Category: Rant

On March 25th, I ranted about a developer who had checked in a bunch of stuff that required a special “upgrade DVD” without telling the other developer that this would be required in Rants and Revelations » Developer dumbassedness. Well, it turns out it’s worse than that. Far worse. Not only didn’t he not tell us about the magic DVD, but he hadn’t even tested the damn DVD. It’s now 2 weeks later, and his DVD *still* doesn’t work.

So now I’m caught in a vice – I had to “rebase” my development environment to the new build in order to deliver some bug fixes, and now my development environment and my test system are at different builds, which makes it hard to test things, and especially hard to use the remote debugger in Eclipse. And I can’t get them back in sync until this damn DVD is ready.

I’d also like to mention that I did a much more ambitious upgrade DVD a few years ago, where his DVD is upgrading from CentOS 5.0 to CentOS 5.1 and reformatting the content partition from ext3 to xfs, mine was upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to CentOS 3.3. And I didn’t leave the rest of the developers out to dry because I tested the hell out of it on my test system, reformatting it back to RedHat 7.3 and running versions of my upgrade script over and over for weeks before I put it into the development stream.

I got an email from one of the sysadmins at NCF saying that the news directory has run out of space. After poking around a bit, I’ve discovered that:

• cron jobs, including the nightly expire job, haven’t run since March 18th
• I haven’t been receiving emails sent to the NCF news account, possibly for even longer than that, which is why I didn’t notice when the system throttled 3 days ago. Normally newswatcher sends these emails which I have forwarded to SMS so I don’t miss them.

The sysadmin wonders if the cron jobs not running has anything to do with the DST change. The machine is ancient, and running an ancient version of Solaris.

Of course, the fact that I didn’t notice the lack of the daily news admin email in my morning scan-and-delete folder isn’t good, either.

Today the developers were invited to see what our new usability expert has come up with. Evidently he hired some local company to do the graphics, and somebody else to whip it up into a fancy all-signing all-dancing Flash demo. It’s all eye candy and very little substance, and it looks childish to me. But evidently all the suits and managers love it, so it’s going to go ahead. I can’t tell you what it looks like, except the back drop looks like it was copied from the default background/splash screen/packaging of a certain fruit-based cat-themed operating system that was recently released.

The fact that the interface looks like it was designed more to impress suits than to help the people who are going to use it day to day isn’t the part that sucks. The fact that it’s all going to be written in Flash semi-sucks. The fact that it’s apparently going to be designed without talking to the people who’ve been working on the program for 6 years semi-sucks. What really sucks is that the project leader is talking about either outsourcing the entire Flash part of the user interface, or hiring their Flash programmer away from them. It was left to my cow orker Rohan to speak up and say “the reason you hired good people in the first place is that with a little training we can do anything, including Flash”.