much more responsive. But I was ready for something…

Brian Bilbrey September 9, 2015

Mailing list etiquette, updated

I am pleased to report that the Contact Conference mailing list owner got back to me, pleasantly and quickly, apologetically acknowledging the faux pas. One can merely hope that others will pay heed. Mailing list membership should always be recipient-instigated, and double-opt-in. If you're going to Contact, btw, I'm jealous. Just sayin' ...

Brian Bilbrey September 8, 2015

Mailing list etiquette...

7 zillion years ago (Internet time) - aka 2002 - I attended the Contact Conference at NASA Ames. It was wonderful, made sad only by the fact that a part of it was a memorial for Poul Anderson. Niven, Pournelle, Vinge, and many others were in attendance as well. However, enjoying a conference over 13 years ago does not excuse the email I received today: My reply to the list owners went something like this: I've already unsubscribed myself, thanks, but you should consider sending an apology to the rest of the list, and provide clear, simple-to-understand instructions for unsubscribing…