a warm arterial spray
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "frig_neutron" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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10:28 am
[Link] | So here I am, feeling mildly sick, reading Slashdot, being late for work.
Just as I was about to get my procrastination under control, I came upon a fun comment thread which formed around a request for help from what appears to be a teacher putting together a sci-fi literature class. Cue 15 more minutes procrastination.
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10:58 am
[Link] |
Beekeeping Programmers
or How Software Companies Die.
( copy behind cut for archival )
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10:55 am
[Link] |
Copyright Consultation Launches: Time For Canadians To Speak Out
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4173/125/
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02:59 pm
[Link] |
WTWTF?
Exhibit A:
if (cmp instanceof UIAccessControl)
{
accessControl = (UIAccessControl) cmp;
}
The debugger shows that cmp is a UIAccessControl, but instanceof does not match. Remove the instanceof check, and ...
Exhibit B:
java.lang.ClassCastException: faces.UIAccessControl cannot be cast to faces.UIAccessControl
AspectJ load-time-weaving is somehow to blame.
bah. i mean moo.
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11:00 am
[Link] | In my world we want to build systems that are started once and thereafter never stop. They evolve with time. Stopping a system to upgrade the code is an admission of failure.
-- Joe Armstrong (father of Erlang)
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06:03 pm
[Link] |
Maven win!
For the past couple days we've been mavenizing our project. As such, the days were alternating periods of "oh, that's cool"ness followed by periods of intense frustration.
At its core, maven is pretty cool. Want to build?
> mvn compile
package?
> mvn package ant can do this too, but not quite as magically.
For the uninitiated, Maven something of a cross of ant and apt, "ant" being the java build tool and "apt" being the debian package manager and repository. Like ant it builds, compiles, packages, runs tests, and like ant it uses plugins to provide additional goals (targets in antspeak). Like "apt" it resolves library dependencies using repositories stored on far-away servers and downloads them as needed. Like ant, there is a central XML config file (called "pom.xml") where you declare your project dependencies, bring in additional plugins, etc..
( too long )
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05:47 pm
[Link] |
ley lines knotting
tonight the cosmic energies are strong, as it is the intersection of Friday the 13th, Valentine's eve, and the night that unix time rolls over 1234567890.
truly, never again will unix time contain all the digits of the decimal system in strictly ascending order, assuming that 0 > 9, which I argue it is.
rally forth, unix acolytes, have sex with each other.
we must not dilute our ranks with unfaithful blood.
noobs are ok.
the verdict is not in on OSX users, although I'm of the "it's easier to get forgiveness than permission" mindset.
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09:36 am
[Link] | morning at work.
humana inspired to nightmare.
ok.. works.
what be this? heaven torn asunder?
*takes a sip of coffee*
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10:40 am
[Link] |
gitalicious
just had a heart-warming moment with git.
I made some changes to a source file last night. Fixed a couple typos, a minor bug, and generally tidied up. This morning before I came in, Alex - the other developer on our team - changed the name of the public class the source file contains, renaming the file in the process.
I come in this morning, fetch his changes, and.. merge without conflict. My changes are magically integrated into the renamed class.
This is something I understand SVN vomits on.
Current Mood: giggly
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03:15 pm
[Link] | this.states.setStates(states);
a ridiculous line overdue for refactoring, but fun to say quickly (pronouncing the "." as "dot");
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01:56 pm
[Link] |
Fight Club
remember how in the end of "fight club" they blow up those buildings, and how blowing up those buildings is supposed to clear out everyone's debt record? and remember how we made fun of them for assuming there are no backups of the data, and that taking out those buildings even _if_ they contained the main data-centers would cause permanent data-loss?
well, having just watched fight club for the nth time, i realized that yes, they could very well have succeeded in taking out the consumer debt records, and no, the scenario does not hinge on assuming bad IT practices on the part of the financial firms.
the debt data may be replicated, but project mayhem is decentralized, with coordinated cells in many major cities which gives them the operational reach to destroy the data replications sites. also, they probably infiltrated the IT departments of the financial institutions similarly to how they infiltrated the security departments, which would give them data on where the data replication sites are.
there is still the "vault with tapes in nuclear bunker" thing that would probably retain the financial records even if all the datacenters and backup sites were blown up.. but with the IT infrastructures of the affected institutions smashed as thoroughly as they were, resurrecting the system to a functional state within any kind of near term should prove problematic.
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06:21 pm
[Link] |
k, seriously, wtf?
what is with these children? Quoth the CBC:
During question period, Harper also accused Dion, NDP Leader Jack Layton and Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe of deliberately avoiding being photographed in front of a Canadian flag during Monday's signing ceremony of the agreement between the parties.
"Mr. Speaker, they had to be photographed without it because … a member of their coalition does not even believe in this country," he said.
So, they're vampires now, afraid of crosses and the canadian flag?
Perhaps Mr Harper would care to comment on his own apparent aversion
to being filmed in the same room as a large mirror?
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11:59 pm
[Link] | What passed for human intelligence was a process so flawed it was pitiful—and yet, at the same time it was admirable when you considered all of what it had managed to accomplish in its comparatively brief history; in spite of the built-in prejudices of organic life. The accomplishment was even more astonishing when you realized that all of the separate engines of human intelligence were made out of meat. --David Gerrold: A Season for Slaughter (book 4 of the Chtorr invasion series).
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03:02 pm
[Link] |
Гоогле, мотхерфуцкерс!!
It should have been easy. I was using postfix sendmail to insulate myself from the low-level idiosyncrasies of SMTP. Gmail was responding with status code 250 - the warmest, feeliest, fuzziest status code of them all. Damned gmail. You don't give a status 250 if you don't actually intend to deliver..
and when you can't deliver, you bounce. the headers to facilitate this were in place (Return-path: postmaster@...)
but there was no bounce.
no delivery, no bounce, just that smug status 250 grinning you in the face.
I RTFM'd until my eyes bled, I tcpdumped and drank coffee. Then, just to throw me off the path, I got a couple intermittent "451 SMTP Protocol Violation, see RFC 2821." Then again, same input, code 250. It was a dark time to be a dan.
Anyway, it turned out I stepped on the programmer-equivalent of a rake. A rather innocent looking header:
From: "Web Applicant: Musician" <no-reply@proship.com>
Something about the google parsing.. I believe google broke it down thusly:
From: "
Web Applicant: Musician" <no-reply@proship.com>
Annoying, but should be a non-fatal problem. The message should have still been delivered. Unfortunately, "Web Applicant" seems to be a valid google-email header, the mere presence of which silently stops your message from getting delivered. Any single character change to the "Web Applicant:" string results in proper mail delivery.
2 days on this one..
Btw, this problem only seems to affect google mail. Probably Hotmail too, but they're against email delivery in general.
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12:40 pm
[Link] |
ok, so here is a question for the linux crowd:
Does anyone know of a way to export a filesystem from linux as a USB mass-storage device?
There's this guy at work, and he has a stereo with a usb port. Load some files onto your key, plug the key into the stereo, and it's an mp3 player. That's the intended use. The extended use would be to use a usb jumper, going directly to computer. Of course, if you're close enough for a usb-jumper you're close enough for a headphone-jumper, but that's beside the point. Maybe his stereo doesn't have a line-in, maybe he doesn't have a soundcard, i don't know.
The point is it got me thinking whether it is possible to coerce a linux box to present a usb port as a mass-storage device backed by a filesystem.
You could do things like "jump-boot" one laptop from another, or just generally transfer files in situations where a network link is not available. For example, public systems that let you plug in a usb-key but don't let you configure ethernet over usb.
?
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01:54 pm
[Link] |
a solution to an outstanding problem
incron: http://inotify.aiken.cz/?section=incron&page=about⟨=en
executes tasks based on filesystem changes, rather than time. this solves the "directory with custom permissions" problem.
i tried writing this sort of tool a couple years ago using FAM in C. FAM proved inadequate - you can't monitor a directory. each file must be monitored for alterations separately, and each monitored file uses up a file-handle. in a directory with thousands of mp3s will use up all the filehandles on a system. plus, it's slow.
this is an inotify-based solution. inotify is like FAM, but better. it's kernel-level and (i think) does not require a daemon. consequently, it can react to filesystem changes by setting interrupts.
ееее! this is weirdly exciting. perhaps i'm on a coffee high.
Current Mood: gay
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05:41 pm
[Link] |
happy birthday to me!
Just looked at my Gmail inbox: 3000 messages, even! I believe this is a milestone in my relationship with google, and life in general.
Current Mood: exuberant
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04:11 pm
[Link] |
update
location: talin, estonia.
coppenhagen, berlin, poznan, warsaw, vilnus, riga have been distilled to 1.2GB of photos and film clips, and that's just olya's photo camera. had to buy extra SD memory on the road. On tuesday we're in St Petersburg.
Just came from the museum of medieval torture. Fun fact: Spain used garrot executions until the 1970s (not the piano-wire-strangling garrot - i'm talking about strapping a prisoner to a chair, immobilizing their head and neck, and slowly turning a large screw until the tip of it penertates the base of the skull into the brain [pic]).
am mostly out of comms range - talin just happens to be wired up to the point of futiristic absurdity.
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02:35 pm
[Link] |
carnivorous pidgeons
Credit for the fast hands goes to Mr. B.
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05:24 pm
[Link] | score 4 years with olya! That's like, 15% of my life..:)
(and 18% of hers)
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