Category: Geekery

Same shit, different job…

I’ve written a few times (here and here) about how every time you change something, every bug anywhere near that area now becomes your fault.

In my current job, I was in charge of a system called “Entitlements” that controlled who could do what and could access what parts of the system. Which means that dozens of new defects come to me with a note from the business analyst or equivalent person saying “looks like an Entitlement issue”. And I have to look at it and say “no, the reason they can’t access that part of the site isn’t because of Entitlements, it’s because NOBODY WROTE THAT PART OF THE SITE YET”.

Side note: we’re using “Agile Development”, which is a short form way of saying “we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing from day to day, and we’re not sure what has been done and what hasn’t until somebody complains that it’s not done”.

The good part is that because we’re Agile, that means when I discover that the problem is that nobody wrote that part of the site yet, I get to write it. So yay me.

More Mailman idiocy

I’ve written a few times in the past about idiots who get their monthly email reminders from my Mailman mailing lists and then write to me personally to unsubscribe instead of following the instructions in that email reminder.

For the last couple of months, somebody has been doing that, with a pissy “this is the [N]th request” just as a topper. I write back with “That email you got a few hours ago contains 3 different ways of unsubscribing yourself from the list, and nowhere is “writing a pissy email to the server administrator” listed as a viable option”. Unfortunately, in this case it turns out that the email address the guy is writing me from bounces. And it’s not subscribed to any of my mailing lists. So even if I wanted to unsubscribe him, I can’t.

So I guess I’ll just wait to see what “N” he gets to before he gets really mad. Not that I’ll be able to do anything about it. Or care, for that matter.

Why I don’t consider myself a Linux person any more.

Time was, I was an enthusiastic Linux geek, proselytizing, apologizing, saying “well, it doesn’t now, but somebody will write something to do that”, overlooking the visual horror of the clashes of look and feel and user experience of all the disparate programs written on all the disparate X11 widget sets (yes, I could tell the difference between Xt and Xm at a glance), actually not laughing in people’s faces when they said that Gimp was better than Photoshop, ignoring the fact that Richard Stallman is a smelly looney who eats his toe jam in publc, etc. But over the years, two things have happened:

  • I care more about user experience than I do about raw computing power
  • I don’t apologize for my computers any more

Or to quote Three Dead Trolls In A Baggie “yeah, well I’ve got a girlfriend and things to get done.”

So I use Linux on my servers, and I think it’s a great OS for servers. I even contribute to open source products here and there. I hardly ever use it as a desktop any more, although it was my daily work desktop a year ago, and it was fine for work where video and audio didn’t matter. I’m just not anything like the “freetard” I used to be. Which is why I recognize the type so readily. And when somebody sends me something like this, and thinks it says something about how iPad is nothing new, I can instantly recognize the scent of crazy. Especially since it was sent to me in response to my saying that I hope HP hurries up with the Palm WebOS-based tablet because I like the user experience (UX) of WebOS better than I like iOS.

I’m sorry, but if you think somebody who is debating the subtle differences in UX between WebOS and iOS is going to like a hefty laptop with the keyboard broken off, running Windows XP or Linux, with no multi-touch, a stylus and a battery life that’s probably measured in minutes, you have greatly misunderstood the question. Or the purpose of a tablet. Or the meaning of life.

Getting there…

My IP block has been delisted by SpamHaus. Unfortunately, in spite of the “R” in “RBL” standing for “Real-time”, apparently some ISPs cache their copy of the SpamHaus RBL and are still blocking me. Hopefully normal service will be restored eventually. My outgoing mail queue has gone from 120 to 85, so I guess some ISPs are updating their caches.

I also discovered that evidently you can’t just rsync your whole mail spool area over to a new system because postfix somehow ties the spool file names to the inodes they’re on or something. I was getting strange errors like fatal: lock file defer B99792602A5: Resource temporarily unavailable until I did a “postfix check”, and it said something about renaming files, and now everything is happy again.