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From: sabrina downard
Date: 00:45 on 03 Nov 2004
Subject: Oh, come *on*
pulled out of a program i'm trying to figure out why it's misbehaving:
/* How to print/log error messages */
#define DANGER_WILL_ROBINSON(KateBush) \
{ if (Debug) \
perror (KateBush); \
if (Log) { \
char *xyzzy = malloc(strlen(KateBush)+4); \
(void) strcpy(xyzzy, KateBush); (void) strcat(xyzzy, ": %m"); \
syslog (LOG_ERR, xyzzy); free(xyzzy); } \
finis (); }
well. thank you for your helpful and illustrative names, guys.
From: sabrina downard
Date: 20:27 on 07 Sep 2004
Subject: audible alarms and appliances
You know what I hates? I fucking hates audible alarms that can only be
shut off one of two ways:
1. Using the command-line interface.
2. Using the web interface.
This is especially pertinent when the overpriced gadget (that will
solve all of our mail problems, most of which were caused by
problems with RAID arrays) simultaneously blows up 2/3 of its RAID
set and cannot boot any operating system any longer.
Just fucking spend the twenty-five goddamn cents on an actual,
real, physical, mechanical silence button, okay? The marketing
people are *wrong*. You can even color-coordinate it if you
want. Put a glossy coat of paint on it and make it real fucking
shiny. But give me something to punch, before I kick the goddamn
appliance for screaming at me constantly while I try to fix it.
Not that it'll be fixed, of course. Oh no. Fixing is for those
UNIX boxes that cause you such problems. This, though--this is
a specialized piece of equipment engineered to make your life
easier.
For this, you need to call a *professional*.
*spit*
From: sabrina downard Date: 16:04 on 04 Sep 2003 Subject: Installer Hate You know what I hate? I hate the fact that Adobe PageMaker is only available for MacOS, not OS X. I hate the fact that I'll have to run Classic to use it. But what I /really/ hate is the fact that the installer insists that I quit all other running applications in order to install it, and then it proceeds to quit not just apps running under Classic (of which there were no others, because everyone else has finally moved into the new millennium), but everything I had running in OS X. Why? Whywhywhy? ... Ferchrissakes, if an app is running under an emulator, it should only be able to muck around with /other/ apps under the emulator. You just keep your grimy little fingers out of the rest of my work, pal. Okay, if I was running OS < X, I suppose I could see making the case for quitting. It messes with printer settings, probably dumps an INIT or sixteen on my disk. But, news flash! OS X really could give a crap about what piddly stuff goes on in /System Folder/Extensions. All my Terminal windows didn't care about those font suitcases it maybe just dropped in there. iTunes didn't give a flying fuck about anything at all, that's for sure. (Of course, it quit everything up to and including Finder... but left all of my Konfabulator widgets. I suppose Konfabulator is safe, because we all know that none of these widgets ever goes off into its own little bizarroworld where I have to hunt it down and slaughter it with all the mercy 'kill -9' can muster. Or the time one of them moved off the edge of my screen after I woke the machine up from sleep, and I had to *blow away its preferences file* to get it back. No, no, Konfabulator widget instability is just carzy talk.) I suppose I should be grateful that I'd only just gotten in to work and hadn't really gotten rolling yet. The best part was when the installer just crapped out and I had to go force quit it. Grrrrrrargh. Oh well. Off to open four thousand terminals again. hatefully, --sabrina
From: sabrina downard Date: 19:36 on 27 Aug 2003 Subject: Never-ending dependencies. I mostly do systems herding, not so much programming. Which does not mean that I'm exempt from writing your occasional perl or shell script, of course, since herding systems without having your brain explode frequently means fixing brokenness that happens over ... and over ... and over ... . But that's not what I'm here to hate today. During the years of writing my craptastic perl code, I've learned the joy of reusing code snippets, and of writing my own modules. I mean, it's pretty neat -- check that shit out. Of course, I'm not a real programmer. If I was a real programmer, I'd reuse other people's code too. Lots of it. From as many different packages as I could get my grubby little paws on. I'd require This, version 1.0pl2rc7; and That, from CVS please: the latest release is two years old because the team can't agree on whether to use Widget version 4.2.7b or 4.2.6. The Widget 4 tree would be deprecated due to security concerns, though, and they would recommend that you use 5.1.1, wherein they changed everything. This would require GNU m4 and groff because my vendor's wouldn't be good enough, and That would require a different version of the DB library than I would have installed for a different package. And then I'd start breaking out my project's code into multiple pieces, because I might want to reuse some of it in other projects. What other projects? Well, they're not really done yet. They're on my whiteboard. But, you know, it might happen. Someday. But that's *also* not what I'm here to hate. Mostly. Well, okay. Yeah. That *is* what I'm here to hate. But there's more! You see, if I was a real programmer, I wouldn't actually document all these dependencies -- I'd just let the unwashed masses find it out the hard way. You know, by reading the instructions -- which say "All you need to do is run './configure && make && make install'!" -- and chasing down each dependency as ./configure bails. Or maybe as ld bails. Or just for giggles, as 'make install' bails. So that altogether, what could have been twenty minutes spent tracking down source tarballs and then a couple of hours of nice ordered compilation ends up turning into a day-long hair-pulling extravaganza. Or six day-long extravaganzas -- but who's counting? Not that, you know, I'm bitter, or anything. Oh, no.
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