| To all our friends in the path of Iowa flood waters... |
[13 Jun 2008|02:04pm] |
(Wow. I've been under a huge rock the past few days...sorry!)
To all our (B's and my) friends in the Iowa City and Cedar Rapids areas: You are in our thoughts and prayers. Be safe. And though I'm aware it's not over yet, I hope you all benefit from a speedy recovery.
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| [music] German Rock |
[24 May 2008|11:08pm] |
Whenever I thought of modern German music, I always thought of groups like Einstürzen Neubauten. But fooling around on http://launch.yahoo.com, I've stumbled upon German rock music...and...I think I like it. Although I wonder if that is purely because I don't understand the language, so I don't get turned off by the inanity of the lyrics which sometimes turns me off to the more popular English language rock songs.
One thing still confuses me, though: I wasn't logged in, so without being influenced by any of my musical preferences, the first "set" of these songs/videos were displayed while I was listening to a Three Doors Down song. What do German songs and Three Doors Down have to do with each other?
Oh, but German "gangsta rap", if that's what some of that was, is just pure cheese. :P
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| [Meme] Answers to the shuffle meme. |
[19 Feb 2008|08:09am] |
OK, so maybe 50 songs was a bit ambitious. Perhaps I should have started with five! :P
Still, here are the answers to the shuffle meme, behind the cut:
( Read more... )
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| [Geek,Vent] Because, really, seven languages weren't enough... |
[18 Feb 2008|07:13pm] |
So Monday, like most Mondays, was "weekly-build install day". Only today, the weekly build was installed by my "minion", as usual...but then services wouldn't start. I let him work at it for a while, because these sorts of experiences "build character", right?
When I finally put out the fires in front of me I helped him troubleshoot the issue and found that the startup scripts had been modified to perform a number of new checks. That's good. But one of these external scripts required Ruby. Our servers didn't have Ruby installed. We weren't notified that our servers would need to have Ruby installed. There was nothing in the release notes to indicate that Ruby would be required for these baselines.
So after commenting out this new check that required Ruby and successfully starting our services, I started investigating just what the hell happened.
The "earth shattering" code that was written in Ruby did the following, in my own pseudo code:
Pull a host and port out of some configuration files;
Open a socket to the host and port;
Try to write to the socket;
If the write was successful, print "Yo, dude! It worked!";
If the write was not successful, print "Bollocks! It failed!";
This had to be written in Ruby? Why? This product already uses at least seven scripting dialects, as is. 80% of those scripts all do the same...damn...thing. Why, exactly, did we need an eighth scripting language to open a socket and try to write to it?
I couldn't believe this couldn't be written in Perl. ...and so, in about 5-10 minutes, I refactored it in Perl using the core module, IO::Socket. I didn't even have to write to the socket to know if it was there. And I refactored the damn thing without even knowing the first thing about IO::Socket. I just pulled up the CPAN documentation and belted out my script.
An even better question: Why Ruby? I went to the Ruby site and walked through their fun little tutorial. I don't see the point. I certainly may have missed something, but it really felt like nothing more than a new rehash of the old ways to write sloppy scripts.
As far as I'm aware, there was no cost-benefit analysis for using Ruby. There was no change control meeting. Nothing. From what I can see, some programmer bought a book and decided that was what they were going to use for a while, and our global infrastructure was just going to have to change to accommodate their whim.
Honestly, I wouldn't mind if we were going to refactor all of our scripts to one or two languages. But when we already have Perl, Python, bash, Tcl, csh, tcsh, and a couple others, why do we need to add Ruby to the mix? And again, 80% of these scripts do the same thing: Set one or more environment variables and call another program!
And they wonder why I rant.
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| [Photo] "I thought it was your turn!" |
[15 Feb 2008|11:24pm] |
Looks like someone forgot to walk the plant!
I can't take credit for the caption. But when a coworker made the wisecrack, I had to take a photo with the Blackberry.
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| [meme] Guess the songs. |
[11 Feb 2008|01:20am] |
Taken from a random person (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 3339666) I saw in ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) blackberryusers:
Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever on random.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 50 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
Step 4: Italicize the songs when someone guesses correctly. Whoever gets it first gets their name next to it.
Step 5: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
(I posted the first line of the first verse, because some of the songs started with the chorus. Also, I had to skip some because I couldn't figure out what the first line actually was. That said, I'm probably giving way to much and making it too easy to guess these songs.)
( The list... )
Wow. Where the heck was all the Iron Maiden? I have five Maiden albums (approx. 40 songs) out of the 486 songs on my iPod, And it took forever for any of it to make a respectable showing in the shuffle list. Oh well.
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| [LJ2ME] Ah! Tortured English... |
[24 Jan 2008|08:06pm] |
...How sweet the irony!
From the packaging of the iShape Neck Pillow
The proven way to recharge your Day! Cradle your neck in Prospera iShape Neck Pillow to revive your senses and relive Your stress.
(Emphasis added.)
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| [Administrivia] Prior entries marked private |
[21 Jan 2008|01:34pm] |
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Taking a page out of cipherpunk's book, I have marked all entries from 2008 and prior as "private". I think this is important to allow the tone of this journal to evolve, and to hopefully allow my writing to mature without the burden of any expectations from the past.
Thank you for your understanding.
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