Category: Rant

…it weren’t a soul and productivity destroying piece of shit.

My boss is always nagging the developers to do more documentation, and to put them into the “documenation blog” (which actually has some blog-like features, but it’s mostly a web front-end to a CVS repository). Oh, and you can’t just attach to the CVS server and use good old command line tools – no, you have to use the web front-end, because otherwise it screws up the permssions for everybody else who uses the web tool.

Ok, I’m a team player. I’ll be nice.
Continue reading “Sure, I’d use it more often, if…”

I switched from MovableType to WordPress so that I could take advantage of all the fancy new spam fighting features in WordPress – and because I was stuck on MT 2.661 and development in the MT world was passing me by. Initially I was reluctant because WP is written in PHP and I don’t know if it’s the language or the people who use the language, but PHP web sites tend to be great gaping holes with a big welcome mat for spammers, trojans, script kiddies and every other anti-social reject on the net.

So now I’m sitting here checking my SpamKarma page several times a day to see how well it’s working, but the spammers are still attempting to hit my old blog – I see the hits in my httpd logs for “GET /movabletype/custom-comments.cgi over and over again.

Sad but true – I can’t wait for the spammers to find my new blog.

I had 60 comment and trackback spams overnight. All but one of them were for the same URL. By the time I got through MT-Blacklist removing them, it had already blocked 5 more attempts to spam the same URL.

The problem isn’t keeping up with the URLs that they’re spamming – that’s never going to be completely under control, but MT-Blacklist does an ok job. The problem is the compromised PCs that the spammers are using. Last night’s spam run involved about a dozen different IPs – you can bet your life that ever single one of them is some idiot’s home PC that’s been taken over by a virus, trojan or spyware.

I can’t keep up with that list of IPs, but I bet there is a clearing house out there, and a plug-in for *some* blog software, that will. Any suggestions?

I’m working on something that’s fairly important and complicated, but it’s supporting current customers, not something on the critical path for the highest priority task, which is preparing for a trade show to get new customers. (I hate the fact that servicing current customers always takes a back seat to getting new customers, but that’s a rant for another time.)

There is another programmer who is working on tasks that are on the critical path. He’s task saturated, at least partly because he’s disorganized, only grudingly uses our source code management system, does stuff in a way that’s impossible for other people to understand, doesn’t document what he’s done, and when asked to explain only gives a vague generalities or launches into wild digressions. But because he’s on the critical path and I’m not, my boss thinks nothing of having me interrupt my work and do stuff for the other guy. And because the other guy is useless when it comes to explaining what he’s doing, often those interruptions are like today’s.

“Paul, I need to you remove these three lines from these four files, and submit a PCR for it.” Ok, fine. It only takes 10 minutes to do the edit, and another 10 minutes to process the PCR through the problem reporting system (which SUCKS, by the way). But it’s an interruption that I don’t want when I’m trying to concentrate on something. And lets not forget the 30 minutes of playing Net to get over my anger at being made into the most highly paid secretary outside of the executive floors.