I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.6. It was extremely painless – I didn’t even bother to deactivate my plugins. So far, it looks pretty much the same. I do like the new plugins page, though. One of these days I’d like to see if I can get the Gallery plugin working – I had it working for a while, but it broke after a couple of upgrades of both Gallery and WordPress.
Category: Geekery
“How many other unknown bugs did you fix?”
My main task for this release has been to rewrite large swaths of the database code. Along the way, I had to rewrite a lot of code. Well, evidently in the course of rewriting the code, I fixed a couple of bugs that some people in QA don’t consider bugs. And now they’re hassling me because there weren’t bug reports (PCRs) for the things I changed, and want to know what else I’d changed. I told them that I didn’t stop to document every bug in the subsystems I rewrote, I just wrote the new code to work correctly. But that isn’t good enough for them – evidently I was supposed to spend years doing their job (documenting what was wrong with the sub-system) before I rewrote it so that the bugs they liked could have been reproduced exactly.
The worst thing about this is that yesterday we had a 1 hour meeting with managers, customer service people, installers, QA and developers because QA had freaked about another behaviour that I had never liked and I’d fixed it on purpose, at the end of which every person present except for a couple of the QA people had voted that they like it the way I made it now, instead of the way QA wanted me to put it back to. And this new discovery is in almost the exact same area.
What a day!
Got an piece of beta software that I’ve been waiting for for a while, but it required that I upgrade my Linux box from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. The upgrade seemed to work fine, but the kernel paniced when I rebooted. It booted on “Linux.OLD”, an older kernel, but my USB keyboard didn’t work and several other things weren’t working right. I re-ran “lilo” thinking it might get the proper kernel booted, but instead it removed “Linux.OLD” from the boot menu, and now I have no way to boot it. Downloading a Live CD right now.
Went flying for the first time in a long time. The plane is badly out of rig and with full left rudder trim, still required more left rudder to center the ball. I didn’t have any destination in mind, just flew around a bit to a couple of airports I rarely visit. My third landing wasn’t too bad.
Went with Vicki to buy her a kayak. She bought a Swift Saranac 14, which is a pretty good boat, and very popular. I hope she gets lots of use out of it.
Although the menu and other buttons on the new camera don’t work, I can still take pictures with it (just can’t change the ISO, or switch to shooting in RAW, or any number of other adjustments). First picture is here.
Damnit, Sun!
A while back I mentioned how much I love “kill -3” as a Java debugging tool. Today I decided that instead of having to put a redirection in the start up script for each app in the system, I’d change the logging class so that it would do a “System.setOut” to redirect standard output. And that’s when I discovered the horrible truth – that while setOut redirects things that are printed with System.out, it doesn’t actually affect the JVM’s actual standard output. WTF?
And the suckage continues
As predicted in Rants and Revelations » I have seen the future, and it sucks, they’ve hired a new Flash guy to write the new user interface. It really sucks to find out that your contributions are going to be even more marginalized just as you’re also finding out that they want you to become a full time employee at a significant pay cut.
I guess it’s time to stop antagonizing recruiters and start finding out seriously what’s out there. Either that or find out if the bank account would survive me taking off however long it would take me to get a masters in user inferace design.
Update: Oh, it gets better. New Guy has never even heard of source code control. In other words, he’s used to toy projects on toy operating systems.