Shiny Airplane Purchased
James Gray
> On eBay, of course!
> http://www.flight-instruction.com/images/n30391/ebay_screenshot.png
>
> Some of you (ptomblin?) might recall recall me mentioning a couple of
> weeks ago that I'd bought an airplane. I finally got around to shooting
> pictures of her last night, and got them posted today. You can see a
> few of them at http://www.flight-instruction.com/tb9.php (no, I have not
> taken any marketing classes; piss off!), or the whold gallery is
> available at http://www.flight-instruction.com/images/n30391/.
Yes - I do remember your posts. Nice shots. I did most of my commercial
training in TB10's and TB20's - they are delightful aircraft in every
aspect from a pilot's perspective (except for payload at anything over
about 2/3 fuel load). I know the engineers used to make comments about
"backward flying frog contraptions", but I never had to work on them, only
flew them.
Have fun - I'll scurry away now and be jealous!
--
James Gray ja...@grayoffline.id.au (s/off/on/)
Unix Systems Engineer Sydney, Australia.
Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
-- Publilius Syrus
Niklas Karlsson
>On eBay, of course!
>http://www.flight-instruction.com/images/n30391/ebay_screenshot.png
Having read the subject line, I was about to congratulate you on your
new F/A-18.
Niklas
--
That all depends on how long your gun is.
-- Joe Zeff
Paul Tomblin
>Yes, I'm excited. Now, I just need to get enough people flying to make
>it pay for itself.
Nice looking plane. Evidently sysadminning pays a lot more out your way
than it does here. Mind if I drop by some time and drool on your plane?
BTW: I see the seller's name is rroll. There was a Rob Roll who used to
be involved in aviation here in the Rochester area - I wonder if it's the
same guy?
Any chance of getting the source code to the little weather do-dad on the
main page of that site?
--
Paul Tomblin <ptom...@xcski.com> http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
a) log a message at user.emerg of the form "DANGER! MORON ON /dev/pts/1"
b) print to stderr "NO! WRONG! TOTALLY WRONG! WHERE'D YOU LEARN THIS?
STOP DOING IT!" -- Jeremiah Weiner
Dave Buckles
> Nice looking plane. Evidently sysadminning pays a lot more out your way
> than it does here. Mind if I drop by some time and drool on your plane?
Sure thing. And sysadminning doesn't pay that well; that's part of the
reason she's out for rental.
> BTW: I see the seller's name is rroll. There was a Rob Roll who used to
> be involved in aviation here in the Rochester area - I wonder if it's the
> same guy?
No. The eBay account holder is J. R. Rollins, but the seller was
Richard Yingling. Both in Elyria, OH. The airplane did start life up
there, though; it was a trainer for a flight school whose name escapes
me at the moment.
> Any chance of getting the source code to the little weather do-dad on the
> main page of that site?
Sure thing; I'll tar it up for you. It'll be a few days more, though;
I'm reviewing and repairing a bunch of things on the site. I love the
way a hacked-up "proof-of-concept" demo becomes policy. I'll send you
e-mail when I'm done.
--Dave
--
Dave Buckles | The average user doesn't know what he
name AT barefootclown.net | wants. The average user wants fries
PGP Requested! key avail. | with that, if prompted. --me
st...@madcelt.org
<Snippage>
> I love the way a hacked-up "proof-of-concept" demo becomes policy.
I didn't realise you were working for the same place I am. I have given
up writing quick-and-dirty shell scripts, because every time I do, they
become stock code. It seems to be the way things are done here and it's
starting to show in the way things are leaking out the seams.
--
Stevo st...@madcelt.org
A walkin' tall sheriff And a big Cadillac
And me and my golf shoes on the hood making tracks
Jimmy Buffett - Semi True Story
Paul Tomblin
>At a random point in time Dave Buckles <dbuc...@invalid.com> blathered
>insanely:
>
>I didn't realise you were working for the same place I am. I have given
AKA "Every place in the known universe".
One place I worked, two guys hacked up a demo of a command interpreter for
a trade show. They knew that there was a danger the demo would become
production code, so they prefixed all the commands with their initials
(jbrd). Of course it went into production, and customers were continually
asking us what "jbrd" meant. The PHBs made up some phoney acronym, but
most of the programmers refused to lie about it. We didn't get a chance
to re-write jbrd into something that was actually designed rather than
hacked together for another year and a half.
--
Paul Tomblin <ptom...@xcski.com> http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
"Panic kills"
-- Rick Grant (quoting RCAF pilot training)
Rex Tincher
<snip>
>Last week I got depressed (I'm still new) because I realised that about
>half[2] the "production" code I write isn't, because the project is
>probably not going to be used.
<snip>
I can top this. I once worked at a job [1] where *none* of the code [2]
written by the entire department (8 people) over the space of 3 years made it
into use.
US government SBIR contracts made this possible.
Two of us got laid off [3] and four more quit after our customers figured out
that we never delivered anything useful. Ever. AFAIK, they've been able to
find enough new customers to keep the remaining two (the managers) employed.
[1] ASR oldtimers will remember this as the job where a manager requested code
samples to test her newly-written C parser. So I gave her entries from the
obfuscated C contest.
[2] C++, Visual Basic, and Poet OODB, with C and FORTRAN on the side.
[3] The two that got laid off were
1. The guy who wrote the most code that actually worked. (His title was Lead
Programmer. I demanded the title of Tin Programmer but did not get it.)
2. Me, who was much less productive, but did write one entire subsytem that
completely worked.
--
"A recent analysis found that Kerry, in his fourth term in the
Senate, had received more contributions from lobbyists than any
other senator." Source: "Nader to run for president as independent",
CNN, 22 February 2004
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, <st...@madcelt.org> wrote:
> I didn't realise you were working for the same place I am. I have
> given up writing quick-and-dirty shell scripts, because every time I
> do, they become stock code. It seems to be the way things are done
> here and it's starting to show in the way things are leaking out the
> seams.
My orkplace took this to a new level this week. I took possession of
a really badly written Perl script and rewrote it into an ordinarily
badly written Perl script (whilst adding some requested
functionality). During the process, I put it on my personal Solaris
workstation and started Apache, then published a URL for everyone to
use, and we all played around with it.
Once we were all more or less satisfied with it, I started mentioning
in EVERY. SINGLE. MESSAGE. on this subject that it needed to be moved
to the official test servers for Real And True Acceptance Testing.
You can probably guess the rest of this post without reading it.
The assholes in $BIG_EASTERN_CITY_THAT_I_WILL_CALL_NEW_YORK started
handing over the URL that I had given them ... to the end lusers.
This thing is effectively in production, at least for a small (but
growing) set of people. My logs reflect the fact that its usage is
growing exponentially. So the script is final, but my "sandbox"
workstation just became a Very Important Host.
This shit is about to get nipped in the bud, big-time, though. I am
moving into an office next week[1]. I don't care much about the DNS
being correct on a daily basis, so the DNS entry for the host is about
to point to an IP that is connected to ... air. Bwa ha ha.
Why, yes, I do have a lengthy email trail showing that multiple people
warned the aforementioned idiots that my host was not an approved
acceptance testing platform, and I even sent a note today warning
about the upcoming DNS change. Copied to managers that didn't even
know this was going on.
[1] You heard me. An office. Woot.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it. -T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------
David P. Murphy
> The assholes in $BIG_EASTERN_CITY_THAT_I_WILL_CALL_NEW_YORK started
> handing over the URL that I had given them ... to the end lusers.
> This thing is effectively in production, at least for a small (but
> growing) set of people. My logs reflect the fact that its usage is
> growing exponentially. So the script is final, but my "sandbox"
> workstation just became a Very Important Host.
Sorry to hear about the unexpected and unexplained power outage
you suffered three minutes from now. Or do prefer the more subtle
"loss of network connectivity"?
Waiting for a DNS change . . . <tsk><tsk> You must really
want that office.
ok
dpm
--
David P. Murphy http://www.myths.com/~dpm/
systems programmer ftp://ftp.myths.com
mailto:d...@myths.com (personal)
COGITO ERGO DISCLAMO mailto:Murphy...@emc.com (work)
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, David P. Murphy <d...@myths.com> wrote:
> Sorry to hear about the unexpected and unexplained power outage
> you suffered three minutes from now. Or do prefer the more subtle
> "loss of network connectivity"?
>
> Waiting for a DNS change . . . <tsk><tsk> You must really
> want that office.
While I admit to being an office whore, I also take special pleasure
in, at least on occasion, letting external events do my dirty work for
me.