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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: March 2005

  • LGD ISO LGM

    I noticed this morning that the CPU in my main Linux workstation wasn’t being used. This may seem like an odd statement if you don’t know that I’ve been in the habit of running the SETI@Home client on whatever Linux machines I can since May of ‘99. Running the command-line client with the “niceness” turned up from a cron job is part-and-parcel of my setting up a new workstation.

    So I looked at the SETI@Home website to see if anything had changed. Boy, has it ever.

    A few minutes ago I activated my transferred account and converted over to the new BOINC client code, and I’m once again happily churning out SETI results packets. Of course, now I have to make this update to all of the other machines I have that run the old client code…

  • Lack of capitalization can KILL.

    Back in November I upgraded the server that this site, among several others, is hosted upon. This involved going to new versions of several webserver software products, including PHP. The new version of PHP required me to make a change to the comment script that I, among several others, use.

    I just discovered the reason that my comment script, among several others’, hasn’t been storing the email addresses of commenters. (I’m not talking about displaying the addresses. I don’t want that, and I’ve disabled that accordingly.) This means that if I wanted to reply to a comment directly, well, it wasn’t gonna happen.

    What, then, was the culprit? I didn’t capitalize a letter ‘m’ during a variable declaration. That’s it. Had I typed ‘M’ instead of ‘m’, I’d have saved myself nearly six months of losing those email addresses in my site’s, among several others’, comment files.

    I have, of course, fixed this on my site, among several others.

    Let me tell you what kind of moron I’m feeling like right now: top-notch, baby.

    UPDATE: Yeah, commenting’s been broken all afternoon. I’ve been tweaking the hell out of the script, and finally managed to accomplish very rudimentary email-address validation. Now, if you don’t enter an email address, your comment doesn’t get posted. It’s that simple. As always, though, your address isn’t displayed anywhere. I insist on it mainly so that I can reply to comments personally and privately if I so choose. We apologize for the inconvenience…

  • Design Flaw

    Pop quiz: What’s wrong with the following login screen for Tapscan?

    If you answered, “The down-scroll arrow is dangerously close to the Delete User button,” you should apply to work at Arbitron, because clearly nobody there thinks that this is a problem. Nor, apparently, is it a problem that the “Delete” button does not pop up an “Are you sure?” dialog of any kind. Nope. When “Delete” is clicked, whoever is highlighted gets deleted, immediately, and so do all of their saved settings and schedules. Poof. Gone. No questions asked.

    I mention this only because I’ve had to restore individual user accounts twice in as many weeks, all because someone wasn’t exactingly cautious where they clicked when they went to scroll down through the list of users. Argh. (Please note that I do not blame the people doing the clicking. This is a stupid, stupid user-interface flaw. Stupid, I say.)

  • Ringtones for Treo

    I love my Treo 600. It’s a wonderful piece of modern technology. For instance, with the combination of Pocket Tunes, mRing and a memory card I can now use bits of mp3 as my ringtones, and assign a different one to each contact or category of contacts (to serve as a default for when I’ve got someone in a category but haven’t picked out a distinctive ringer for them yet).

    And so, in the spirit of being useful or some-such, here’s what I’ve created so far. (I won’t bother with the MIDI ringers I first tinkered with… most of those were bollocks anyway.) Mind you, these are short pieces of the tune in question, as nobody in their right mind’s going to listen to all three-to-five minutes of a song instead of, you know, actually answering the bloody phone call.

    I’ll probably make up some more later, when I don’t have to download them to my phone over the web. (Yes, yes, I need an SD reader for my computer. I know. I suck.) For now, all you Treo users out there: go forth and enjoy.

  • AIM now sucks more.

    If you normally use this, you should probably switch to this, with this plugin installed. Why?

    Because of this.

    Way to treat your users like garbage, AOL…

  • Work Levity: An Email Case Study

    While I try to stumble and slide my way through this long, long Friday, one particular round of one-liner emails managed to put a smile on my face. I’ll paraphrase thusly, with artistic embellishments:

    VIP, else-company, to Local VIP and My-Own-Self: You and you, please see to it that something is taken care of in some market somewhere. I’m asking you because you two are tangentally involved with the system in question.

    Local VIP, to Otherwhere VIP, cc’d to Yours Truly: That has to be taken care of by someone at the market in question. I’ve taken the liberty of communicating your desires to the appropriate party. Have a nice day.

    Duckling, to On-Top-Of-Things: Praise you. Had I gotten to that email before you did, I’d have said some distinctly impolitic things, because, I mean, what the hell? No information to go on, just “make it so”? Captain Picard he ain’t.

    Capable One, to Groggy Waterfowl: What, you mean you can’t read minds? I have a great how-to book to sell you, in that case.

    Snarky Quacker, to Purveyor Of Mystic Lore: Any number of women in my acquaintance would praise your name if you had such a book for me to learn from. *laughter*

    Snake-Oil Saleswoman, to Hopeful Sucker: And I’d be rich!!! *bigger laughter*

    Okay, actually those last three exchanges are nearly verbatim. The earlier ones are quite a bit modified from the original.

    Some days, I really love my job simply because it amuses me.

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