Category: Geekery

One of the trials and tribulations and also one of the fun challenges of my job is that I get vague bug reports on something the QA person sees sometimes and not others. Our QA people don’t do a very good job of tracking exactly what they did and what they did differently between the ones that work and the ones that don’t. Ok, sometimes that’s our fault as developers for not logging enough, but it would be nice if they could tell you, for example, that the one that didn’t work used to be on the schedule before it was removed from the schedule while the one that does work has never appeared on the schedule.
Continue reading “D’oh!”

I swear, the next person I discovered declaring a method as “throws Exception” is going to get a kick in the balls. Serously, what sort of fucked up code are you writing that you can’t even tell what type of exceptions it’s going to throw? It’s head up your ass lazyness, pure and simple. And it poisons the code all up the line because your callers have to do the same, and then their callers, all the way up to whoever is handling the exceptions.

Our computers are put together for one thing, and one thing only – to run a theatre complex. And we give the users restricted logins that log them into a IceWM environment where they can’t do anything that they’re not supposed to. Everything on the machine is spec’ed for that purpose.

Today I get an urgent call – a site that is sort of a customer, and sort of a subsidiary had their system locked up, and when they tried to reboot, it complained that PostgresSQL wouldn’t start up. I’ve seen that happen before, so I asked their contact person to check if the root partition is full. Sure enough, it was. But of course they had no fucking clue how it could have filled up. “We didn’t do anything”, the constant cry of the clueless. I told them do to a “du -x | sort -n” on the root partition to see where the bulk of the files are. Turns out that there was 1.6Gb of stuff in /root/Desktop/Trash, and when they emptied the trash and rebooted, everything was fine.

I explained that our root partition is sized based on the premise that nobody would be logging into the console as root (I left out “unless they know what they’re doing”, because they obviously don’t.) They explained they “have” to do that because they have to preview the content that they’re preparing, and they can only do that as root.

I somehow resisted the urge to say “Either get a fucking clue or stop logging in as root”, and just responded “With great power comes great responsibility”. Next time they fill up the root partition and call me, I’m going to uninstall every desktop environment except IceWM.

If you start a long rambling description of a problem, and in the middle of it I interrupt you to say “fixed three builds ago”, that means that I understood the description, and realized it was identical to a problem I recently fixed. Your action at that point should be to go back and upgrade your system, not continue with your rambling description. Because otherwise I’ll be forced to put my earbuds back in and resume listening to Glen Gould and ignore you until you go away.

Thanks.

Update: 3 hours later, it’s working again. No thanks to AT&T.

I have a Palm Treo. I’ve had it for over 2 years, and all during that time I’ve had the same cell phone plan, one which includes “unlimited internet”. And all during that time, I’ve used it at least daily to check my email – and since my employer cut off my access to my home computer, I’ve used it even more like several times an hour while I’m at work I also use it to check weather, check Google maps, and other things that require an internet connection. This morning, I’ve been unable to get to the internet.

So I called “The New AT&T”. And once again, their “trouble shooting” involved me taking out the battery and sim, trying and failing to read the tiny little 20 digit number on the SIM card, reading the IMEI number from the back of the phone, and then putting it all together and getting exactly the same results as before. The “helpful” AT&T tech said that one reason for my problems might be that my data plan is incompatible with the Treo, and I needed to switch to a PDA data plan. Except that she couldn’t make changes to the plan unless I could remember my wife’s social security number. I tried to explain that there is nothing wrong with the data plan as I’d been using it on a daily basis for more than 2 years, but she insisted that she couldn’t do any more trouble shooting unless i gave her my wife’s social security number so she could switch my data plan. I shudder to think how much more a “PDA data plan” is going to cost.

So the question in my mind is: is this a temporary outage on their network that the tech wouldn’t admit, a problem with my phone, or did they just notice that I’ve had the wrong data plan after 2 years and suddenly cut me off? And how does this affect the probability of me buying a iPhone when the 3G ones come out?