Archive for the 'Vitriolic Diatribes' Category

So, on the list of shit I find pretty aggravating in this world, not being able to showcase some technology I’m excited about to its full potential is fairly high up the list. You know what I’m talking about — you get a new video card, for instance. Now you can blaze through the new Half-Life 2 episode, pointing out to yourself how framerate has vastly improved, and how the game no longer stutters, how textures are crisper because you can now up the filter quality quite a bit.

You’re basically engaging into a form of post-purchase masturbation, where you sit in almost religious contemplation, envelopped in a smug sentiment of confidence in your purchase, and how much joy it has brought you.

You then obviously want to repeat the experience with a friend, who will confirm how right you were in your purchase, and perhaps be inspired to get one too, so you can fill countless hypothetical conversations with how much it rocks, over dinners or perhaps even funerals.

But there’s always this sceptical friend of yours who makes a weird face when you showcase the object of your affection to him, who brings his face closer to your giant cinema display as to physically show that he’s making an honest effort to understand what the fuck you’re on about. Read the rest of this entry »

I have spent most if not all of last week frantically running around servers and devices trying to patch them up­. Some were pleasant, some were not.

My Cisco PIX 501 for instance, was easy to patch for DST.

azrael(config)# sh clock
12:30:25.078 EST Tue Mar 13 2007
azrael(config)# clock summer-time EST recurring 2 Sun Mar 2:00 1 Sun Nov 2:00
azrael(config)# sh clock
13:30:26.999 EST Tue Mar 13 2007
azrael(config)# wr m
Building configuration...
Cryptochecksum: 7898776d bee63c89 5f3ab01b 9064f51c
[OK]

I’ve had the pleasure of patching production servers running Oracle 9i and UC4 Global. Doing the Oracle jazz helped me fully grasp the deadly truth that is, I am not a DBA. With reason. I have spent a day just to determine the consequences of the DST changes. Turns out none of the systems used TZDATA columns, whatever that means. So I have pushed the patch into the next maintenance window.

Since everything java is affected, I had to run around upgrading every single jvm and jdk running on servers. The problem is now apparent with a Macromedia/Adobe Jrun instance we have. Log entries are off by one hour for two weeks, and I hope none of the transactional code is actually fucking up. I couldn’t patch the jdk on the production server because of a nasty bug with anything above 1.5.0_05, where the Java compiler outputs notices no matter what, and Jrun interprets these as errors, thus rendering your web application non functional in some cases.

I think it is time they get rid of Jrun. It has brought nothing but misery. So, all of this just so it can be dark outside when I get up to go to work, and “save costs” while spending thousands trying to get everything patched up? (A giant bitchslap to companies who provided their patches last tuesday before the change). Just so that we can all spend the two weeks adjusting to the change and living with jet lag-esque effects? Sometimes I wonder who the fuck decides these things…

Well, you’ve seen it. So have I. You probably have been extremely excited, clutching your credit card tightly into your groin as you watched the keynote. So have I.

And now, it turns out uncle Jobs came out with a total boner killer.

No third party applications on the iPhone.

Jobs said:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

He also said:

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Of course, the third-party applications on my Treo are such a goddamned liability. Meh.

This probably made a few thousand hackers (myself included) cringe. I was eager to hack around on the device and saw infinite potential. I already saw myself running a terminal on it, and ssh’ing around from my 600$ USD iPhone.

600$ USD is around 705$ CAD. That price would have seemed right if I was allowed to do whatever I damn please with it. Now it is just another overpriced toy which I doubt I’ll ever buy…

Oh well. My bank account is probably happy. As far as I’m concerned now, Steve just announced a very expensive brick.

The guy in the office next to mine is listening to Andrea Bocceli, full blast. I gave him headphones with an obviously forced smile, but he didn’t seem to catch the subtle drift.

Opera in the morning is too much, especially when you have an ear infection, and are trying to do some work.

It now stopped but then he proceeds to watch shitty videos, again, with the sound at full blast, like he has been doing for the past two months. When he’s gone, I’ll disconnect the internal speaker of his desktop machine. Watch me.

At this price, is hope the memory stick is gold plated, beautifully marked with the Cisco logo, hand chiseled by romanian virgins trained in their craft since birth. And guaranteed to never, ever go bad.

That’s a metric fuckton. Well, I guess the enterprise can justify it, else, they should have gone with the SOHO stuff. I use cheap hong kong made knock off flash SIMMs in my personal 2611 router. 20$ for 64 megabytes on e-bay. Don’t do that if you’re using your router seriously, though, unless you like words like “void warranty” and “obscure failures”.

On another note, their new logo looks like two raised middle fingers. Appropriate, for the price tag.

Just when I was starting to actually enjoy (read: thinking “hey, it’s not so bad!”) Windows scripting after discovering documentation for the 32 bits command interpreter in Windows NT, I realize I have been spoiled by Unix shells and expect some things to work, and then frown in disgust when they don’t.

for /F "usebackq tokens=2,*" %i in (`net use | find "..."`)... 
| was unexpected

I really wanted to like writing cmd scripts. But the parser is way too obnoxious when parsing brackets. For instance, you can’t set an environement variable in one branch of a conditional statement.

if "text" EQU "othertext" ( 
    set VAR=value 
) else ( 
    echo Not Working. 
)

This will fail silently or with unexpected results. Can’t wait until PowerShell becomes mainstream enough for me to use.

The next best thing to getting ran over by an 18th wheeler would be having a gentoo baselayout update breaking havoc over your mail server.

I have no idea why, but Courier, which is the mail server suite I use, in conjunction with DJ Bernstein’s qmail and vpopmail, all this lovely stuff keeps breaking all the time on Gentoo. I’ve had courier hand mask’ed since they kept screwing up.

Now, the lastest baselayout prevents authdaemond from starting, and leaves no evidence in the logs. The Gentoo bugzilla is confusing, they say it’s Courier’s fault, and that they need maintainers, and that uh.. I don’t know, I’m not sure. They sound like they expect the problem to fix itself, or that it will magically occur at some time.

Gentoo is definitely not something you should run on a production server, sometimes.

Update: Well, updating to the lastest courier and removing /etc/init.d/authdaemond seems to have fixed it. The ones who are having problems are actually those who are running the “unstable” courier, with ~x86 flags. I wish you guys luck.

I would like to take this moment to bring up an issue that is very dear to me. Recently, I was discussing with a friend on the subject of Google Mail and how they have access to way to much information for my tastes. While I do somewhat trust Google, should they turn evil in the next decade or so, I could be fucked over.

Then, the conversation drifted onwards (Drifted onwards? Isn’t that some kind of paradox?) to things that call home, that send information to companies without your consent. I believe that, while at a minor cost and with very minor impact, the WGA tool does just that. (Indeed, if you have been following the news, it turns out that the Windows Genuine Advantage tools calls home once a day to the mothership, “to ask if it should shut itself down”, they say). It talks to a server somewhere in redmond that I did not aprove of. Nowhere in the EULA does it says it does, too. I never agreed for that communication to happen. It’s a matter of principle.

My friend retorted with something like “Well, I don’t care about the information on Google, even if as you say, this very Google Talk log is being stored on their servers, since I have absolutely nothing to hide”.

I tried making an analogy, picture someone going in your house and looking through all of your stuff, and all of your drawers. You have nothing to hide, but that person still searches through just in the event that you might. He said he would not really care if someone did, because he has nothing to hide, but I could sense that this second answer was vaguely softer, more unsure. That uneasy feeling was there.

Well, this is the exact same thing. It pisses me off that in the IT world, you are considered guilty until proven innocent, software companies overrule every single right to privacy you have, and they get away with it.

This is my machine. My computer. I paid for it, assembled it myself, and gave it much love. This alone should enable me to have complete and utter control over what the hell happens on it.

More broadly now, this is my network. I own all the machines. I pay for the commercial DSL line. I own every single piece of hardware connected to it. I should be able to have complete and utter control over what traffic goes through it, right?

It just amazes me how people can quickly disregard their god given right to privacy, their freedom and security just to please a big company that doesn’t like them, nor even care about them in the slightest regard. The only thing they care about is your money.

It’s a matter of principle. Benjamin Franklin said:

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security”.

And damn he was right.

Fuck you.

I sent this angry mail to the Amazon.ca customer service. You enjoy.

Dear Amazon,

I have tried your new online service “Easy FalseHope™” and I must say I am very pleased. I like how you order things with real money, and never receive your item — ever! I checked my mailbox this morning and think it is quite awesome, I still haven’t received it!

I have placed an order for the following item:

linkage

On January 20, 2005. Shipping estimates were for March 15 2005.

Last time I checked, we’re now the august 10th 2005. I really love it, time has been going by, and it still have not delivered!

Perhaps you guys are still out of stock — well, that’s nice, really. Fine by me, I understand. However, why the fuck is the item still up and available for purchase? Why is nothing being done to, you know, get more or this OH SO FIRST COPIES PRINTED EVER release?

Or at least let me know “Sorry our Japanese dealer snorted too much wasabi, and died, and now the Kyoto prefecture is being a dick and forbids us from importing it. We are currently sending rabid rhinoceroces to convince them as we speak — we will let you know once the item comes back in stock”.

It would have made me all warm and fuzzy to live under the chimerical illusion that you guys give two shits about your customers =/

What? Do I still want the cd? Well, yeah. I downloaded it already. And I have the right to, I’m canadian, and live in quebec, where the legal drinking age is a suggestion, where you can have sex with 14 years old girls legally (I kid you not) and where you can download from P2P freely.

Well, I like to think I’m supporting my favorite band, which would encourage them to come over at some point for a gig, which would make me happy.

So yes, I still want it. But I expect some kind of compensation on this order — free express shipping would be nice for instance, to make up for the months of ass grabbing on your part.

Else, well, you can cancel that order if you’re never going to receive it, and I’ll just go import it with yen currency, for double the price — but at least I’ll fucking get it

Thank you for your time.

Yeah. Someone has to say the truth you know.

In other news, this website now renders … better, in Internet Explorer. Not that I care, but you know, I dislike discriminating people.

No really. See this exerpt from my daily morning time involving fixing a screwed up network connectivity under Virtual Server 2005.

C:\> net start "Virtual Server"
The Virtual Server service is starting..............
The Virtual Server service could not be started.

More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 3523

Okay… Now my first question is why are they not simply calling the help message and displaying it directly? Because they like to make me type? Mmkay, so I indulge this and decide to try their useful command.

C:\> net HELPMSG 3523

The *** service could not be started.


C:\>

WOW. Geez thanks for the info! I don’t know what I would have done without that. The event log reveals “The service did not respond in a timely fashion” — which means that it got tired of waiting for Virtual Server and the virtual machines to start. Sad thing is, they’re all running. Sometimes, I think I make Bill Gates cry by using the command line…

Now time to go put my dirty hands in the registry to increase the timeout value…