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Reminds me of: Don't say silicone when you mean silicon.

 

German movie viewers know this issue far too well; silicon is sometimes falsely translated as "Silikon" (silicone) instead of "Silizium" (silicon). I just noticed it recently in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (with Keanu Reeves), describing Gort as (back-translated) "silicone-based". You wonder how - after decades of professional translation and dubbing - well-paid people still fail to consult a simple dictionary in time.

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32 minutes ago, mizapf said:

Reminds me of: Don't say silicone when you mean silicon.

 

German movie viewers know this issue far too well; silicon is sometimes falsely translated as "Silikon" (silicone) instead of "Silizium" (silicon). I just noticed it recently in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (with Keanu Reeves), describing Gort as (back-translated) "silicone-based". You wonder how - after decades of professional translation and dubbing - well-paid people still fail to consult a simple dictionary in time.

Ah, those infamous silicone-based lifeforms. I know of at least one Reddit that worships such creatures. Best not to describe the rituals they use in their ceremonies, for it is Lovecraftian in its horror...

 

Anyway, I never thought my boyfriend could get more vitriolically political than he has been, the last couple of years, but after I got denied for SSI AGAIN (for like, the billionth time in the last decade), he just flat-out said "screw both sides of the government" and vowed not only never to vote for the Republicans, but also never again to vote blindly for the Democrats. Dunno what the correlation is between that and SSI coverage denial, but whatever...

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2 hours ago, Schmitzi said:

 

Aluminium.... don´t miss it (2nd post)  :grin: :grin:

 

 

 

After watching Ashens for a long time, it still messes with me how weirdly the I is spoken in various words by the British; for instance, "titanium" is pronounced like "tit - tanium", with a short "I", but "urinal" is pronounced "Yoo-rai-nal", with a long "I". Very odd...

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23 minutes ago, xabin said:

After watching Ashens for a long time, it still messes with me how weirdly the I is spoken in various words by the British; for instance, "titanium" is pronounced like "tit - tanium", with a short "I", but "urinal" is pronounced "Yoo-rai-nal", with a long "I". Very odd...

Not consistently true - I'd say "tie-tanium". So it's consistent with urinal, should I ever happen to use both words in the same sentence. And Titanic. There's a titanic tie-tanium yoo-rai-nal in the cupboard under the stairs.

Edited by Stuart
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02:30.  After struggling with various DAT drives, I finally find a DAT72 drive in my collection which will work in my Solaris 8 x86 machine.  Other DAT72 and DDS4 drives obstinately insist on reporting "Illegal request" errors, and will only respond at /dev/rmt/0l*.  Unfortunately, I think the backup I need is on a DDS2 tape which the DAT72 will not read.  Oh, and the one narrow DDS4 I still have has a malfunctioning mechanism.

 

Anyway, at this point I start going through a bunch of unlabeled DDS3, DDS4, and DAT72 tapes to see if, just maybe, I made a backup of the machine I need to restore and just neglected to label it.  I tend to do that when running tests, so perhaps I have one test which will be useful.  I am very tired at this point and should stop, but the now-functioning tape drive is a siren song.

 

Instead, I come across a tape which has a backup of my old personal web site filesystem which was lost a couple of years ago in a drive failure.  Nothing major and I did not spend a lot of time or heartache on it, but finding this backup would provide me with a few missing ingredients.

 

02:48.  I begin the ufsrestore into the home folder of the root user, /root.  Whoops.  This is a lot of data being extracted and I completely forgot that / only has 64MB of space.  (It is a boot filesystem on a Solaris 8 machine... whaddaya want?  I have 64GB in /home and 80GB in /local.)  I devise a cunning plan to re-home my /root to /home/root, but I cannot touch the directory "web" which is being restored, so I will mv all of the files in /root to /home/root, including my hidden files, with the following one-liner.

 

for foo in `ls -al|grep -v web`; do mv $foo /home/root; done

02:55.  I notice /home/root is not populating but the drive is running like crazy.  Okay, time to stop it and see what damaged I have to fix.  Wait, no commands will run.

ls: Cannot find /usr/lib/ld.so.1
Killed.

 

WTF?  I look at my one-liner again. MFW.

 

Cul-willow-EFAD2R.thumb.jpg.a63cb4f8071f18365eda1eb4321db631.jpg

 

 

/usr has been relocated.  Not to /home/root, but to /home.  And why in the first place?  Well, it appears mv took my source argument of ".." and said "you got it, boss!"

 

04:25.  I have spent a lot of time trying to work some magic to restore /usr/lib from its new /home (see what I did there?)  What should be statically-linked commands in /bin, well, are not.  I can load files into variables in Bash, but unfortunately the echo command will not create a missing path.  I have tried nothing and have run out of ideas, and realize my only chance is to boot onto the installation CD (where has that gone after 18 years, and can I find the ISO?) and work from the installation shell.  Yeah, screw this, I will tackle it tomorrow.

 

08:01.  Tomorrow is here, the first distress call of the day comes in as a bad shutdown during last night's storm has prevented a customer server from booting.

 

I am the dead.

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I think relocating /root is not really recommended: Your root account very likely has some config settings there. I'd have stopped the restore process. You could have probably moved /root to /home/root and then symlink /root to /home/root.

 

Just recently I fooled myself with a script. After I copied all photographs from my camera to my PC and sorted them into subfolders for each day, I wanted to rewrite all file names to lowercase since my camera creates those ugly all-caps file names, and I cannot change that.

 

So I wrote a "lowercase" script and put it in my PATH.


#!/bin/bash
for myfile in *
do
    lcfile=`echo $myfile | tr [:upper:] [:lower:]`
    mv "$myfile" "$lcfile"
done

 

And then I stood before the subfolders and wanted to run that script in each of them.


for mydir in *
do
    cd mydir
    lowercase
    cd ..
done

 

But that script has a really small, yet nasty error. And it made me hastily search for my backups. Which one? What did it do?

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14 minutes ago, mizapf said:

I think relocating /root is not really recommended: Your root account very likely has some config settings there

In Solaris root is pretty arbitrary.  By default, its homedir is /.

14 minutes ago, mizapf said:

I'd have stopped the restore process.

They say hind-sight is 20/20.  I say it is more 20/200, because so many of us tend, and will continue, to make the same silly decisions :)

14 minutes ago, mizapf said:

You could have probably moved /root to /home/root and then symlink /root to /home/root.

This was my plan, but, you know, after the restore completed.  Because... well... late, tired, logged in as root on an inconsequential machine.  Go for broke, right?! :D

 

14 minutes ago, mizapf said:

But that script has a really small, yet nasty error.

I am assuming "mydir" did not actually exist as a directory.  How far up did it traverse before you caught it?  All about the $s, baby!

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1 hour ago, OLD CS1 said:

I am assuming "mydir" did not actually exist as a directory.  How far up did it traverse before you caught it?  All about the $s, baby!

Right, the dollars...

 

The folder was similar /home/michael/pictures/photos/travel/winter/2020/clips/

and there were subfolders 01-monday, 02-tuesday, ... 07-sunday

 

It ended in home, and this was how I actually saw that something has gone wrong

 


michael@capella:/home/michael/pictures/photos/travel/winter/2020/clips/> ./myscript

... lots of error messages ...

michael@capella:/home>

 

This is when you realize: Oh, this did not work ... wait, what's it doing there? OH NO!

 

However, things could be worse, since the script never steps down in the tree again, and in the folders most files are lowercase, anyway. Also, as I was using "*", none of the dot files in my home was affected. So this is the moment when the sweat starts to dry up, and you start to act more calmly again. The sabretooth is not behind you anymore.

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1 hour ago, xabin said:

...well, crap; just a day after I learn I got denied SSI, I learn I'm eligible for the stimulus check. What a world, eh?

 

Hi,

 

sorry, but as I am interested in that, and I did read more than once about "the SSI", what is this ?

(Google only tells me things like "Scuba Dive Inspector" and like this ;) )

And the "Stimulus Check" is a financial contribution, from the government to the people ?

 

thanks

 

 

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12 hours ago, Schmitzi said:

I did read more than once about "the SSI", what is this ?

"SSI" is "Supplemental Security Income."  It is a program for supplemental income for individuals who are disabled or unable to work.  It is managed by the Social Security Administration.

 

https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/ssi/

 

12 hours ago, Schmitzi said:

And the "Stimulus Check" is a financial contribution, from the government to the people ?

The "stimulus check" is essentially a tax credit†.  It is a $1,200 check to all tax filers, plus additional for special circumstances (married joint filers, dependents.)  It is meant to bridge the gap in income during the safer-at-home and stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 spread.  There is talk of a second round of checks, but at this point I am pretty certain most of the country which has actually "locked down" will be re-opening in stages starting soon.

 

In Florida, the majority of the state has been under safer-at-home and work-from-home guidelines and recommendations, with businesses considered "non-essential" or which operate in environments conducive to close-quarter spreading (gyms, salons, etc.) ordered closed.  Most offices which work in close quarters are either closed or under reduced staffing; schools and our universities are closed and will remain closed for the remainder of the academic year -- which also means students in the dorms were sent back home.  Restaurants are operating as delivery or pick-up only, with dining rooms closed.  I know of several restaurants which closed completely because they either lacked delivery/pick-up options or were facing shortages of supplies.  Theaters are closed, and so on.

 

The state office where I work closed almost immediately and will likely remain on skeleton staffing until the end of May if not later, even if other offices open.  Fortunately I can get into the office after hours as my office is in a completely separate building from emergency ops.  My private industry customers are still operating in full capacity, but mostly off-site.  I actually only had a few days in the past three weeks that I have not had to leave the house.  I have kept busy and I am damn happy for it.

 

† This means it will be paid back from future tax returns.  Though I have not seen definitively what year or years this will occur.  I suspect it will be forgiven at some point.

23 hours ago, mizapf said:

You could have probably moved /root to /home/root and then symlink /root to /home/root.

The system is restored to normal operations.  I found a good ISO of the final release of the OS and was able to get the file systems I needed mounted and moved things back into place.  However, I realized as I was preparing to move the root user home directory to /home/root that it needs to be in a file system which gets mounted in single-user mode in case something goes awry, otherwise root cannot log in.  /home is not one of those file systems.  So, another cunning plan: I unmounted /home, created /home/root, the re-mounted /home.  Voila: in multi-user mode I have my root home directory in a file system with plenty of space, and in single-user mode I have a directory in the / file system.

 

I even tested it! :)  So proud of myself.  Now, bed time.

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On 4/23/2020 at 4:14 PM, Schmitzi said:

 

Aluminium.... don´t miss it (2nd post)  :grin: :grin:

 

 

 

This post has me so turned around that I no longer know how to spell Alumin....  However, I pronounce it b-e-e-r...

 

(Just kidding, everyone one knows that the best beer comes in bottles, not cans (if not on tap) and at room temperature.) Glad we got that cleared up!

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You realize that the "Foster's" sold in the US is brewed in Canada - it doesn't taste anything the much superior real Aussie brew. Foster's in Oz isn't even the best of the lot. I rate Toohey's much better. Victoria Bitter isn't a "bad drop" either. I spent some memorable afternoons on Lake Macquarie with a tub of prawns and a cooler (Eskie) full of VB. Of course, having a couple of good "mates" along for company helped as well.

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3 hours ago, wierd_w said:

Seriously..

 

I understand the financial situation is deplorable (and it is that way because of 40+ years of "But who will PAY for it!?!" -ism), if we re-open the country at this point in the game, it will be a catastrophe.  Infection rate will jump into the stratosphere.

Soon in France we open on May 11 schools and people return to work.

the children would be less carriers but it could contaminate their parents the world is crazy

 

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We have a new German word, recently coined by Angela Merkel: "Öffnungsdiskussionsorgie" ("opening discussion orgy", a derogatory reference to the process in which more and more people try to impress each other by suggesting more and earlier measures to restore normal life). Received some criticism for that, in fact.

 

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