mesrik

Agreed what you wrote. It's great and well written book. I did read the book again last fall after couple decades.

Then few weeks after finishing book I ran into his LinkedIn post (bit OT sure) if what book told was his recollection still accurate in part where book refers his work at DEC Systems Research Center (SRC) at the time. Following is what he replied to me:

" markoff and hafner did extensive research and the book is accurate in all ways i could know. note that while mitnick has paid his debt to society (jail time), i've never received from him an apologia. my only other written mention of those breakins was here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/burdens-blame-paul-vixie/ "

Bit late to reply, but seems ^A and ^E (jumping line begin and end) at least do work in Firefox.

But for example ^T (letter transpose) do not work on macOS Firefox, which I'm quite accustomed to use also. But ^T works fine same macOS Safari and Chromium.

Firefox apparently has its own input method which do not implement all what macOS supports.

Well, I've got to admit I've haven't read HN using emacs. Is there such a .el thing avalabnle somewhere? It would be great to read HN as it was with usenet news. Not joking, that would be excellent tools I'd like to have !

Vi is fine. It's superior and to bare ed - The Standard Editor*, when you don't have anything else available. I made much of my living coding vi 7 years in -80's. And I still use vi, when emacs is not there or system has so little memory that emacs is too much. Which is usually with a embedded systems or some old Unix on single mode fixing unbootable system.

*) https://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs249/Resources/ed_is_the_standard...

I just tried, and my macOS up todateFirefox (still Sonoma few weeks), doesn't work. Nor does Waterfox (Firefox derivativ) that I've been using more lately. Could it be some setting I need to set before it works?

Yes, emacs keystrokes became kind of cli lingua franca, which apparently many do not know. I don't remember my self ever read about those supported explicitly anywhere, but accidentally I found out long time ago and then whenever I try new systems, programs and whatever I try which keystrokes do work. Quite often at least some work.

Sure. Browser autocorrect there just tried to be helpful :/

"Is anyone still using emacs?"

Yes, 34 years and no plans to switch.

Emacs cursor movement keystrokes are quite widely supported elsewhere too which use GNU readline or implement at least subset themselves.

Those work well also besides shells with Chromium/Chrome/Safari etc. many browsers input fields (address bar and text area). Cisco IOS, Juniper Junos, Netscreen load balancers too etc. IMHO makes jumping around CLI much much convenient and faster than moving hand to reach cursor keys.

My only gripe is that Firefox and its derivatives it doesn't work any more. Long time ago it did work. And I have no idea why feature was dropped some rewrite.

e: s/deadline/readline/g

Oh, and there were more than just UUCP bang paths.

IBM Memo, Novel Netware etc. groupware and such X.400 and routing those required also odd email conventions. VAX VMS addresses did have % left side routing in too.

There is one more 'lie' missing and not included in that writing which only looks email addresses what is are limits of valid destination addresses.

But if used as a senders source address there are even less limits.

For example you can use a null address <> when sending. That has been used bit less these days than earlier. It's been used ages SMTP delivery status notifications, mail loop prevention and so where intentionally not much sense to expect anyone to reply. And all well known MTA's forward it and email clients handle it very well by disabling reply to that message.

There is however a catch that anyone who thinks he would now start using it when he doesn't want any reply. Ever since IT Service Management (ITSM) and Service Desk software appeared, they have had issues with email coming from <> sender, because they like to always add received messages email addresses to database, where then someone handling would reply. I've been using only few, Service Now (SN) more lately and before Issue Tracker (IT), both didn't at least about year and half ago know how to handle null sender addresses. Both seemed to just discard or sort some trash bin those emails. With our SN sysadmin didn't find where those went in that system.

But otherwise <> as a sender works great. And sure it would be great if those ITSM making folks would get this fixed, because when your postmaster, postmaster, etc. and such role-aliases are the quite often handled by ITSM software, there is good chance you don't get some important notifications from systems that rely on that null address sender.

ps. Search Google: smtp and sender address as "<>" for more info incase needed.

I've last seen those in older Cisco ASA firewall's up to OS version 8.something which had internal or external CompactFlash with VFAT16 filesystems. Usually caused by end of useful life of that CF or if already replaced by someone who did not quite understand device requirements and what it supports.

Either because did not care or understand 32bit VFAT while it works for while, then when CF usage gets over VFAT16 supported 2GB fs gets corrupted, system fails after a while and then you got plenty of those FOUND.xxx files root of that CF drive after boot ran fsck. Those old ASA's did accept and work with 4GB CF's which were available much longer than 2GB versions, but you needed to make max 2GB VFAT16 primary partition and then format it with Linux mkfs.vfat with flags that made sure it's only 16bit version. Once that was done, you could copy files from old CF using something that copies also hidden files and directories too, which there were few there.

ASA used to be some Cisco proprietary OS and was just rebranded PIX firewall, then from 8 oddly hacked linux with grub boot.

Not much of my favourite box as a firewall, but Remote-access VPN features did work quite well quite long and when clustered it was easy to run upgrades each node at time without DTLS and IPsec clients even noticing it.

OK, I found bit more from UNIX System Administration Handbook Third Edition (Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Scott Seebass, Trent R. Hein, with even more authors mentioned) 2001 book following:

  "134 UNIX System Administration Handbook
  ...
  The lost+found directory is automatically created when you build a filesystem. It is 
  used by fsck in emergencies; do not delete it. The lost+found directory has some
  extra space prealocated so that fsck can store "unlinked" files there without having
  to allocate additional directory entries on an unstable filesystem. Some systems pro-
  vide mklost+found command that can recreate this special directory if it is aci- 
  dentally deleted.
  ...
  "

Foxleys book does not actually claim reason why it need to be preallocated. I've got the book also. Index mentions fsck only page 52, where it reads:

  "52 UNIX FOR SUPER-USERS
  ...
  The filestore consistency check is performed by the command fsck (usu-
  ally stored as /etc/fsck, but sometimes in /bin), which should be used to check
  all discs used as file-systems. It defaults to the list of filestore devices given
  in the file /etc/checklist. At this stage, most of the file-systems will not be
  mounted, so will be inactive; only the root file-system will be active. The
  fsck command goes through each one in turn, reports any inconsistencies in
  them, and offers to correct them. The reply to each query is either 'y' for yes
  (correct the inconsistency), or 'n' for no (leave the file-system inconsistent).
  A parameter '-y' to the command assumes 'yes' replies to all questions, so
  that no further interaction is necessary; a parameter '-n' similarly assumes
  all 'no' answers, and therefore needs no write permission to the device. Any
  'yes' reply may involve the loss of information, such as the complete removal
  of a suspect file. Suspect files on the file-system being checked are written to
  a directory lost + found on the device if such a directory exists; this directory
  must have been created, and be sufficiently large already to hold the names
  of all the files involved. This can be ensured by first creating the directory,
  then creating a number of files in the directory, and then removing them.
  The corrected systems will be consistent, and can later be mounted as and
  when required. It may be possible to recover information from deleted files
  by looking at the lost + found directory. There should be a lost + found direc-
  tory at the head of each mountable file-system.
  When checking the root file-system, there are complications, in that it
  will be active (even though, because it is root, it will not be formally mounted
  as such, but is implicitly mounted as root during the booting process). If
  modifications are necessary, they should be completed, and the machine
  rebooted without first performing a sync (see section 4.5 below for the nor-
  mal procedure for taking a system down). This is to ensure that the disc as
  modified by fsck is not overwritten by any in-core information, which may
  have been generated from information read from the original corrupt (incon-
  sistent) version.
  ...
  "

Old time UNIX systems directories were just another structured file, which a 'd' bit (like others you changed with chmod) on them, where each record was 16 bytes, which 2 first were the inode number followed by 14 bytes reserved for filename. IIRC linux also had first same limit first filesystems. You could read directory with any program, common feat was to check any odd stuff that "ls" would not show with could hexdump or "od" with some flags and print 16 bytes lines per row. That way you also could see any deleted or moved files from that directory, because directory entry was not quite long otherwise cleared but just clearing that inode reference two bytes.

A Quick look from other books that I have close me now Maurice J. Bach, The Design of Operating UNIX System (-86) contains much more about fsck and filesystem fixing issues scattered few pages in the book and what methods were used to mitigate loss of data. S.R Bourne The Unix System, no mention of fsck at all, at least by looking book automatically generated index.

It could have been some other quite old book I did read, but did not own or anything since BSD4.3-tahoe documentation I've read over the years. But sure it would be nice to read that exact reasoning again from credible sources.

edit: Oh, and you could preallocate also just by adding entries or copying some data to lost+found enough, and then remove entries. Unix traditionally have not compacted and resized directories. They only grow and can be if have been very large slow to traverse. The way to compact is creating another, moving existing data there and then swapping directories.

I understand that while small kids or baby then there is lot of laundry. But I've heard some people wash same fav clothes every day just to be able to use them fresh clean every day.

Gosh, but there are other ways to solve that issue like having bit more of fav clothes, so that you dont' have to wash same cloth every day but instead was a bunch of them end of week. Need white shirt every day at work, buy at least 10 of them, use one each day, wash & iron weekend, put on pile1 and use from pile2 next week rotating for even use and to have some redundancy, then pile1 week and so on. Get more trousers etc. whatever you need. This is what I did when had job where dress code told what to wear in office.

And kids, buy them more fav clothes too if it otherwise becomes fight what they want to wear daily.

But each to their own. Above is just my view and how I learned when I was kid looking my parents, and how I've done also.

Miele makes darn reliable appliances, I've had two Miele vacuum cleaners from -88 and still both work fine. Used weekly, one at home and when I sold summer cottage to my brother & his wife I gave one to them, they still use it there.

All parts still available and when I bought new hose few years ago from service I asked if they still are willing to fix it if it went broke answer was. Sure absolutely, just bring it here and we make it work again. I've just bought once new floor nozzle that was worn out and that hose because it grew leaky from ends. Third party dust bags are available and very cheap.

True, that's some things have changed.

But it's when you consider taking first full drive backup times. It still takes 'forever' when you'd rather like to get on with fixing single disk issues. Or like when you wait RAID rebuilds too.

We did plan our maintenance tasks so, that there was something else useful we could do while obligatory backup and Spinrite was running. Upgraded another devices EPROM's, PC BIOS or dot matrix printer EPROM, cleaned printer heads, chaff and dust from chassis, changed colour ribbon to it. Ran updates to software we had sold etc. And went lunch with the customer:)

I've used Mail.app since 2004 and have not had any of those problems except searching using Spotlight have occasionally been broken over the years, but never searching within the app.

And I've had both multiple accounts various servers both private and work. And dozens of work-related role aliases which Mail.app correctly always used when replying. No problems there. Neither I have had to rebuild sqlite mail folder db, but did have some quirks first when work emails were transferred to Office365 which wanted to rename folders etc. nuisance, 2FA worked also worked fine since IIRC Mojave. I've had some addons MacGPG, sorting and maintenance scripts too. MacGPG does need some attention when upgrading though besides paying for subscription it moved time ago.

I've used also Thunderbird, mostly with linux. And used and tested whole lot of various clients since Elm was a thing -80's, then Pine, mutt etc.

The macOS Mail.app is fast reliable in my opinion, but sure there are things in its UX it could be yet improved. But still it's been long time among best and never broken or let me down over 20 years, both work and private use.

How so, not last a decade?

I had AEG Lavamat 1055 about 35 years (from 1982), worked well without hitch. It was quite small, top loading model etc. Fast spin-dry w/ variomatic (shaking also while spinning). Laundry out of it was quite dry already.

Then 2017 building plumbing had to be redone and gave reason to remake bathroom completely and replacing old equipment. I would have bought Miele model but it didn't fit reserved place and I ended up buying Electrolux instead.

That's now month short of 9 years and I have no reason to believe it will not work well at least another 10 years to come. regardless advertised 10 years warranty.

This current one has more electronic parts, but now searching by its model found only fault codes all seem to be user errors, overfilling, water hose not open, draining filter clogged etc. All non issues whoever bothers knowing how to maintain and operate that thing over years. No complaints about issues with electronics problems.

These were first used by a couple and later single (me) needs which are usually once a week plus twice a month washing 4-5 uses single day. Which becomes bit over 100 washing in year.

That's just 1000 washings in 10 years and 3500 in 35 years. For a family washing every day once it would be 3563 uses in 10 years.

If washing machine isn't badly kept against instructions and it isn't cheapest knock off plastic rubish, why would be a surprise if it doesn't last at least that 10 years use washing family laundry. And last many decades with single or dink use?

Sure I remember, but since I purchased Spinrite doing lowlevel was needed just once while changing ST-506 controller to a different type or for a new disk, former was quite much rarer needed.

Then even after std lowlevel it was worth using Spinrite to check if interleave value was proper. And if it wasn't it was worth letting it first before anything else. Same when changing a faster CPU as it could speed up IO so much that no interleave would not needed any more and get faster IO.

Spinrite was such a great tool and time saver fixing or making preventive periodic maintenance to customers disks, even though it chugged hours even 30M disks. And just because not to take absolutely any risk it was necessary to make full backup first, which that took quote long also. LapLink was a great tool for that, before LAN became more common.

And it's been used by many commercial networking and storage appliances too. Juniper using various devices (routers, firewalls, switches, etc), Citrix Netscreen load balancers, Dell storage Isilon just to name few. Knowing FreeBSD pays dividends if you work enterprise gear. Makes your life so much easier even there is vendor specific UI's and shell, but you know your way around so much better when you encounter any issues which requires using shell and it helps you debugging things you would otherwise not being able to accomplish.

Knowing you way around *BSD how check things, mount a USD drive, collect data & or evidence when need arises is well worth having beyond just surviving bare Linux skills. BSD's are alive and kicking on commercial appliances and devices.

You should't need mainframe for 100% (or five nines if that's fine) service uptime.

You can build that way cheaper with 2-3 proper clustered load balancer units, 2-3 application servers behind those and those using persistent storage (databases,ldap, files) which allow writing multiple nodes simultaneously.

I used to work uni that we had few services from 2012 to 2025 my retirement with zero downtime. One time my manager with tech background tried to add PBR in hurry using WebUI and did not understand cli syntax and caused close to require reboot, but I was able to fix it from cli rolling back previous config and rebooting one unit at time. Upgrading software major version up to each unit supported level wasn't hard, upgrade node it joins back cluster, upgrade another node and it joins cluster, all done. Few times I had to fix manually config for some less important test backend servers that I had forgotten to change before upgrade. No big deal. No major outages during all that 13 years time happened. Some redirecting policy and action syntax was first hard to understand and learn like GeoIP, but I was very surprised how darn reliable and nice they to use and maintain.

The LB's were (Citrix) Netscalers in clustering mode (all nodes process traffic concurrently), which allowed live update one node at time without losing any connectivity through them. That wouldn't have been possible devices in just HA mode.

We had just 2 beefy units which worked very well for us, but you can have 2-32 of them in cluster and managing thousands of servers behind them if you need that. Netscalers are FreeBSD derived where quite a bit of the TCP/IP stack was rewritten adding support many some quite odd features std FreeBSD doesn't have. Much of that is IP/ethernet multicast features, PBR's, Traffic Domains (VRF's) and of many service and monitoring processes which sync cluster (or HA) and if node fails another can continue straight from there without any loss of traffic to clients being proxied.

Though I think most people in this forum are familiar with with haproxy, pound and web-server software provided reverse proxying.

A car analogy if previous were your fancy sport sedan Netscaler and F5 BigIP are formula F1 class cars ie. quite different beasts altogether.

e: And proper LB's are not just for HTTPS etc. but very nice proxying many other protocols were they TCP, UDP or something else. We did done VPN's and something like Cisco AP'S CAPWAP (DTLS ie SSL over UDP). e: typo.

and Bob with his Billard pipe, now as you brought these up!

My father did not smoke, but many of his colleagues did which some did look 60's bit like Bob. For some odd reason I still kind of remember what tobacco and pipe smell felt in room when I begin to think of it, like now in this occasion.

In Finland and most of Europe have 230V one phase, 400v in three phase. And bare single phase subscription haven't even been available new houses for at least 45 years any more.

But if you buy an old summer cottage further away from permanent living areas it may well be that a) you don't even have grid there or b) if you have it's single phase and three phase upgrade would be too expensive because you are being billed building cost for that work all in front.

Using that single phase for sauna stove needs then so much that it's not allowed by code or if you would be able to convince some electrician do some kind fo switching other devices off when stove is on most perhaps do not like to pursue that and choose wood stove their sauna instead. That's known working solution and remote location it's also a secondary heat source incase grid were down due some storm fallen trees on wires which mess cleaning takes several days etc.

I think I've heard US it's mostly no water at all on stove and Germany I've heard they have had these sauna-masters who come and cast water on stove.

Neither of these are practised anywhere in Finland at least. But there are at least one Finnish swimming bath where they had to limit steam competitions and made a button controlled mechanism to administer water instead of free usage. Not because electrical shock prevention but because bad human behaviour per se.

That "electric heater stones on top" is usually called stove, "kiuas" in Finnish :)

When needing to define type of stove, it's electric stove, wood heated stove. Latter has two types, which continuous wood burning is still common (this stove you can add burning wood during bathing) and older not so much any more used before bathing heated type stove which you cannot add wood while bathing. Oldest type is smoke-sauna, which doesn't have chimney at all. Wood is burnt in stove when heating, then when burnt enough sauna is ventilated first and then bathing starts.

But all these different heating elements are commonly stoves, just adding electric-, wood-, or smoke- stove is added context requiring.

Infra saunas then have those lamps of course, no stove there.

Yes, that it was especially rural environments and not having much options otherwise to live around while building.

Sauna that was built then wasn't just one hot room, but it also had at minimum small changing room dressing/undressing, relaxing between turns in steam room. Also if it was first building made then adding also lounge which served as living space with beds and cooking stove while building house was common. With sauna you had place to stay warm first winter, able to get warm water, wash clothes, yourselves and even a give birth old times. Building sauna first made lot of sense.

These days sauna for home builders is more about getting sauna somewhere in that floorplan where works well for the intended users of that house.

Besides water proofing wooden boats and long time ago ships pine and fir tar it's been used protecting wooden roof tiles when they were a thing and still are used old wooden churches keeping and restoring.

It's used small amounts in additive in soap or shampoo mostly as a scent, mouth pastille and lozenge a for taste, animal health care kind antibacterial and bug resistant etc. long time ago.

Quite lot of applications especially old times long time ago before more scientifically developed medicines were commonly available. These days less there but it's used as a scent or for flavour.

That is growing trend in Finland too. GenX and younger seemingly use less sauna compared to older generations.

Thus when it was common to build sauna for a while all new all least family size apparments late -80's and -90's that has been less common later decades. And it's become so common people not using saunas already built bathing and instead use it additional storage. Which has unfortunately caused even some fire accidents if stove circuit breaker was not disconnected. Last year we had this kind of happening when child apparently had played with the sauna timer switch and activated it.

Correct, most saunas at homes were they apartments or family homes, businesses, public saunas etc. were built using electric stoves when they became commonplace during -70's.

But traditional summer cottages and villas have been either intentionally or still built wood burning stoves unless three phase power is easily available not bring cost up too much because remote location and long distance to grid. We have about half a million summer cottages in Finland. Which almost all have saunas and I would guess that perhaps 5% would have electric saunas as most summer cottages are built quite long time ago and off grid.

There are fancy (luxury) summer cottages where there is not one but either two or even three saunas built or moved there. All different types of course if having many. One electric inside for convenience.

Traditional (continuous) wood burning sauna, "jatkuvalämmitteinen" in Finnish, right next to lake because that type is consider to give better 'löyly' (steam in sauna) than you get from electric stove and thus preferred by many.

Third if some have is usually oldest type, the smoke-sauna. Which is really nice to have if you can afford keeping and have patience to make use of it few times a year. It takes lot of time and bit of knowledge too to warm it up which can take up to 6-8 hours, before it's ready to start bathing there. This was most common type about hundred years ago in country side.

Fourth type is or mostly was between smoke-sauna and continuously burning stove sauna. Its stove burns wood during heating, but then during bathing it's just releasing heat accumulated during heating. This type name in Finnish is "kertalämmitteinen kiuas" ie. onceheated-stove. And was most common in towns and cities before continuously warming stove was invented and became popular about 60 years ago.

I go sauna four times a week, once evening where I live and three times a week early in morning when I go swimming to (county owned) swimming baths.

e: typos, and clearer expressions.

I'm not one that he flies with gamma spectrometer. But I've had RadiaCode 103G since Dec 2024. It's pretty neat device that can be brought with you almost anywhere.

https://radiacode.com/

It's made in Cyprus (EU) and has apparently received some EU funding. Using Google Search AI mode and asking what is CEO Sergey Shek connection with Moscow Radiological institute gave me following reply.

"The connection between Sergey Shek, the founder of Radiacode (formerly Radiascan), and Moscow's radiological research centers is primarily rooted in his and his team's professional and academic history. The key points of connection are:

    Academic and Professional Origins: Radiacode’s founding team consists of Russian physicists and engineers who were educated and began their careers at prestigious scientific institutions in Moscow. These include researchers formerly associated with the N.N. Semenov Federal Research Center for Chemical Physics and other centers specializing in nuclear physics and spectroscopy.
    Early Product Development: The company's initial products, such as the Radiascan-701, were developed in Russia using the technical expertise gained at these Moscow-based institutes. The technology behind their current high-precision scintillation detectors stems from this scientific background.
    Relocation and Independence: Following the start of the conflict in Ukraine, the company officially rebranded as Radiacode and shifted its headquarters and operations to Cyprus and the United Kingdom. Sergey Shek and the company have sought to distance themselves from Russian state institutions to operate as a global, independent entity.

Russian background didn't sound good to me for obvious reasons. Thus I did not install app to my daily driver phone and use a separate Android device for this app. But the device is nice and app quite good for what I've used it.

Adding: You can find videos about the device from Youtube.com