On the theory of systems administration
Szechuan Death
personal preference, management diktat, whatever - are three, eternal,
and easy to articulate:
Rule #1 (Principle of Least Intervention):
"If it ain't broke, don't fsck with it."
[An oldie but a goodie, well known by nearly everyone who's ever played
with a comple system. From this springs several corollaries, my
favorite being 'Developers are tools of the Devil.']
Rule #2 (Principle of Escape):
"If you *have* to fsck with it, have a plan to roll back whatever
changes you've made."
[First recorded in the year 20 B.I. (Before Internet), by the first
sysadmin to ever botch a change on a production system, Harassus Maximus
the Eternal Catamite, verbalized only moments before he was swallowed by
a demon dispatched from the bowels of the nether to punish his
accidental folly.]
Rule #3 (Principle of the Panic Button):
"If you cannot roll back the changes you made, be damned sure you have
some way to restore service as soon as practically possible."
[This chestnut was first uttered by Hero Bastardus the Elder, as an
admonition to a PFY, shortly before the PFY was executed by Hero for the
sin of finger-fscking a production system into a terminally crashed
state without any coherently-verbalized plan for unfscking it or
mitigating the outage.]
Yet these Articles of the Faith are routinely ignored, by clueless
management; by mouthbreathing submorons who should never have been let
near a keyboard, much less given root access; by perpetual spastics who
know these things in an academic sense, but somehow manage to routinely
lose control of their sphincters at precisely the correct time to cause
a fsckup of epic proportions; by users. Oh, God, the users. They
demand ponies, and demand them *now*, the hell with the havoc it will
wreak on the machines and on the hard-won stability achieved over
man-eons of effort prying bugs and strange failure modes from the
systems. And the PHBs, who perpetrate such insanities as attempting to
force practitioners of the Art into eternal Follies such as "democratic
design" (usually ignoring Rules #1 and #2) and craptastic Kool-Aid fads
like "agile development methods" (destroying all Rules in a pyre of
brilliantly iridescent stupidity).
Yet have heart, O ye my brethren; the Rules are eternal, and Wankery is
ever-passing. It returns, yes, and frequently, like a maladaptive
evolutionary trait recurring at random intervals on the theory that
'Hey, maybe *this* time it will work'; but never does it triumph, not in
the long run.
(This is a good thing to believe, because otherwise one winds up curled
in a ball beneath one's desk, the tears and gibbering flowing freely
until the men with needles come to carry you off to the Wacky Factory
for a vacation.)
Apropos of nothing, of course, this fine Monday evening. Nothing
a'tall. Just another swell day in Paradise, yessir.
--
(c) 2009 Chaste Adze Hun via Central Plexus <has...@tent.heads>
I am Chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are Free. -Eris
Every day of your life is a losing battle. Fight it with panache.
|-------- Your message must be this wide to ride the Internet. --------|
Lionel
[big snip]
> Apropos of nothing, of course, this fine Monday evening. Nothing
> a'tall. Just another swell day in Paradise, yessir.
Nice rant. Welcome to The Scary Devil Monastery.
--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------
mikea
Excellent Initial Rant left uncut and entire, preserved but not dead, a
living document for the edification of those who had damned well better
follow us.
Welcome, Brother Bastard. Enter into the fullness of your calling,
recognized by your brethren as a True Bastard. Pull up a chair, grab a
beer, and relax. For a while. You phone will ring soon enough; enjoy
your well-earned respite while you may.
--
... just what are we going to say to an alien race if we make contact?
"Do you have Napster?"
"Can we borrow one of your rainforests?"
"Stop making crop circles!" -- Scott Barber, in rasfw
Maarten Wiltink
news:7uidnTEsK7aCOZbW...@posted.mtasolutions...
[...]
> "If it ain't broke, don't fsck with it."
>
> [An oldie but a goodie, well known by nearly everyone who's ever played
> with a comple system. From this springs several corollaries, my
> favorite being 'Developers are tools of the Devil.']
I object. I am nobody's tool. When necessary, I will impersonate the
Devil myself.
But mostly I will just kick impotently against the chair legs of the
system, like this morning when in a grandiose refusal to even attempt
to write customer-facing labels, I left 'temporary text' in several
places as my very personal scent marker.
In all caps.
Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink
Peter H. Coffin
Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. Passersby
were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. Passersby were
amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood. Passersby were amazed
by the unusually large amounts of blood. Passersby were amazed by the
unusually large amounts of blood. Passersby were amazed by the unusually
large amounts of blood. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large
amounts of blood. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts
of blood. Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.
--
With a Dremel tool and a cut-off wheel, _everything_ takes a flat-blade
screwdriver.
-- Matt Roberds in the Monastery
Peter Corlett
[...]
> They keep repeating that word, "Agile". For some reason on the dev end of
> things it feels like a straightjacket.
Then you're letting your sysadmin cynicism slip.
"Agile" is just the modern formal name for the pre-existing practice of
bodging stuff together until the customer stops whining.
"Extreme Programming" is the same, except you don't bother doing any
documentation.
David Gersic
> Rule #1 (Principle of Least Intervention):
>
> "If it ain't broke, don't fsck with it."
Corrolary: When it breaks, it's going to be Your Fault anyway, so you
might as well fsck with it.
Steve VanDevender
enough rant?"
Welcome to hell, here's your kazoo. Did we not tell you about the
superglue on the mouthpiece? Bwa ha ha ha.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
"bash awk grep perl sed df du, du-du du-du,
vi troff su fsck rm * halt LART LART LART!" -- the Swedish BOFH
Lawns 'R' Us
> That certainly violated the rules just posted, given
> the lack of both a plan B and a rollback scenario.
I have been in situations where I had to implement a change that had
no plan B, and no rollback option. To say that such situations were
nerve wracking is putting it ... mildly.
Of course, by the time these came up, I'd been with Gigantic Green for
so long that the "Don't care" factor was high, which compensated
somewhat.
Szechuan Death
> Am I the only one who looked at this and thought "Too much UI, not
> enough rant?"
>
> Welcome to hell, here's your kazoo. Did we not tell you about the
> superglue on the mouthpiece? Bwa ha ha ha.
I prefer to be somewhat lyrical - takes my mind off the mean, picayune
details. What UI there was, was mostly backgrounding/setup for the tail
end.
Adding lamentations to the previous post about the abject futility of
attempting to get VOZ TCSF+UFZ+GFZ running on $RODENT_CORPSE Yvahk in a
three-week "sprint" - you know, because we're "agile", and God only
knows that sysadmins have been doing their work all fscking wrong for
the last forty years, deprived as they have been of dot-bomb-era
Kool-Aid development methodologies - and dealing with Helpful Little
Gnomes in the background undermining what work I *have* been able to
accomplish, to my mind, would have detracted from its crystalline
purity. I prefer to re-center my focus on the Eternities, as the saying
goes, not the Times. YMMV, of course, and de gustibus non est
disputandum (sp?), and all that other good stuff.
Not my best work, perhaps, but it felt right. This was more of
a 3-4 on the rant scale. When next I post, I shall endeavor to aim for
8-9. That'll take a bit of doing, though, and probably a spectacularly
bad day to accomplish.
"slayer of ponies"
-SD
Scott
Coffin" <hel...@ninehells.com> wrote:
>Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.
The most interesting tangent here is the idea that to passersby, there is an
amount of blood which is large, but not *unusually* large, and so does not
engender amazement. An oddly comforting thought, at that.
Alan J Rosenthal
>On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:15:10 -0900, Szechuan Death wrote:
>> 'Developers are tools of the Devil.'
>
>wearing[1] both sysadmin and developer hats.
... and posting to the scary devil monastery...
Lionel
> Lionel <imag...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Szechuan Death wrote:
>> [big snip]
>>> Apropos of nothing, of course, this fine Monday evening. Nothing
>>> a'tall. Just another swell day in Paradise, yessir.
>> Nice rant. Welcome to The Scary Devil Monastery.
>
> Ponydynamics).
Could be, but that post caught my attention - in a good way.
Lionel
So... Situation Normal, in other words.
mikea
> Lionel <imag...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Szechuan Death wrote:
>> [big snip]
>>> Apropos of nothing, of course, this fine Monday evening. Nothing
>>> a'tall. Just another swell day in Paradise, yessir.
>>
>> Nice rant. Welcome to The Scary Devil Monastery.
>
> Ponydynamics).
That, nonetheless, was a *FINE* rant, and I think it was his first rant,
even if not his first post. That being so, I'll deem it his Initial
Rant.
--
`Heinlein is quite competent at putting together sentences, but usually
he also puts together a plot to go with them.' --- Russ Allbery
mikea
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:24:12 +1000, Lionel wrote:
>> Peter Corlett wrote:
>>> "Agile" is just the modern formal name for the pre-existing practice of
>>> bodging stuff together until the customer stops whining.
>
>
That means you do a lot less programming. W.r.t. some folks, it is better
(for us) that they do a lot less programming. Zero would be good, and a
negative amount, if they could accomplish it, would be even better.
--
Today's target: 47.639963 N; 122.130295 W. Fire at Will!!
Today's Excuse: Decreasing electron flux
Peter Corlett
[...]
> That means you do a lot less programming. W.r.t. some folks, it is better
> (for us) that they do a lot less programming. Zero would be good, and a
> negative amount, if they could accomplish it, would be even better.
The most satisfaction I get out of programming is when I produce *negative*
LOC.
Ben A L Jemmett
First read as 'negative LOL', which actually made a twisted sort of
sense until the realisation of 'froup and author made me re-read it.
Examples of such programming-related negative LOL include, for
instance, spending most of a day tracking down a crash only to discover
that the root cause was a typo in a header file for a different
component:
#define TRUE 1
#define FALSE 1
... as well as others which I can't bear to recount without a stiff
drink in hand.
--
Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
http://flatpack.microwavepizza.co.uk/
TimC
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
> On 24 Nov 2009 23:04:05 GMT, Lawns 'R' Us wrote:
>> I have been in situations where I had to implement a change that had
>> no plan B, and no rollback option. To say that such situations were
>> nerve wracking is putting it ... mildly.
>
Especially when we started snipping wiring looms and then wheeling out
racks. The project has stalled, as we expected. But so has
everything else.
--
TimC
In retrospect, hiring the dingo as a baby-sitter may have shown lack
of judgement. -dp.
Paul
news:5qjvt6-...@mikea.ath.cx:
> Gallian <gal...@linuxmail.org> wrote in
> <864oojt...@gareth.avalon.lan>:
>> Lionel <imag...@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Szechuan Death wrote:
>>> [big snip]
>>>> Apropos of nothing, of course, this fine Monday evening.
>>>> Nothing a'tall. Just another swell day in Paradise, yessir.
>>>
>>> Nice rant. Welcome to The Scary Devil Monastery.
>>
>> I think you and Mike missed a post about ponies some time ago
>> (Theory of Ponydynamics).
>
> That, nonetheless, was a *FINE* rant, and I think it was his first
> rant, even if not his first post. That being so, I'll deem it his
> Initial Rant.
>
And another reminder of why I did not say "I'll think about it" when
offered the cardboard (? certainly not golden) parachute.
--
Paul the Legacy Server
Full Recovery reached May 30, 2008
"People can be educated beyond their intelligence"
-- Marilyn vos Savant
Zebee Johnstone
Michel Buijsman <ab...@rubberchicken.nl> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:24:12 +1000, Lionel wrote:
>> Peter Corlett wrote:
>>> bodging stuff together until the customer stops whining.
>
>
For some reason parsed as "being in beatings a lot more often".
Zebee
Lawns 'R' Us
There's a difference?
Willem
) On 2009-11-25, Zebee Johnstone <zeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
)> In alt.sysadmin.recovery on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:49:12 +0100
)> Michel Buijsman <ab...@rubberchicken.nl> wrote:
)>> Not quite: It involves being in meetings a *lot* more often.
)>
)> For some reason parsed as "being in beatings a lot more often".
)
) There's a difference?
Yes or no, depending on horse deadness.
SaSW, Willem
--
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any of the statements
made in the above text. For all I know I might be
drugged or something..
No I'm not paranoid. You all think I'm paranoid, don't you !
#EOT
David Cameron Staples
> mikea posted thus:
>>Gallian <gal...@linuxmail.org> wrote in
>><864oojt...@gareth.avalon.lan>:
>>> I think you and Mike missed a post about ponies some time ago (Theory
>>> of Ponydynamics).
>>
>>That, nonetheless, was a *FINE* rant, and I think it was his first rant,
>>even if not his first post. That being so, I'll deem it his Initial
>>Rant.
>
> I'd count the Ponydynamics dissertation as a Rant in its own right, even
> if it wasn't in the madly-spitting unhinged classic Rant format. Calm
> dispassionate dismemberment with a velvet glove is a fine format too.
>
> Somewhere beyond anger or ego or emotion or desire or fatigue is a calm
> airless place of wisdom; I've sensed it a few times myself.
I deeply liked the concept of rigorously and mathematically *proving*
that we are, after all, irredeemably fucked.
It was, I thought, basically Gödel's theorem for Hope.
--
David Cameron Staples | staples AT unimelb DOT edu DOT au
Melbourne University | School of Engineering | IT Support
Ow! My Mythological Buttocks!
Steve VanDevender
> Somewhere beyond anger or ego or emotion or desire or fatigue is a calm
> airless place of wisdom; I've sensed it a few times myself.
And maybe someday you'll get to shove one of your most vexing lusers in
there and watch him gasp for breath and pound against the glass for a
few seconds before he asphyxiates.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes
Niklas Karlsson
Safeword! Safeword!
Niklas
--
One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking
zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs. -- Robert Firth
Maarten Wiltink
news:hekvq6$oln$1...@sheepdip.leftmind.net...
[...]
> Somewhere beyond anger or ego or emotion or desire or fatigue is a
On the road to which passersby get to be amazed by the unusually large
amounts of blood. I barely contained myself yesterday, walking out of
a fairly one-sided discussion about checking in code with warnings.
Not to mention memory leaks and just plain bugs. I know *exactly* why
that ^@!#!!ing !#!%!*!#!@'s code works at all; it's the unintended
consequence of another uninformed habit he has. This is the sort of
enterprise programmer who refuses to fix anything if he has to check
out a file for it.
Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink
Jim
>>This is the sort of
>>enterprise programmer
>
> Earth?
Was it John Crichton in Farscape that shouted "Fuses! Haven't you people
heard of fuses?!" during the first console pyrotechnics?
Jim
--
http://www.ursaMinorBeta.co.uk http://twitter.com/GreyAreaUK
My Oasis of Calm has dried up. However, my Garden of Angry is
flourishing quite nicely.
Peter Corlett
> grueling planning meeting, nooo thank you.
Of course, they never last just five minutes. The net result is the person
with the largest bladder gets their way.
Shmuel Metz
at 12:30 PM, ab...@mooli.org.uk (Peter Corlett) said:
>The most satisfaction I get out of programming is when I produce
>*negative* LOC.
The most satisfaction that I get is when my rewrite[1] is not only
shorter, faster and more reliable, but also easier to understand. Not that
my irritation at the original version is any less, of course.
[1] Sometimes of my own code :-(
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
Shmuel Metz
at 12:15 AM, Szechuan Death <sde...@sdeath.net> said:
>It returns, yes, and frequently, like a maladaptive
>evolutionary trait recurring at random intervals on the theory that 'Hey,
>maybe *this* time it will work'; but never does it triumph, not in the
>long run.
Rule # 4: "That trick never works!"
Maarten Wiltink
news:6sh2u6-...@rubberchicken.nocrap...
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:39:19 -0500, Shmuel Metz wrote:
>> The most satisfaction that I get is when my rewrite[1] is not only
>> shorter, faster and more reliable, but also easier to understand. Not
>> that my irritation at the original version is any less, of course.
>>
>> [1] Sometimes of my own code :-(
>
> Ah, yes.
>
> "Who's the bloody idiot that wrote this -- Ah."
Earlier this year I had cause to look up some of my old code from twenty
years ago. It was somewhat shocking to see how much it already looked
like _my_ code.
(The twenty years is a coincidence; 1988-9 was simply my first year
in university.)
> Been there, done that.
> Apparently, I'm still getting better at this shit...
I haven't stopped programming bugs. But they tend to be either very
simple or a lot more complicated now than they used to be.
Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink
Morten
> I haven't stopped programming bugs. But they tend to be either very
> simple or a lot more complicated now than they used to be.
True. It's funny how it still takes either less than 5 minutes or more
than 5 hours to fix a bug. I would have thought that that particular
metric would improve with experience, but apparently it doesn't.
Regards,
Morten
--
"Science" reporting... *sigh* If newspapers had been around when Newton discovered the law of gravity, the headline would have been "Things fall when you drop them".
Scott
Burton West <roger+a...@nospam.firedrake.org> wrote:
>Michel Buijsman wrote:
>
>>"Who's the bloody idiot that wrote this -- Ah."
>>
>>Been there, done that.
>>Apparently, I'm still getting better at this shit...
>
>I suppose that might be a metric of the rate of improvement - what is
>your shortest interval between writing code and saying that about it?
Once in a while I understand that my code is shit even as I'm writing it.
Sometimes I go back and fix it, but not always. Sometimes it matters, but
not always. Sometimes I care, but not always. I should know better by now.
My life is replete with examples of shitty one-shot scripts that somehow
become the basis for an institutional standard, or just get recycled with
ever more shit code piled on top until you have a reusable general-purpose
utility that doesn't do any one thing well because it's really nothing more
than a twisted knot of nearly-but-not-quite identical special cases.
c...@nospam.netunix.com
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:24:12 +1000, Lionel wrote:
> > Peter Corlett wrote:
> >> "Agile" is just the modern formal name for the pre-existing practice of
> >> bodging stuff together until the customer stops whining.
>
> > So... Situation Normal, in other words.
>
May I remind the honourable monks of the ancient art of the meeting
room fart. A diet of cabbage and onions the night before is guaranteed
to bring any meeting to a swift conclusion by clearing the room.
--
From the quill of Chris Newport g4jci.
mikea
> In <hej81g$t7$1...@mooli.org.uk>, on 11/25/2009
> at 12:30 PM, ab...@mooli.org.uk (Peter Corlett) said:
>
>>The most satisfaction I get out of programming is when I produce
>>*negative* LOC.
>
> The most satisfaction that I get is when my rewrite[1] is not only
> shorter, faster and more reliable, but also easier to understand. Not that
> my irritation at the original version is any less, of course.
>
> [1] Sometimes of my own code :-(
Revisiting your code can be extremely profitable, I've found. Even if I
don't find and fix some bit of absolute idiocy, I still have the chance
to improve what's there, using what I've learned since the last time
around.
--
"Remember: every member of your 'target audience' also owns a broadcasting
station. These 'targets' can shoot back."
-- Michael Rathbun to advertisers, in nanae
Mav
of the universe to say:
> Not my best work, perhaps, but it felt right. This was more of
> a 3-4 on the rant scale. When next I post, I shall endeavor to aim for
> 8-9. That'll take a bit of doing, though, and probably a spectacularly
> bad day to accomplish.
>
> "slayer of ponies"
> -SD
Or as it's known around my shop... Tuesday.
--
TechMav AKA The Guy In The Funny Black Hat
When the FBI/CIA/NSA/FDA/and other three-letter government agencies come
looking, you don't know me, you never saw me, never heard of me. get it?
got it? good!
John F. Eldredge
It helps, of course, to have mastered the art of doing it silently, so
that the PHB can't be sure which one of his subordinates is using
chemical warfare.
--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
Kevin Goebel
>Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spam...@library.lspace.org.invalid> wrote in <4b0d3387$5$fuzhry+tra$mr2...@news.patriot.net>:
>> The most satisfaction that I get is when my rewrite[1] is not only
>> shorter, faster and more reliable, but also easier to understand. Not that
>> my irritation at the original version is any less, of course.
>> [1] Sometimes of my own code :-(
>Revisiting your code can be extremely profitable, I've found. Even if I
>don't find and fix some bit of absolute idiocy, I still have the chance
>to improve what's there, using what I've learned since the last time
>around.
Tempting fate by violating General Order #4: "If it ain't broke, don't fix
it."
Kevin Goebel
Kevin Goebel
This tactic works the first time, but at the cost of encouraging other
meeting victims to try the same tactic. It may gratifying to be the author
of the room-cleaning tactic, being next to another author of the tactic is a
different matter.
Since most of us don't have spigot-grade sphincters, there is the problem of
collateral damage before and after the meeting. If you share a cubicle, as I
do, you may lose more political points with cow-orkers than you gain by
early disperal of the meeting(s).
Kevin
mrob...@worldnet.att.net
> On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:53:40 +0000 (UTC), c...@NOSPAM.netunix.com wrote:
>
>> May I remind the honourable monks of the ancient art of the meeting
>> room fart.
>
> problem of collateral damage before and after the meeting.
There is third-party hardware available to help solve this problem.
You'd probably need to drill it through, tap it, and install some kind
of remotely-operable valve (or just a simple blowoff valve that only
opens when the pressure exceeds a certain value) but it's eminently
doable.
Matt Roberds
c...@nospam.netunix.com
>
> >May I remind the honourable monks of the ancient art of the meeting
> >room fart. A diet of cabbage and onions the night before is guaranteed
> >to bring any meeting to a swift conclusion by clearing the room.
>
> This tactic works the first time, but at the cost of encouraging other
> meeting victims to try the same tactic. It may gratifying to be the author
> of the room-cleaning tactic, being next to another author of the tactic is a
> different matter.
>
A few minutes of stink versus another 2 hours of interminable bullshit
sounds like a bargain to me.
> Since most of us don't have spigot-grade sphincters, there is the problem of
> collateral damage before and after the meeting. If you share a cubicle, as I
> do, you may lose more political points with cow-orkers than you gain by
> early disperal of the meeting(s).
You need more practice.
Niklas Karlsson
> On 2009-11-25, Szechuan Death <sde...@sdeath.net> bent the will
> of the universe to say:
>> Not my best work, perhaps, but it felt right. This was more of
>> a 3-4 on the rant scale. When next I post, I shall endeavor to aim for
>> 8-9. That'll take a bit of doing, though, and probably a spectacularly
>> bad day to accomplish.
>>
>> "slayer of ponies"
>> -SD
>
> Or as it's known around my shop... Tuesday.
Around my shop it's known as Thursday. Every day is Thursday, it just
has a different degree of Thursdayness according to bogon density at the
time.
Niklas
--
Unfortunately, users are in `unstable' so shouldn't be installed in a
production system.
-- David Richerby
David Taylor
I'm sorry, but I refuse to drill through my own sphincter.
--
David Taylor
John F. Eldredge
> On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:50:24 +0000 (UTC), c...@NOSPAM.netunix.com wrote:
>> Kevin Goebel <kevi...@kevingoebel.com> wrote:
>>> This tactic works the first time, but at the cost of encouraging other
>>> meeting victims to try the same tactic. It may gratifying to be the
>>> author of the room-cleaning tactic, being next to another author of
>>> the tactic is a different matter.
>>
>> A few minutes of stink versus another 2 hours of interminable bullshit
>> sounds like a bargain to me.
>
> More likely: A few minutes of stink, followed by another 2 hours of
> interminable bullshit in another room...
I think you mean "a succession of rooms", until you either run out of
meeting rooms or the boss figures out who is causing the stink.
TimC
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
> On 2009-11-27, Mav <tech...@nospam.com> wrote:
>> Or as it's known around my shop... Tuesday.
>
> Around my shop it's known as Thursday. Every day is Thursday, it just
> has a different degree of Thursdayness according to bogon density at the
> time.
I formerly worked in a building next to the university pub. I was
warned of the Tuesday Tossers, but by the time I left, I could
differentiate between the Tuesday and Thursday Tossers, Monday Morons,
Friday Fuckwits, and Wednesday Wankers.
--
TimC
Quantum Mechanics is a lovely introduction to Hilbert Spaces! --unknown
Peter H. Coffin
> On 2009-11-27, Mav <tech...@nospam.com> wrote:
>> On 2009-11-25, Szechuan Death <sde...@sdeath.net> bent the will
>> of the universe to say:
>>> Not my best work, perhaps, but it felt right. This was more of
>>> a 3-4 on the rant scale. When next I post, I shall endeavor to aim for
>>> 8-9. That'll take a bit of doing, though, and probably a spectacularly
>>> bad day to accomplish.
>>>
>>> "slayer of ponies"
>>> -SD
>>
>> Or as it's known around my shop... Tuesday.
>
> Around my shop it's known as Thursday. Every day is Thursday, it just
> has a different degree of Thursdayness according to bogon density at the
> time.
"I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
--
Science is like sex:
sometimes something useful comes out, but that's not why we're doing it.
-- Richard Feynman
mikea
> On 27 Nov 2009 21:51:49 GMT, Niklas Karlsson wrote:
>> On 2009-11-27, Mav <tech...@nospam.com> wrote:
>>> On 2009-11-25, Szechuan Death <sde...@sdeath.net> bent the will
>>> of the universe to say:
>>>> Not my best work, perhaps, but it felt right. This was more of
>>>> a 3-4 on the rant scale. When next I post, I shall endeavor to aim for
>>>> 8-9. That'll take a bit of doing, though, and probably a spectacularly
>>>> bad day to accomplish.
>>>>
>>>> "slayer of ponies"
>>>> -SD
>>>
>>> Or as it's known around my shop... Tuesday.
>>
>> Around my shop it's known as Thursday. Every day is Thursday, it just
>> has a different degree of Thursdayness according to bogon density at the
>> time.
>
> "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
My experience is that every week has at least 7 Mondays. Some weeks are
much longer than a mere 7 days, some days are longer than 24 hours, some
hours are much longer than just 60 minutes, and so on.
Last Friday was a typically nasty week of Mondays.
--
If infinite rednecks fired infinite shotguns at an infinite number of road
signs, they'd eventually create all the great literary works of the world in
braille. -- Discordian Quote File
Jim
> > Not my best work, perhaps, but it felt right. This was more of
> > a 3-4 on the rant scale. When next I post, I shall endeavor to aim for
> > 8-9. That'll take a bit of doing, though, and probably a spectacularly
> > bad day to accomplish.
> >
> > "slayer of ponies"
> > -SD
>
> Or as it's known around my shop... Tuesday.
I hate Tuesdays. Really, really fucking hate the bastards. You don't
have the comforting knowledge that it's the middle of the week, and the
memory of the last weekend has now faded.
This assumes that you do a Monday-Friday gig, which thankfully I do.
Jim
--
"Microsoft admitted its Vista operating system was a 'less good
product' in what IT experts have described as the most ambitious
understatement since the captain of the Titanic reported some
slightly damp tablecloths." http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/
Lawns 'R' Us
> Around here, Friday is a popular day for escalations. Hey, we have
> executed that change, or implemented a possible solution for that
> incident on Tuesday and mailed the customer about it to ask them to
> test.
>
> Guess when they test and escalate if they find out things don't work?
"I'm terribly sorry, if you'd only tested it on Wednesday, we'd have
sorted it right out for you, but right now we're snowed under with a
heap of other stuff. We'll look at it on Monday."
This works much better when you have a boss who's willing to support
you on the matter.
Alan J Rosenthal
>#define FALSE 1
I hope this won't be considered prohibited UI (perhaps I'd better edit
the FAQ quickly), but the more experience I get, the less I approve of
this sort of thing, even the correct variety. C doesn't have "true" and
"false" keywords. Deal with it. Where in Pascal you wrote "x := true",
in C you have to write "x = 1;". If this is a major obstacle, you're not
cut out to be a computer programmer.
Competent C programmers know what "x=1;" means, but may not guess correctly
what "x=MY_NEW_KEYWORD;" means, without having to waste time looking for
your #define (undoubtedly in a file named "defines.h" which is full of all
sorts of unwise definitions).
I feel similarly about text-messaging-isms such as "ur" for "you're".
"#define TRUE 1" is the same sort of thing.
--
"#define ever (;;)" is a habit that most C programmers grow out of.
-- Henry Spencer
Alan J Rosenthal
>It turns out that taking a fuvg on the floor of the office does
>nothing for workplace zen either.
Better than in your shared flat.
http://myveryworstroommate.com/2009/08/25/beach-bum/
http://myveryworstroommate.com has made me understand the state of the
toilets in the building I work in. It was always a mystery to me. Now I
understand that some people just don't understand why you don't foul your
own nest... and if it's someone else's nest, all the better.
TimC
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
> nothing for workplace zen either.
>
The presenter on the radio this morning related a story about how a
newsreader once returned from the pub and vomited on the mic while
attempting to read the news.
The audio exists, and the current newsreader is attempting to dig it
out (so to speak) for the next newsreading.
--
TimC
According to a bike cop I spoke [to], if everyone rode a white BMW with
POLICE stickers on it there would be no SMIDSYs. -- Nev
mikea
> Chris Newport posted thus:
>>May I remind the honourable monks of the ancient art of the meeting
>>room fart. A diet of cabbage and onions the night before is guaranteed
>>to bring any meeting to a swift conclusion by clearing the room.
>
> nothing for workplace zen either.
>
> And before anyone asks, no, it wasn't me who did it.
Only because someone else beat you to it.
--
"I cannot imagine what it's like to know nearly everything about
systems and have to deal, daily, with people who know nearly nothing
about systems. It's like being a cosmologist at an astrology
convention)...." -- James Lileks
mikea
<http://mikea.ath.cx/History_from_Below/tp.html> may provide information
on how the other side live[sd].
--
Lots of couples say, "We want a baby."
I never heard one say, "We want a teen-ager."
-- Ruth Moore, private communication
Ben A L Jemmett
> [BALJ wrote:]
> > #define TRUE 1
> > #define FALSE 1
>
> I hope this won't be considered prohibited UI (perhaps I'd better edit
> the FAQ quickly), but the more experience I get, the less I approve of
> this sort of thing, even the correct variety.
I quite agree; I feel I should clarify, at this point, that the header
file and errant component in question were written several years before
I joined the company, and the bug had lain in wait for close to a
decade before I tickled it with my new code.
[Although I did use '#define EVER ;;' once, in my first piece of real
coursework at university -- and was promptly scolded by the lecturer.
I'd picked that up from some of Digital Research's header files, and
quickly learned the error of my ways!]
--
Regards,
Ben A L Jemmett.
http://flatpack.microwavepizza.co.uk/
Paul
news:7nb8reF...@mid.individual.net:
> On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 00:13:14 +0100, Michel Buijsman wrote:
>> More likely: A few minutes of stink, followed by another 2 hours
>> of interminable bullshit in another room...
>
> I think you mean "a succession of rooms", until you either run out
> of meeting rooms or the boss figures out who is causing the stink.
>
Unless it's the boss causing it, in which case he will continue the
meeting as if nothing happened, do it a few more times, then blame a
subordinate.
--
Paul the Legacy Server
Full Recovery reached May 30, 2008
"People can be educated beyond their intelligence"
-- Marilyn vos Savant
Steve VanDevender
> Ben A L Jemmett posted thus:
>> ... the root cause was a typo in a header file for a different
>>component:
>>
>>#define TRUE 1
>>#define FALSE 1
>
> How did you distinguish truth from lies at that gig?
Clearly everything was true, so there was no need for distinction.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
"bash awk grep perl sed df du, du-du du-du,
vi troff su fsck rm * halt LART LART LART!" -- the Swedish BOFH
Shmuel Metz
at 01:44 AM, nob...@xmission.com (Scott) said:
>Once in a while I understand that my code is shit even as I'm writing it.
>Sometimes I go back and fix it, but not always. Sometimes it matters,
>but not always. Sometimes I care, but not always. I should know better
>by now. My life is replete with examples of shitty one-shot scripts that
>somehow become the basis for an institutional standard, or just get
>recycled with ever more shit code piled on top until you have a reusable
>general-purpose utility that doesn't do any one thing well because it's
>really nothing more than a twisted knot of nearly-but-not-quite identical
>special cases.
Then there's code that has to process ill defined external input and
periodically gets a new special case to handle something that I hadn't
seen before. Take parsing Received: header fields, where many of the
important data are inside comments.
Of course, in some industries you are dealing with well defined fields and
can write the code once and for all. What do you mean I need to change it
to accommodate the new law?
If there's one thing that I've learned it's to eschew hard-wired constants
and tightly coupled dependencies.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <http://patriot.net/~shmuel> ISO position
Reply to domain Patriot dot net user shmuel+bspfh to contact me.
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
Shmuel Metz
at 10:49 PM, "Ben A L Jemmett" <bal.j...@ukonline.co.uk> said:
>[Although I did use '#define EVER ;;' once, in my first piece of real
>coursework at university -- and was promptly scolded by the lecturer. I'd
>picked that up from some of Digital Research's header files,
My experience with DR C was such that I would rely on one of their header
files about the time that Sol went supernova. Yes, it is a yellow dwarf;
why do you ask?
mrob...@worldnet.att.net
The machining operations are to be carried out on the third-party
hardware before it is installed; the machining operations are not done
to any part of anyone's body. [0]
Matt Roberds
[0] Please twig before this requires CAD files or 8x10 color glossy
pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back.
David Cameron Staples
> Steve VanDevender wrote:
>>ab...@leftmind.net (AdB) writes:
>>> How did you distinguish truth from lies at that gig?
>>Clearly everything was true, so there was no need for distinction.
>
> Discordian programming?
Given that apparently even false things are true and I have no idea why
because I didn't do it, it would seem so.
Bron Gondwana
Szechuan Death <sde...@sdeath.net> wrote:
> The basic rules of systems administration - agnostic of platform, era,
> personal preference, management diktat, whatever - are three, eternal,
> and easy to articulate:
>
> Rule #1 (If it's not repeatable, it doesn't exist)
>
> Rule #2 (If it isn't checked in, it doesn't exist)
>
> Rule #3 (If it's not backed up, it doesn't exist)
Otherwise nice rules.
I live by the three above. For three different kinds of data.
(1) is upstream data, operating systems and the like. They are
installed in a repeatable way, and reinstalled repeatably too.
No point backing it up or version controlling it, just run a
caching proxy of the upstream repository and be done with it.
(2) is stuff that we ourselves have created, software or
configuration. It goes in source control. No exceptions.
Live machines are build from the source control in a repeatable
way. As much as possible "make diff" will show if some wanker
has hand-modified something.
(3) is customer data (and the source control repository of
course)
Bron.
Lawns 'R' Us
> In alt.sysadmin.recovery, on Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:15:10 -0900
> Szechuan Death <sde...@sdeath.net> wrote:
>> Rule #1 (If it's not repeatable, it doesn't exist)
>>
>> Rule #2 (If it isn't checked in, it doesn't exist)
>>
>> Rule #3 (If it's not backed up, it doesn't exist)
>
> Otherwise nice rules.
>
> I live by the three above. For three different kinds of data.
I'd modify #3. "If it's not backed up, or a copy does not exist
offsite, it doesn't exist." 'Course, against that is the simple fact
that sometimes, you're just not meant to have the data - like the time
a corporation needed to restore something. The onsite tapes were
physically damaged. They pulled back their first offsite copy.
Degaussed. They pulled back their second offsite copy ... and the
courier managed to have an accident. Gone, without hope. (I'm probably
misremembering the details, but the upshot of it was, they had
multiple copies in multiple locations, and none of them were usable -
the last copy because of the accident, the others for various other
reasons.)
Maarten Wiltink
news:1j9vrz0.5wi9331xmcrpeN%j...@magrathea.plus.com...
[...]
> I hate Tuesdays. Really, really fucking hate the bastards. You don't
> have the comforting knowledge that it's the middle of the week, and the
> memory of the last weekend has now faded.
I've had the good sense to adopt a hobby that takes place in the evening
hours. Currently, on the evening hours of Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, sometimes Friday, and usually Saturday (though usually not
Friday _and_ Saturday). My day job is beginning to interfere with it.
There have also been occasional problem with planning social gatherings.
Who needs a life when you've already got three?
Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink
mikea
One commercial storage site, in a fairly deep salt mine in .ks.us, was
found to have a minor problem w.r.t. storage of magnetic media: the field
put out by the elevator's drive motors was sufficient to render unusable
every tape, disc, diskette, zipdisk, etc. on the platform. As a result,
nothing usable ever got down to storage, though nobody realized this until
some months after the site opened, when a customer needed to restore
something from backups.
I don't know if they stayed in business or went belly-up, though I don't
see how they _could_ have stayed in business without a huge cash infusion
from some vulture capitalist, since they must have had to disgorge and
repay all the fees they collected for magnetic media storage.
--
"As for Gollum, personally I reckon Frodo should have slit the throat of that
loathsome ingratiating schizophrenic homunculus when he first set eyes on it.
How can anyone take seriously the word of such a vile macrocephalic animated
fetus?" -- from one of Tanuki's posts in the Monastery
Brian Kantor
>For some reason parsed as "being in beatings a lot more often".
I stopped going to meetings after I woke up and realized that
they were all about blaming me for all the problems. Obviously
I don't need to actually be present for that, so I was able to
get much more done. And those folks now generate meetings for
each other to attend. Inner circle of Hell, as I see it.
- Brian
Brian Kantor
>The idea of a 5 minute daily standup meeting is a good one,
>but 4 hours of grueling planning meeting, nooo thank you.
Just
Don't
Go
Brian Kantor
>> grueling planning meeting, nooo thank you.
If a manager can learn all he needs to know about the project in 5 minutes,
then the project clealy doesn't need him at all.
MOMMY! Make the scary man go away!
- Brian
Brian Kantor
>Of course, in some industries you are dealing with well defined fields and
>can write the code once and for all. What do you mean I need to change it
>to accommodate the new law?
One of the proudest moments of my code-monkey years was when a payroll system
I had designed and written was able to accomodate a new union contract without
changing a single line of code. It was all table driven. Ahhhh.
If I *NEVER* have to work on another payroll system it'd still be too soon.
- Brian
Brian Kantor
>Since most of us don't have spigot-grade sphincters, there is the problem of
>do, you may lose more political points with cow-orkers than you gain by
>early disperal of the meeting(s).
Take you laptop to the toilets and work there. No one[1] will come looking for
you and there's no phone to ring. Get a LOT of work done that way.
- Brian
[1] well, maybe
Brian Kantor
>It turns out that taking a fuvg on the floor of the office does
>nothing for workplace zen either.
Last century, during an interminable undergraduate lecture on the
historicity of ${popular deity}, a large dog wandered into the lecture
hall, and chose to squat down in front of the lecturer, leaving a
malodorous token of the entire class's respect for the presentation.
Even the professor got the hint.
- Brian
Brian Kantor
>>#define FALSE 1
#define TRUE (`phoon -q`)
#define FALSE (random() & 1)
Steve VanDevender
> ab...@leftmind.net (AdB) writes:
>
>> Somewhere beyond anger or ego or emotion or desire or fatigue is a calm
>> airless place of wisdom; I've sensed it a few times myself.
>
> And maybe someday you'll get to shove one of your most vexing lusers in
> there and watch him gasp for breath and pound against the glass for a
> few seconds before he asphyxiates.
Randall Munroe gives us a vision of an airless place of wisdom:
Zebee Johnstone
Long time ago when I worked for a geophysical survey company I took a
shortcut down the firestairs.
And discovered the Area Geophysicist sitting there with his sections and
papers (pre laptop days)
He asked me not to let on that he was hiding there as he got a lot
more work done when people couldn't find him.
Even as a callow youth I could see his point.
Zebee
Paul
> Take you laptop to the toilets and work there. No one[1] will come
> looking for you and there's no phone to ring. Get a LOT of work
> done that way.
> - Brian
>
> [1] well, maybe
You would expect that would work. One would expect that would work.
But I would not expect that to work, since I once had a PHB that
would track me down anywhere, when a question or task popped into
his mind. Yes, even there, several times.
One of the features/bugs of working for four decades is that there
is nothing new under the fha (or UC, or Qryy ...)
Graham Reed
> He asked me not to let on that he was hiding there as he got a lot
> more work done when people couldn't find him.
I used to do the same thing, using the machine rooms. If I couldn't
get anything done for all the people asking stupid questions, I'd turn
off a secondary interface on the big server and then "have to go fix
it."
Uninterrupted time on an 80x25 TTY beats a full X screen with
co-workers.
--
"You are a winner. But that doesn't mean you aren't a loser."
-- [jealous] co-worker after I won two iPods
Lawns 'R' Us
> One commercial storage site, in a fairly deep salt mine in .ks.us, was
> found to have a minor problem w.r.t. storage of magnetic media: the field
> put out by the elevator's drive motors was sufficient to render unusable
> every tape, disc, diskette, zipdisk, etc. on the platform. As a result,
> nothing usable ever got down to storage, though nobody realized this until
> some months after the site opened, when a customer needed to restore
> something from backups.
I'd say that they (the customers) deserved what they got, then. I
would say more, but that would be UI.
mikea
But they were the Low Bid! We Have To Award To The Lowest Bid!
On, I suppose, the theory that suing the incompetent venduh will make
the bit patterns reappear on the media.
Just like standing behind a 1403N2 and pulling on the paper makes it
print.
Back before I retired the first time, I caught Hell more than once from
Central Purchasing because I wasn't willing to award a contract to the
lowest bidder -- frequently because other agencies had had bad experiences
with that lowest bidder. I name no names here, but *they* know who they
are. Our specs called for a complete spares kit for each type of gear on
the floor, and for a site inspection to verify its presence. Shyeah.
Some of these outfits didn't have a single spare on hand for some of the
stuff we had on the floor.
One of these days the Rant On Maintenance Contracts wil come frothing
and spewing out, burning everything around it, and etch its way into the
surface of the asbestos paper that is its proper living space.
--
A Because it's annoying and makes no sense.
Q Why is top-posting bad?
Peter Corlett
[...]
> I don't know if they stayed in business or went belly-up, though I don't
> see how they _could_ have stayed in business without a huge cash infusion
> from some vulture capitalist, since they must have had to disgorge and
> repay all the fees they collected for magnetic media storage.
Unlikely. They'd just pay out to the tiny number of customers who actually
noticed there was a problem and could be bothered with the paperwork
involved in making a claim.
Howard S Shubs
fl...@dgp.toronto.edu (Alan J Rosenthal) wrote:
> I feel similarly about text-messaging-isms such as "ur" for "you're".
> "#define TRUE 1" is the same sort of thing.
How do you feel about
#define TRUE (1==1)
--
Don't bother with piddly crap like "gun control".
Life is 100% fatal. Ban it.