Month: April 2008

And it just gets worse

On March 25th, I ranted about a developer who had checked in a bunch of stuff that required a special “upgrade DVD” without telling the other developer that this would be required in Rants and Revelations » Developer dumbassedness. Well, it turns out it’s worse than that. Far worse. Not only didn’t he not tell us about the magic DVD, but he hadn’t even tested the damn DVD. It’s now 2 weeks later, and his DVD *still* doesn’t work.

So now I’m caught in a vice – I had to “rebase” my development environment to the new build in order to deliver some bug fixes, and now my development environment and my test system are at different builds, which makes it hard to test things, and especially hard to use the remote debugger in Eclipse. And I can’t get them back in sync until this damn DVD is ready.

I’d also like to mention that I did a much more ambitious upgrade DVD a few years ago, where his DVD is upgrading from CentOS 5.0 to CentOS 5.1 and reformatting the content partition from ext3 to xfs, mine was upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to CentOS 3.3. And I didn’t leave the rest of the developers out to dry because I tested the hell out of it on my test system, reformatting it back to RedHat 7.3 and running versions of my upgrade script over and over for weeks before I put it into the development stream.

That’s pretty cool

A couple of old friends from my time in the Army Reserve found my picture and post at Rants and Revelations » Lorne Scots SRTP 1979 and have left some comments. It’s great, especially Alex McKelvey’s precis of what happened to nearly everybody. All this time later, it’s hard to remember who you liked and who you hated, and it probably doesn’t matter much now, but Alex was one of the ones I liked.

First paddle of the season

Well, I got out earlier than last season, but not as early as the previous year. The sun was shining, the air was warm (just a little over 60, I think), the water was freezing cold. All in all, a great day to be out. And obviously I wasn’t the only one, because the creek was crowded with boats, some who looked like they knew what they were doing, some who obviously didn’t. Three teenagers in a canoe lurching from bank to bank with no clue what they were doing (sort of a “sub-prime” canoe), a large gaggle of kayaks coming downstream together, a guy with his feet up on top of his kayak deck and a fishing rod between his feet, people in spiffy paddling jackets and wet suits, and people in t-shirts and shorts.

I wore my wet suit because I knew the water would be cold and I didn’t want to get cold legs on the bottom of the boat, nor did I want to get hypothermia if I tipped. I had planned to only go as far as the weir so I wouldn’t overdo it. But in hindsight I probably should have turned back sooner – I was tired and my elbows were sore by the time I got there. And when I turned back, there was a strong wind in my face countering any assist I was getting from the current.

The weir was impassible – the smaller gaps were jammed with debris, so all the water was flowing through the middle channel, and there was about a foot and a half or two foot drop there. I bet it would have been fun to paddle down, but as tired as I was, I wasn’t going to try paddling up it. I wasn’t even going to try portaging around it so I could shoot it. I just looked at it and said “no f-ing way”. There were a couple of people fishing the eddy below it. So avoiding the lines, I did an eddy turn and turned down stream. I was glad to see that the big mud flat that had sprung up last year just downstream of the weir had submerged again. Hopefully the spring run-off will scour the stream bed a bit deeper this year so it won’t re-emerge in the lower water season.

Not much wildlife in the marsh yet, except some sparrows and lots and lots of Canada geese. Most of the geese looked like they were getting ready to nest, but there was one on a dead tree that lies on its side in the middle of the creek who was playing dead as I splashed by. I wonder if she had eggs? Last year I noticed that a goose had tried to lay eggs on a semi-flat spot on that tree, but most of them had rolled down into a crack, and I guess she’d abandoned the nest. I hope she has better luck this year.

Oh, that’s not good

I got an email from one of the sysadmins at NCF saying that the news directory has run out of space. After poking around a bit, I’ve discovered that:

  • cron jobs, including the nightly expire job, haven’t run since March 18th
  • I haven’t been receiving emails sent to the NCF news account, possibly for even longer than that, which is why I didn’t notice when the system throttled 3 days ago. Normally newswatcher sends these emails which I have forwarded to SMS so I don’t miss them.

The sysadmin wonders if the cron jobs not running has anything to do with the DST change. The machine is ancient, and running an ancient version of Solaris.

Of course, the fact that I didn’t notice the lack of the daily news admin email in my morning scan-and-delete folder isn’t good, either.

Unsolicited testimonial

I’ve ordered a couple of things from Duluth Trading. Mostly they make stuff for people in the building trades, but they make good looking and durable clothes. But that’s not what impresses me the most. What impresses me the most is that I choose the cheapest shipping option, and the package arrives two and a half days after I ordered it. I compare that to some site I once ordered something and chose their expensive express shipping, only to find that while they sent it FedEx Overnight, they didn’t actually give it to FedEx for 4 or 5 days.