Category: Rant

Go The Fuck Away!

I’ve ranted about the impromptu meetings that break out outside my cube in the past, right? Well, today it reached a new pinnacle of annoying: there were three separate groups talking, and because they were so noisy, each group was getting progressively louder and louder as they struggled to be heard over the other two groups.

After a minute or two of this, I went out and said very loudly “Excuse me, I’m not working too loud for you, am I?” One person laughed, but nobody stopped talking. About two minutes later, two of the groups went away but the one group stayed for another 5 minutes or so.

Next time I’m plugging my iPod into my speakers and blasting “Mao Tse Tung Said” at them.

What a scorcher!

This office has never been particularly well airconditioned. Mostly it’s too hot in both winter and summer, although a few years ago it was the opposite, so that I kept a sweater in my desk for the days when it was too over airconditioned in the summer. But in the last couple of years, we keep getting “emergency power reduction program in effect”, which means that they’ve turned off at least one of the building’s chillers, usually because one of the (formerly belonging to the company, now sold off to some other organization) power generators is off-line.

Today it’s bloody hot in the office, and of course this is a day when I chose to wear a long sleeve shirt.

D’oh!

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!”

Java Exceptions

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.

Hey bozos!

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.