tapiwa's comments

tapiwa | 9 years ago | on: Nano is no longer a GNU project

Loads of us use nano.

Simple light editor without the overhead (read learning curve), of all the other big editors.

Sure, I might not write code in it, but when I need to edit a conf file or two, both on a server, and my desktop, it really hits the spot.

tapiwa | 9 years ago | on: “@ubuntu asks us to bill you 1e-2e per month for each VPS/PCI/PCC/SD”

Ran into this problem a couple of months ago.

Could not figure out why Docker would not install on a stock 14.04 bare metal server from OVH.

Turns out it was their custom kernel.

With a little flag in the corner giving the option to install the stock kernel. Trying to do that gave no end of problems. So reverted to the stock Proxmox, and ran my 14.04 in a VM that uses pretty much all the resources.

True, it cost me a small %age in overhead, but it was the easiest/quickest fix.

tapiwa | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do we replace our POP3 email solution?

With email, you want simple, turnkey, and ideally self service.

Free::

http://modoboa.org/en/

http://www.iredmail.org/ ... also has paid version

Paid::

http://www.afterlogic.com/mailsuite/linux-email-server

https://www.atmail.com/

With each of the options above, you get the complete stack.

::Email server (IMAP + SMTP + POP3)

::Spam protection etc

::Web Client.

And for each of them, you also get a decent web admin panel out of the box.

Trust me, you really don't want to be spending the next week putting the individual components together and getting them to play nice yourself.

tapiwa | 9 years ago | on: Is a prenup a good idea?

Prenups are strange in that those who are mature enough to get them, probably don't need them, and those who aren't, do need them.

If I had my way, prenups would be a mandatory requisite for anyone applying for a marriage licence.

Here's why.

On Maturity, Frankness, Honesty & Disclosure:: I'll call the decision to get married, Peak Love. You are about to spend a chunk of money on a party, so I'm thinking you are pretty loved up.

This is the time to be having the hard conversations. I can almost guarantee that if you are not able to agree on what happens in the event of a divorce at this time, there is no way you're going to agree once you decide to divorce.

As other posters have indicated too, both parties are forced to disclose their financial positions. No more "oops, I forgot to mention my $100k in credit card debt" conversations once you're already married.

Divorces can be messy and acrimonous. With a lot of bitterness, anger, and all the other emotions that will make what should be a rational discussion seem like a Mid East peace negotiation summit.

And once you go guns hot, it can get very very expensive very quickly.

Cost is totally worth it:: Even allowing for the fact that your marriage will never fail, the fact that there is a non trivial chance it will, makes the cost of lawyering up for a pre nup totally worth it.

Put slightly differently .... Prenup lawyers are cheaper than divorce lawyers. Especially if the other side decides to get nasty.

tapiwa | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Found a way to fraud my bank thru a loophole, how to disclose properly?

Document the vulnerability. Document your attempts to contact the bank.

Contact your local[1] newspaper. Particularly one that is big on investigative journalism, and technology.

A good hint is if they covered the recent SWIFT bank heists.

[1]Local is relative. If it is a big national bank, go national.

The idea is for them to do an article, not necessarily exposing the vulnerability, but how processes (or lack thereof) in the big banks allow security holes to go unfixed.

tapiwa | 10 years ago | on: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Sentences like this exist in other languages too.

My mother tongue is Shona, and this would be a grammatically correct sentence.

Vana vana, vana vana vana, vana vana vana vana.

Translates to ...

Four children, have four children, who have four children each.

tapiwa | 10 years ago | on: Why We’re Removing Kik Messenger from Startup Timelines

But Azer was right on the money.

A request, by definition requires a binary response.

A polite request, by definition, means that you can live (however badly) with either a Yay, or a nay.

Kik's attitude (whilst claiming to be polite), was that anything other than a "Yay", would be met with lawyers.

On this one, #IStandWithAzer.

tapiwa | 10 years ago | on: A phony STEM shortage and the scandal of engineering visas

>>They are trying to protect US citizens from losing their jobs (or getting wages cut) due to a sudden availability of cheap labor.

Mmmm. I hear you. Sort of. Your argument though, is not very different from the "women are taking jobs that rightfully belong to men" spiel that was all the rage after WWII.

I suspect that my argument is fundamentally based on wishful thinking. That said, you can't have your cake and eat it. The 'race to the bottom' you alude to is already happening with offshoring though.

But my central argument remains ... foreigners (based on borders determined by middle aged white men a couple of centuries ago), remain the last 'minority' group that you can still discriminate against, vocally, in polite society.

tapiwa | 10 years ago | on: A phony STEM shortage and the scandal of engineering visas

Can someone please remind me again why USians should have a god given right to jobs in the US? Or put another way ... should an accident of birth(place) be the most import decider on whether someone should get a job or not?

I realise that this is probably going to get stupidly downvoted, but I am a die hard libertarian.

Why is it, in 2016, still OK to pick on the foreigners? Replace the word "foreigner" with Black/Woman/Jew/Gay/White/Whatever, and it would be totally unacceptable.

Way I see things, in a hundred years or so, picking on foreigners will be seen in the same light as picking on some minority group today.

I just worry that I won't get to live to see that day.

tapiwa | 13 years ago | on: Project started to run Erlang on bare metal

I have been following this project, and it makes so much more sense to me.

As another poster mentioned, going all the way down to the bare metal does not make sense to me.

Or maybe I have lived through too many hardware upfrades to not want to worry about whether the APP will run if we upgrade the RAID controller or something.

tapiwa | 14 years ago | on: What Happens When You Swear At Your Users

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is not located at 221b Baker Street.

That address does not exist, but any mail addressed to it is redirected to the Museum, which is technically 239 Baker Street (since it sits between 237 and 241).

They do have a special dispensation from the City of Westminster to display their address as 221b Baker Street though.

tapiwa | 15 years ago | on: PEP 3333 Accepted: WSGI standard for Python 3.x

I agree. Python 3 will not see significant uptake till it is the default on most distros.

It is the usual chicken and egg problem. Distros won't upgrade if there is no reason to. In fact, many are reluctant to upgrade to 3.0 since it breaks a few mini-apps developed in 2.x (as happened to me on ArchBang Linux a few weeks ago).

You need a killer app to force through the migration. Viz Rails and the number of hosts who now have Ruby hosting (if only in name) even on their cheapest hosting packages.

tapiwa | 15 years ago | on: Google Needs Sex

Ahh, I forgot to add the 'solution'.

The 'sex' bit, will be marrying google search results with other sources, and breeding a search ranking algorithm specific to you.

For example, the Facebook 'like' button could turn out to be very useful. Stuff liked by more people gets ranked higher. Since webmasters are already gaming Facebook though, then stuff liked by people who are one or two degrees of separation from you on facebook could count more. Any social network that allows you to indicate some sort of trust in an individual could work.

I bet you though, that if Google did this, the very same people complaining about the bad results now, would be the first to complain about the privacy implications of all this, and how google seems to know so much about us .... sigh

tapiwa | 15 years ago | on: Google Needs Sex

I have been thinking a lot about this problem. If indeed it is a problem.

Google is in the business of serving ads. The vast majority of those spammy sites display google ads. So, there is little incentive for google to change things just yet. Joe public is not complaining, yet. It is only the digerati, and a whole bunch of other webmasters who think their sites should be ranking higher because they are just better, who seem to be up in arms over this.

The interesting thing is that half the spammy do provide content that is 'just good enough' for what most people are looking for. The quickest exit from one of these sites, is via a google ad, so google wins, the site wins, and the advertiser targetting a specific niche wins.

The only problem will be when the advertisisers stop getting the bang for their buck when their ads are displayed on these sites. Until then, Google has little incentive to change.

tapiwa | 15 years ago | on: The Trillion Dollar Website (a story of quantitative easing)

As a Zimbabwean myself, I would have to say that most of the posters here totally missed the point of the site.

The site was not a critique of quantitative easing. It is a commentary on the Zim government's attack on a newspaper that dared to criticize their fiscal policy (in this case a whole lot of printing money, or ... ahem quantitative easing).

The paper then fought back, using this effectively worthless money (available in huge quantities, and cheaper than paper), to front their guerrilla campaign.

Looking at the box of Zim dollars under my desk, you can see how the currency got steadily worse (physically), as the currency got steadily worse (economically). The last straw was the EU sanctions that then prevented the German company from exporting banknote 'paper' to Zimbabwe ... the notes after that were sad. Really sad.

Interestingly, at the height of the Zim crisis, a friend of mine in Germany sent me a couple of notes from the hyper inflation days in Germany (apparently, even now, there are still so many of those notes around that they are not worth much). The 1919 '50 mark' note feels like real money (quite oily too), while the 1923 '500 million mark' note, is just a plain paper bill, printed on one side, with just a bit of colour.

When the govt starts printing money on paper, instead of cotton, then you know you are in big trouble.

I suppose the point I was trying to make, was that while you can debate the similarities between the Zim situation and the Fed's quantitative easing, the site is really about the fight between one paper and the Mugabe government.

Incidentally, the Zim Dollar died a couple of years ago. The only currency you will find in widespread use, is the South African Rand, and the US Dollar.

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