A stupid idea, stupidly done

In amongst my podcasts, iTunes downloaded three “PDFcasts”, two from Make Magazine and one from PilotCast. Of all the ways that people on the Internet have found to re-implement the same basic idea as Usenet, this has got to be the worst. If I wanted content that I had to read on my computer, what’s wrong with a web page? Or better yet, an RSS feed for a web page. Or an email list. Or Usenet.

Ok, that’s one thing

I discovered why OpenID comments went from working some of the time to working never: last time I upgraded my blog I’d inadvertently made it so none of the directories within my blog site were writable by the web server, and the OpenId plugin makes temporary files. That lead to the discovery that as well as OpenID comments, the directory used by the Gravatar cache wasn’t writable, which lead to the discovery that the Gravatars weren’t updating at all, even after I fixed the permissions, which lead to the discovery that when the Gravatar plugin discovers it can’t write to the Gravatar cache directory it just silently turns the “Enable caching” option to off, which lead to the discovery that even when I turned it back on, it still wasn’t updating, which lead to the discovery that there is an option in the plugin to “Use REST protocol” which evidently Gravatar doesn’t support any more so I had to turn that off. Phew. Now Gravatars seem to be working again.

Knees still hurt like hell, though.

META: Don’t use OpenID

OpenId comment authentication seems to be extremely hit-or-miss. It works for some, and for others their posts get flagged as spam, and for others still they get swallowed entirely. I’ve tried to debug it, but I haven’t figured out what’s wrong. I tried to deactivate it, but it just made things worse. So until further notice, please don’t use OpenID or your LiveJournal ID to comment on here.

Update: I just remembered that I had to hack the source in order to make this work before, and I recently installed an update. The update probably over-wrote my hack. Now to dig though the backup to see if I can find the hacked file.

Oh, this bodes well for meeting our end of month deadline

The ClearCase server machine is still dead. Evidently both hard drives went tits up yesterday, and nobody can bring it up. And I’ve got a bunch of files not checked in – from what I remember back when we had a ClearCase administrator, files that aren’t checked in aren’t backed up.

And just to make my day complete, I can’t log into Lotus Notes.

Good thing I’ve got some movies on my iPod.

ClearDDTS? I have to ask…

Was there ever in the history of the world a worse bug tracking system than ClearDDTS? The user interface is so ugly, inconsistent and unfriendly that the only way they could have made it worse is if they’d used Lotus Notes as the front end. Slow? It takes a good 30 seconds to enter a new bug or process a change in an existing bug, something that should take way, way less than a second in any competent relational database.

And to top it off, recently it’s taken to kicking everybody off for 5-10 minutes at a time and not letting you log back in, while the sysadmin says “there isn’t anything unusual in the log files”.

The only reason for not throwing the whole thing away and switching to Bugzilla or something like that is that it integrates so well with ClearCase. And it has become apparent to me over the last few weeks that the only reason I loved ClearCase is that we had a really good full time ClearCase administrator, Steve. Since the powers that be fired him, we’ve got two guys struggling for a week at a time to do stuff that Steve could have done in a few minutes. And I no longer love ClearCase.

Let’s throw away the whole thing and replace it with that CMS that integrates with Subversion, ok? What’s it called, Trak or something like that?

Update: Just got an email from the sysadmin – evidently a process keeps dying. One called “update_htpasswd.sh”, which evidently updates the .htaccess file based on what is returned by “ypcat passwd”. Ok, I’m not an expert, but aren’t there ways to authenticate directly to NIS rather than building a .htpasswd file at regular intervals? Sheesh, talk about amateur hour!

Update 2: Minutes after posting that, the ClearCase vob crashed as well, and so I left for home.