[BALUG-Admin] DreamHost.com - yes, others (besides BALUG) also notice issues, ...

[Michael Paoli]

Nice catch.  :-)
When I read over the item - in HTML on web page,
in the context, I was expecting rather to quite
competent code ... so my brain autocorrected
what I read to what I'd expect, rather than
what it actually was (competent code slightly
broken by HTML conversion).

On the other hand, when I'm much more skeptical of
the code, I'm much more likely to notice errors
(or encoding mess ups, etc.) ... in fact I'll
often, in such cases where it's not already in
text/script file, copy & paste or otherwise
copy into file ... or often just into editor
(vi(1), or more precisely nvi(1), of course)
buffer, and have a look at it there ... and things
like that tend to then quite jump out at me (like
Microsoft automangling of code that introduces
non-ASCII bytes and other issues).

Hope Cabal is going well - I was seriously tempted -
it's been a while - but rather long trek via public
transportation from Berkeley ... and besides, I'm
still working on BALUG list migration bits ... more
on that soon.

> From: "Rick Moen" <rick@linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [BALUG-Admin] DreamHost.com - yes, others (besides  
> BALUG) also notice issues
> Date: Sat, 8 Jul 2017 15:19:39 -0700

> Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):
>
>> Yes, we're certainly not the only ones to notice DreamHost.com
>> having issues, e.g.:
>> https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/30/36#subj22
>
> HTMLisation for purposes of presentation in the
> https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/ digest version messes up the cron job a bit
> (eliminating semantically vital spaces).  The correct version can be
> seen on the underlying comp.risks newsgroup, and I find it delightful
> and useful:
>
> # This gives me a whole week (expr 60 \* 60 \* 24 \* 7 : 604800)
> # after reboot to figure out which process was the memory hog:
> * * * * * if test $(sed 's/\..*//' /proc/uptime) -gt 604800; then  
> set -e -- $(date +\%M); COLUMNS=500 top -b -n 1 -c > TOP.${1#[0-9]};  
> fi
> # Yes, need to run once a minute, as Dreamhost takes no snapshots of
> # the system before rebooting it.