Category: Geekery

Vacation update

I had a bunch of plans for the vacation.  Some of them actually got done.

Goals:

  • Spend time with my daughter, step-daughters and wife (partial credit – probably could have done better, but it was great to have Liane here for the first time in years even just to hang out, and we did a few fun things.)
  • Finish reading “Ajax In Action” (partial credit – read the first 10 of 13 chapters and Appendix A.)
  • Reimplement the “progress report” part of the navaid.com web site so that instead of re-drawing the entire page every 10 seconds it just grabs the actual count that’s changed and puts it into an appropriate div.  (Not even started.)
  • Add some more design notes to the NavData wiki. (Not done.)
  • Import some of the user data files I’ve been sent into the navaid.com web sites. (I did a couple, Brazil, Argentina and the UK, but I’ve got a couple more to do.)
  • Finish Half Life 2 which I got last Christmas.  I stopped last January when I had some video card problems.  (Played for 15 minutes, got to Ravenholm, got violently motion sick and stopped.)
  • Get some flying in. (Didn’t get a single day without low ceilings.)

I probably get a failing grade for that.

Ok, that’s annoying

I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 a few days ago.  I just noticed today that the comment count isn’t incrementing when people post comments (although they do decrement when I delete a test comment).  So there’s all those posts on my main page that say “Comments (0)” even though they have comments.  And they’re not showing up in my “unread comments” plugin either.

I think I’m going to have to try turning off some plugins to see if that makes a difference.  I hope it’s not SpamKarma.

Testing

Upgraded to WordPress 2.0. Looks like my highly customized Maple theme still works, as do all the important plugins. I still haven’t upgraded to Spam Karma 2.0, because the original Spam Karma works just fine for the pitiful small volume of spam I get these days.

The new editor looks nice.

If you don’t hear from me after today…

…it’s because I’ve had to commit Seppuku to appease our Japanese customers.

A few days ago, based on a code review (which I unfortunately did on our 5.0 code base instead of the 3.6 code that they are using) and an examination of the customer logs, I confidently said that this mysterious changing value that they are seeing is due to one of them mucking around with changing values in Webmin. I found at least one case where that had happened, and like House my default assumption is that the user is always lying, because that’s usually the case. My confidence was reported up the line by my boss, and from him to the Japanese support people, and from them to the customer.

So yesterday I was taking another look at the logs, and I found that as well as the case where they had messed around with the values themselves, I found another case where the values had changed “spontaneously”. Oh oh. And then I remembered the cache of these values I’d put in in 3.1, and how hard it had been to get everybody who used the cache to understand that if they used the cache they had to listen for a particular message, and when they got that message they had to call a method to flush and reload the cache, and how some of the other developers don’t seem to get the concept of Singletons and how something they call in one thread can affect something that happens after that thread is dead and another one spawned off, and because of that in 4.0 I’d gotten rid of the cache entirely.

After apologizing, I’m going to have some backporting to do.

Why is it that when called on to apologize to the touchy Japanese customers I feel this Basil Fawlty voice in the back of my mind saying “Don’t mention the war” over and over again? I have trouble reconciling the delicate sensibilities of the Japanese and with the brutal butchers who bayonetted Canadian nurses in Hong Kong at Christmas 1941 or who casually beheaded surrendered prisoners being force marched in Bataan. I guess that’s not very culturally sensitive of me.