Another rant

[Xen]

Liam Proven schreef op 16-11-2017 20:33:
>> I am also not great with learning existing configuration tools in the 
>> sense
>> of automation scripts, so I write my own.

> Ah. Potential problem there.

It's just that the learning curve of anything will always dwarf the 
needs I have at any moment.

Also anything I acquire from someone else I can probably not easily 
change.

So if I don't like something, I am stuck with it.

For me time spent not knowing something is time very badly spent.

If I create something myself the only thing I run into is bugs and time 
developing, which is a process, and in a sense a pleasurable activity.

Running into roadblocks because I don't know how to do something that 
was created by someone else is a draining experience, I mean this drains 
my energy very quickly.


I am pretty adept in Bash and coding in other languages is also always 
easy, what is not easy is using other people's dysfunctional APIs.

For instance Ansible is described as a deployment tool that activates 
_other_ hosts.

My main requirement is not other hosts, but repeatable configuration on 
the same host.

Time spent "deploying" is merely a git clone and I do not have a central 
"hub" from which I can "infest" other hosts.

So even though I like all of the design goals of Ansible, the website is 
just a typical corporate website that gives you the idea it is going to 
be *very* complex.

Of course it is wonderful that you can deploy a new machine very 
rapidly.

This is also my aim.

To capture the configuration of a machine so I won't ever have to do the 
manual work again :p.




I rather spend time "saving" my progress while I am okay, then having to 
redo it while I am in a rush.

So Ansible seems perfect but I might not even have a controlling 
machine.

(Also it is yet another Red Hat product... :( ).



> Sounds like something better done with a standard tool such as Ansible.


> :-o
> 
> Fair enough!
> 
>> However it's not getting easier and now I am not getting boot messages
>> anymore maybe because the system boots too fast but I think it's 
>> because of
>> changes.
> 
> Remove 'quiet nosplash' from the kernel parameters.

Okay good point, but ESC always worked.

> And you know dmesg, surely?

Not useful if your system doesn't boot.

> Agreed, strongly.
> 
> Altho' OTOH I recently joined the FB Linux group, and OMG, it's full
> of morons. Noisy opinionated morons.

The world is full of morons these days.

That didn't use to be the case.

I never experienced such a world before.

Either I know better what a moron is because I have become wiser myself, 
or the world has changed.

I suspect the latter more... ;-).

Although I must say that I never knew




that people in general were this underdeveloped.

In their minds.


Even talking judges.

Public prosecutors.

Everyone dealing with anything.

Lawyers.






Stuff you are not told by the people who were supposed to tell you and 
then later you read the "source" (law) yourself and you are amazed at 
all the illegal stuff that has been happening.




The law is broken so many times each day.

And no one seems to notice.

I always say: the corruption always goes deeper than you think.




I have found that in general as a person you have more rights than the 
people in power want you to know.

But the people that are supposed to defend you are sometimes dumb as 
bricks.

If you call a government consumer support line or something like that, 
you are told falsehoods.

The advice to fight for it or to go for it is almost never given.



>> Can you even boot Windows 10 from a logical partition?
> 
> The bootloader has to go into a primary. I think the rest can go
> elsewhere. I haven't tried; I stopped fighting its preferences many
> years ago.

Me too.

>> The annoying part is that usually in kuch Windows it is a breeze to 
>> get it
>> running and stable too.
> 
> "kuch"?

Ehm. As a sense of saying something that some people here wouldn't like.


> Often true. :-(
> 
> Until it's replaced with something else in 0.01x status.
> 
>> But that's mostly because many Linux people and developers are hostile 
>> to
>> user friendliness.
>> 
>> If you even suggest something that would be user friendly they become
>> hostile.
>> 
>> If you actually do it yourself they don't like it either.
>> 
>> They want Linux to be spartan.
> 
> The thing is that the big driver is servers. Virtual servers, mainly.
> If it isn't relevant to servers, a company won't throw much money or
> many people at it, so it remains volunteer/hobbyist-driven and thus
> suffers.

That's fine but that doesn't explain the spartanist attitude.

For instance there is an OpenSUSE guy who is big in servers or at least 
good with it who typically thinks that more user friendliness is a need 
somewhere at the end of the ladder when all other stuff has already been 
dealt with.

And which thus will never happen because that's how things go.

He also appears to be "tone death" with regards to written communication 
and often does not get what a person is saying even though other people 
always know exactly what I or they mean.

This always then produces a sarcastic or cynical attitude on behalf of 
that person who then blames me for not being "clearer" in what I say and 
mean.

As in "If something comes across to me as incomprehensible or stupid, 
it's probably because the other person is a moron, not because I don't 
understand something."

This attitude in feeling superior even though this impression derives 
from a lack of comprehension



is really pervasive among the Linux crowd, maybe because there are so 
many technically inclined people, and not very socially inclined people.




So you are always fighting an uphill battle against people, or with 
people, who are actually stupider than you, but they insist the problem 
lies with you.





Which also happens in real life.



>> You said that.
>> 
>> One dedicated person can achieve more user friendliness than a 1000 
>> coding
>> monkeys fighting Git and arguing about what needs to be done.
> 
> Up to a point. Depends on the tools.
> 
> A wise person once said "building an entire OS in C is like
> hand-building a 100 metre model of a toothpick out of toothpicks."

Yes I wanted to say that this person also loves C and cannot see that...

I mean.




C is not user friendly.

No big surprise then that the system that derives from C is not user 
friendly either,

that the attitudes of the people that work with C do not foster user 
friendliness either,

and that overall a lack of user friendliness or usability is considered 
"A Okay!"

C is a terrible language.

It is ugly.

It is error-prone.

So the software these people build is also error-prone, because they 
give it the same user interface that C has.

Take the function strdupa().

Not only is that a cryptic word.







The manpage of strdupa(), which is a function that duplicates a string 
for you while allocating memory for it on YOUR stack,



warns against its usage because it does not check for stack overflows, 
and what's more, you cannot use it in a functional call chain,


because if you do:    funca( strdupa( funcb() ) ).

Then the memory for strdupa will be allocated on the call stack of 
funca(),

causing this... actually I might be wrong here.

You cannot do funca(a, alloca(100), b)

or something of the kind causing the memory to be allocated on the call 
stack for function funca().


In any case this shows clearly enough how confusing and corruptable this 
system is.

And then these same people say "Bugs are not caused by the language, 
they are proportional to lines of code."

The above is often my Linux experience ;-).