Category: Rant

Inspirational quotes?

Somebody has put up a bunch of those oh-so-inspirational quotes where business leaders said something really stupid. I’m not sure how these are supposed to inspire us, especially since almost all of them are urban legends. One of them I walk by every day says

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

— William Orton, president of Western Union, in 1876

I’m trying to figure out the clip art they used for a banner on the quote, because I really want to replace it with

“These digital cameras are a fad. People will always want the quality that they can only get with film”

— Any Kodak executive from 1975 to about 2005

Is it a brand, a description, or just meaningless crap?

Our system is called “$EMPLOYER Theatre Management System”. It used to be called “$EMPLOYER Cinema Operation System”, so when they decided to change the name, Kris got the brilliant idea to put the new name in the properties file so that when it changes to the “Plexinator 5000n” or whatever, it will be a simple matter to change the name.
Continue reading “Is it a brand, a description, or just meaningless crap?”

Headdesk

Hey, I’ve got a weird idea: When a beta customer, who is using build 30, starts complaining about the same problem we’ve spend the last 15 builds trying to fix, maybe instead of pulling several of us off our work to look to see if we can manually enter stuff into their database to kluge it up to get them going again, you should update them to build 45? Just a suggestion.

Can I just digress for a moment?

I just want to say that I HATE HATE HATE rpm and it’s fucking broken dependency checking?

At work, we use apt-rpm so that we have a hope in hell of dependencies being satisfied when we install stuff. Our previous build of our software uses the RHEL 4.3 default version of dnotify, 0.17.2-1, but our current build needs a version we got from somewhere else, which is version 0.18.0-1. So I dutifully changed the

Requires: dnotify

to

Requires: dnotify >= 0.18

But it doesn’t matter whether I install it using “rpm -Uvh foo” or “apt-get install foo”, it happily installs the latest version of our stuff without complaining about unmet dependencies or attempting to upgrade dnotify. WTF? I tried with “0.18”, “0.18.0” and “0.18.0-1”, all with no effect.

I did verify with “rpm -q -provides” and “rpm -q -requires” that the version numbers internal to the rpms in question agree with the file name versions and the dependencies made it into the rpm. So it’s not a case of a file “dnotify-0.18.0-1.rpm” that internally thinks it’s dnotify version 0.01 or something stupid like that. It’s just fucking rpm being fucking brain dead.