Appreciate your sysadmin. At least today.

Today is the System Administrator Appreciation Day.  I wish a happy sysadmin day to everyone who ever took their time to answer a stupid question for a billionth time without resolving to violence, to everyone who ever spent a night or a weekend in the office fixing a problem that he didn’t create, to everyone who makes IT infrastructure invisible until there is a problem, to everyone who spent their own free time to make things better for the rest of the world, to everyone who despite working hard and taking a lot of initiative is often the first person to blame, to everyone who spent hours in the freezing datacenters or on pan-frying roofs or in dark and stinky basements, to everyone who’s mobile phone receives dozens of SMS messages every hour 24×7, to everyone who’s mobile number is posted on all office white-boards with the caption “Emergency”, to everyone … you got the idea.

If you know a sysadmin, take a minute of your time, go and say “Thank you”.  If you have some change in your pocket, buy your sysadmin a pint of beer.  If you are a hot girl, go give him a kiss and a hug.  Or her.  If you are not a sysadmin, you don’t have and probably won’t ever have an idea of how hard these people work to make your life easier.  It’s their day today.

If you still don’t understand what sysadmins do, have a look here.

Day in brief

Robots disallow

Andrey forwarded me a link to last.fm robots.txt file, which, as many other robots.txt files, forbids search engine bots to access certain areas of the site.  This one however does a little bit of more.  For machines, it serves as the reminder of Three Rules of Robotics by Isaac Asimov.  For humans, it provides a tiny bit of geek humor.  Here is a screenshot, in case it disappears over time.

Red Hat contributions to Gnome

Via this rant, I learned about this report, which shows who contributes the most to the Gnome project.  I knew that Red Hat was doing a lot of Gnome, but I never knew how much it actually was.

Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.

Way to go, Red Hat!