So I find myself suddenly needing to get everything off my work laptop and make sure the toolchain I was accustomed to for years works on my own hardware.

THis is proving pretty complicated, particularly since I need something that can run Premiere for my videos. I realized the best choice is my #Windows gaming laptop, so I'm tooling that up to do the job.

Windows is... a weird world. First up, ssh client. #termius Looks good. $10/mo?!? For an #SSH client? Eff that. #putty it is.

We've released #PuTTY version 0.84.

This release fixes three security vulnerabilities, although all are minor as far as we know. One allows a malicious server or MITM to make PuTTY crash with a double-free, although we don't know of a way this can be exploited for worse than a DoS. Another allows the same MITM to cause an assertion failure (and maybe lose your scrollback) instead of giving the right error message. The third marks text from the server as "trusted", but only when connecting via Telnet or similar through a proxy that asks for authentication.

New features: support for running a command before connecting (e.g. to perform wake-on-LAN, or a port knock), and on the Unix version, support for displaying 'pre-edit text' (Unicode characters you're half way through typing via a multiple-keystroke sequence).

Other bug fixes include (on Windows) fixes for spurious network errors using proxy authentication and for mishandling of cursor blinking when it's disabled in the OS, and (on Unix) better support for running on Wayland.

Around 2000, when #PuTTY first started to become popular, it brought me more and more email. At some point it became hard to answer it all, and my inbox started to grow.

Young and optimistic, I came up with a plan to fix this. I drew a line in my inbox (by sending myself an email with subject "---------"), and told myself that I'd keep the region below the line clear, and every few days, deal with a few messages from above the line, until eventually the line was at the top again.

Of course, it didn't work at all. Soon enough there was a huge backlog even below the line, and the stuff above the line was all still there. The line became part of the problem, not the solution.

It took a historian friend of mine to point out the fallacy. To answer more mail, you must spend more time answering mail. No amount of classifying, rearranging, or reorganising it makes there be less of it. You must either answer the mail or decide not to. (And once there's too much of it, only one of *those* is possible.)

This is a post about management methods that respond to any problem by spending more rather than less time moving issues around the bug tracker or kanban board or what have you.