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From: Sean Conner Date: 21:40 on 26 Jun 2007 Subject: Installing Firefox should not wipe out /dev Ah, where to place the blame? That is the question ... The situation: I work in a small webhosting company, and in order to cut costs (and boost employee morale) we now all work from home. Or rather, we no longer have to work at The Office. Which is a Good Thing (TM). We have a large physical server (running Linux) upon which we installed OpenVZ, and my "workstation" is a virtual server (also running Linux) running on this monster box. My "workstation" is really only used to check email (I receive root's mail on this box from all the various servers) and to log into certain devices that have restricted access. I can do everything (short of anything requiring physical access to the servers, which is rare) from anywhere I have Internet connectivity. So far, so good. Except for accessing our spam firewall [1]. It's one of the restricted devices, and double plus ungood, the only interface is via the web [2]. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that when I set up my "virtual workstation" I did not install X Windows. At the time, I forsaw no need to install about a bazillion megabytes of crap. If I'm working remotely, I already have all the GUI crap I need in front of me. But recent events at The "Office" [3] require I check the spam firewall on a regular basis. Now, if I'm at home, this I can do. Since I have DSL with a static IP address [5], I can access the spam firewall. If I'm elsewhere (which I am half the time), then I can't. So, today, I decide to install Firefox on my "virtual workstation". That way, I can "ssh -X workstation" and run Firefox there, which has the access I require to access the spam firewall. Silly me, I thought it would be a simple: GenericRootPrompt# yum install firefox Surprisingly, specifying "firefox" to "yum install" actually did what I expected it to---install firefox---instead of bitching about not finding it because it *really* wanted "yum install firefox-pointless-version-numbers-and-architecture-information". But what I did not expect was the process *DELETING* the contents of /dev. Yup. Gone. The whole thing. No /dev. Oh, I didn't find out immediately. No. I first had to try GenericUnixPrompt> ssh -X workstation only to get the bizarre "couldn't exchange keys" or something error---the one that happens when sshd crashes on a connection. Okay, I'm still logged into my "workstation" as root---so just a simple: GenericRootPrompt# /etc/init.d/sshd restart but it failed, saying to couldn't generate some key or other. *THAT'S* when I found out /dev was empty. At least being a virtual server meant that I could do some stupid things to get it working (instead of doing stupid things and locking myself out of the "workstation" were a trip to the Data Center and a recovery disk were required). So ... Who gets the blame here? OpenVZ? Yum? The firefox yum installation script? -spc (oh, and apparently firefox no longer supports the "-no-remote" option [6] ... sigh) [1] An "appliance" from some company. I have no complaint with this device. It does what it does, and doesn't give us much trouble. Our customers, however, do, because they either receive too much spam, or "important" email is filtered as spam, and they keep asking to be added, then removed, from said spam firewall. But that's not a software hate, so I shall speak on this topic no further. [2] Okay, maybe I have one complaint about the spam firewall [1]. [3] Lost messages between three mail servers, one of which is the spam firewall, one of which is another email server we control, and one which is an email server controlled [4] by our customer, which I now have to debug. Joy. [4] They're a Windows shop, but have a token Linux box doing their email. Fun times. [5] DSLi. Static IP address at no extra charge. I love these guys. [6] http://spc.hates-software.com/2007/01/25/73ba6651.html
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 10:23 on 26 Jun 2007 Subject: VMware Server Console Dear hateful VMware Server Console: I have drool follows pointer. So why can't you accept typing from me, unless I click in the window? Oh. and of course, once I click in the window, you grab the mouse too. So then I have to remember to press keys to unlock the mouse before I can go back to drooling in another window. Hateful thing. You're making me have to think. Oh, and the way you change the height of your lower window bound depending on whether the mouse is grabbed is hatefully irritating too. Crap. Nicholas Clark
From: Minty Date: 14:42 on 25 Jun 2007 Subject: innodb_thread_concurrency I never knew Douglas Adams wrote for the mysql innodb documentation team. His legacy continues to grow.... "If you have performance issues ... try setting this variable lower or higher." "The range of this variable is 0 to 1000. A value of 20 or higher is interpreted as infinite ..." http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-parameters.html
From: Tia Marie Date: 21:06 on 12 Jun 2007 Subject: I hate you UI Designer at Prove It! I'm currently on the horrible road to job hunting. One company in particular is having me take "aptitude" tests from this site proveit.com in order to "prove" I am as proficient on certain softwares as I have claimed to be. That is totally fine with me. However, the "Virtual software" Java applet sucks. The user interface for the tests for the Microsoft office programs is by far the worst and most hateful shit I have ever touched. You can only launch it from IE or Netscape. Also when testing it will ONLY except standard answers. Like clicking the [B] icon for bold to change the font instead of the shortcut key. When I do try an alternative method (or the method that isn't considered right by the test's standards) it interrupts me with a pop up saying "Are you finished with this question?" and gives me the option to say "repeat question" which starts me brand new (if I were in a menu or something a few options in I'd be back at start and have to retrace a multistep process) or I can say yup I'm done. I hate you UI Designer. You may seem to think that making these tests more frustrating to us unemployed non-programmer types is funny, but I find it sadistic and I hate you and your entire company and your shitty UI. --Tia
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 19:37 on 06 Jun 2007 Subject: Apple Mai^Hl As seen on a list not a million miles from here: ----- Original, trimmed ----- User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.2.1i Subject: [ANNOUNCE] [REMINDER] Social Meet at The Antelope - Tomorrow, 7th of June And remember to come grab me if it's your first time and I'll buy you a drink. Cos I'm nice like that. ----- End ----- ----- Reply with quoted text inline, trimmed ----- Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] [REMINDER] Social Meet at The Antelope - Tomorrow, 7th of June X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3) On 6 Jun 2007, at 6 Jun 17:55, Simon Wistow wrote: >And remember to come grab me if it's your first time and I'll buy >you a >drink. > >Cos I'm nice like that. ----- End ----- No, no, no, Apple Mal. Simon didn't write *that*. You've fucked it about, and are now slandering his mailer. mutt didn't hard wrap after "buy". Apple [fucking] Mal - *you* put that hard wrap in. And *then* you put in '>' marks to quote it, as if you're quoting something verbatim. WHICH YOU ARE NOT. And there's no cop out about "a format fucked compatible mailer can unfuck it" Because there's now that sodding '>' in front. *You* fucked it, and you're trying to frame mutt. Shame on you. FOAD. HAND. HTH. Nicholas Clark
From: Robin Stephenson Date: 16:43 on 06 Jun 2007 Subject: OpenNMS I've just wasted two man days trying to figure out why this benighted piece of software is sending duplicate alerts. Unfortunately, for some reason, it seems to be hard (maybe even impossible without starting from scratch) to locate the cause of the problem. Let's see: Lines of Code XML (481105) <-- most of these lines are enormously long of course Java (154324) JSP (20879) Shell Script (5360) SQL (3409) C (1492) Perl (1349) Python (1160) JavaScript (855) Lisp (412) numbers from http://krugle.com/kse/projects/Qd1CNfi
From: Yossi Kreinin Date: 12:02 on 06 Jun 2007 Subject: <event object="pants">wet</event> Dear Green Hills Software, If you have to dump core, just do it. I mean, congratulations - you are truly enlightened compiler writers, being able to figure out the stack trace and list it in (wow!) XML, but do you notice that you're doing all that dancing in front of me with your pants wet? You know, silently turning your back to me to go change them would be less embarassing after all. No, I'm not going to report the bug. I've reported way too much of them already. And this time, I bumped into about 4 in a row. I'm not your beta tester. Working around the bugs is easier than localizing and reporting them. Stupid XML-formatted-but-actually-binary stack trace follows. <troubleinfo version="1"> <signal><signo>SIGSEGV</signo><code>SEGV_MAPERR</code><addr>0x53fbdd94</addr></signal> <stacktrace> <frame><addr>0x081fb0ac</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x081e6f4d</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x081fafd8</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x081fb150</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x081ece5a</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x081ed0f1</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x081fb294</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x08201bb3</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x08154739</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x0829995e</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x084c9b01</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x084dc1c0</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x084dc392</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x084dcd97</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x084dd43e</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x08346f5d</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x08347014</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x084bdd0f</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x4008bd17</addr></frame> <frame><addr>0x0804aa0c</addr></frame> </stacktrace> <prog>ecommip</prog><feature>2201</feature><host>56</host><version>7</version> <rundir>/usr/local/green-4.3.0-mips/linux86</rundir> <builddir>zip:/home/zip/checkouts/devl/linux86-ecom</builddir> <what>Green Hills Software, MULTI v4.3.0 MIPS</what> <timeslot slot="0">1143111073</timeslot> <timeslot slot="6">1143112506</timeslot> </troubleinfo> ecommip: error: An internal error has occurred. ecommip: error: The xml output has been included above. "", line 767: Internal Program Error (11)
From: Andrew Black - lists Date: 21:07 on 05 Jun 2007 Subject: Creating an account on a website - going round in circles..... How many times have I gone to a form Username : AndrewB Password: xxxxx Password again: xxxxx email: Graphic to check you are really human : Submit Sorry AndrewB is taken Change to AndrewBlack Sorry you must give a password (been cleared down) Type password twice Sorry AndrewBlack is taken Change to AndrewDBlack Add password - remembered to put it this time Sorry must put in the letters from the graphic Do that but forgot to put password this time Put password in but don't notice the graphic has changed. Sorry AndrewDBlack is taken (by me a minute ago but I got confused and didn't realise I had succeeded .... Why can't it check your username is sensible before all the other things. I guess with Ajax you can
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 11:40 on 01 Jun 2007 Subject: Firefox DOM Inspector When I have a line selected in the DOM inspector, and I *drag* the scrollbar, what do you think I want to do? a: Scroll? b: Initiate a drag-and-drop? And teasing me by giving me 'a' for half a second then swapping to 'b' isn't endearing you to me. Nicholas Clark
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi