Category: Rant

Sour grapes is turning me into a rules lawyer

I didn’t want to book any trips until I got IFR current because you never know when you’re going to need to fly in actual. So it was with some dismay a few weeks ago when I realized that one member of my flying club has managed to book the Lance on for the weekends of May 5, 11, 19, 26, June 9, and then solidly from June 17-29, and then somebody else has it solidly from June 30-July 8, and somebody else has it solidly from July 8 to July 22. Unfortunately Vicki has other committments on June 3rd, meaning that if I wanted to plan a weekend trip to Ottawa with a couple of friends, I’d have to wait until July 27th, or figure out how to squeeze four people plus baggage into the Dakota.

So I’ve been kicking myself for leaving it this late to book, and I’ve been a little annoyed at Jim for booking all those weekends. But last night Lenny mentioned that when he booked the Dakota to go to Colorado a few years ago, he was told that he’d have to get approval from the Board of Directors because he’s taking the plane away for more than 10 days. Well, those three block bookings that go straight from June 17th to July 22nd are all more than 10 days. So I’m not proud of myself, but I sent a letter to the Officers and Board of Directors asking if that policy is still in effect.

And so it begins again

Once again into the breach, once again risking the severe depression that follows every previous attempt to do something about my pain. So it goes. The pain has gotten so severe that I really have no other choice. Just hope I can survive the let down when it doesn’t work.

So I have a new prescription for a new NSAID, and orders for x-rays of my knees and elbows, and a bunch of blood tests. And a promise that if nothing turns out, I’ll get a referral to a pain clinic.

Love: strace. Hate: RedHat

Well, thanks to my second favourite debugging tool (after System.out.println), strace, I figured out what was going wrong in Rants and Revelations » Today’s Java puzzlement.

(Short aside: CentOS is actually RedHat Enterprise Linux with the proprietary stuff filed off. So any changes between versions are RedHat’s fault, not CentOS’s.)

I had a short program I wrote some time ago to print out the names of all the fonts that Java knew about. Today I straced it on my CentOS 4.4 and my CentOS 5.0 machines to see what was the difference. Both machines opened up /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_11/jre/lib/fontconfig.RedHat.bfc just fine. And both started opening up various TrueType font files. But what’s that? On the CentOS 5.0 machine, I’m getting ENOENT (file not found) for /usr/share/fonts/ko/TrueType/gulim.ttf. Oh, that’s not good, since I know the installer installs the “fonts-korean” rpm, which is the CentOS 5.0 equivalent of “ttfonts-ko”, which is what I’ve got installed on CentOS 4.4. Oh, but when the geniuses at RedHat renamed the rpm, they also renamed the directory the directory that the TrueType font files go, from /usr/share/fonts/ko/TrueType to /usr/share/fonts/korean/TrueType. And when they did similar renaming with Japanese and Chinese fonts, at least they had the decency to put symlinks at the old locations.

After that, it was a simple matter to copy the /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_11/jre/lib/fontconfig.RedHat.properties.src to /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_11/jre/lib/fontconfig.RedHat.properties, fix the directory names, and voila, I have Korean fonts.

Now I just have to figure out how to get this into the delivery RPMs.

Fuck pain

The pain in my knees is really getting out of hand. It’s been getting worse for decades, but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting a stabbing pain on top of the usual diffuse pain – I used to get that every few months and it would only last for a day or two. My tolerance for any sort of activity has gone way down, and Alieve isn’t doing as much as it used to.

I was planning to clean out the basement and my office this weekend, and hopefully get out kayaking for the first time of the season. Instead, all I managed to do was replace the locks on the garage and clear out the cardboard boxes that have been waiting to be flattened to go out to recycling for months. Oh, and walk around the block once looking at the garage sale. And for that, I’m paying in agony.

I guess if I recover enough, I’ll have to do the cleaning out in short chunks of time every evening instead of one big weekend project. And hopefully fit in the kayaking one of these days.

(And yes, I am going to talk to my doctor. Not that I have an iota of hope that he can do anything.)

Dear Boss

Three years ago, when I was asked to implement a DocumentCache class in the cinlib, I made a mistake so that first build that had it was actually horribly slower than before it was implemented. Yes, I admit it. But I fixed that problem in the very next build, and it actually did end up being a net gain.

So is it really fucking necessary that every time since then when there the slightest question about cinlib performance, the first words out of your mouth are “can we try disabliing the DocumentCache to see if that fixes it”? I mean, it’s been three years. Give it up, already.