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From: Yossi Kreinin Date: 14:43 on 09 Dec 2006 Subject: Invalid Operating System I have a shared object built on 32 bit SuSE Linux. It loads and runs fine on 40 bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If I pass it to g++ to link with, though, I get: /path/name.so: could not read symbols: Invalid operation collect2: ld returned 1 exit status Running g++ under strace didn't make this more clear. nm reads symbols fine. objdump --syms --dynamic-syms is happy, and so is nm. So what does "invalid operation" mean, besides the very act of running g++ under RHEL? P.S. "gcc is not the operating system" is as valuable an observation in this context as "the barrel is not the gun". P.P.S. why does RHEL (or RHEL's tcsh, or some other sub-sucker of a larger sucker) lists terminated jobs after the command following a kill command, and not when they are actually terminated? P.P.P.S. why is tcsh located in different places in SuSE and RHEL? I'm not saying that one of the locations is right, just that, um, I don't /understand/ the person that saw the stupid program located in some stupid place and said "hmmm, I know a MUCH BETTER place!". What makes a human move a shell?
From: Patrick Quinn-Graham Date: 18:01 on 04 Dec 2006 Subject: smtp servers Dear smtpd* authors, Please please please make your smtp software stop sending Mail delivery failed type messages in response to Mail delivery failed type messages. I'm quite sick of the bounces in reply to bounces littering my postmaster inbox. with hate, Patrick * I don't know if there's any one smtpd that does this more than others, the two most recent seem to have been through qmail and exchange.
From: David Mackintosh Date: 16:27 on 27 Nov 2006 Subject: Veritas NetBackup. So as a consultant who gets to go different places to do different things, I have managed to get exposed to both Veritas NetBackup and Bakbone NetVault. The latter will undoubtedly be the subject of a later email; today I'm being hindered by the former. See, in order to change the media in the robot for NetBackup, one must go to the robot, remove the media to be removed, and then add the media to be added. Oh wait no, there's another step: you must MANUALLY TELL THE SOFTWARE THAT THE CONTENTS OF THE ROBOT HAVE CHANGED. Oh wait no, there's another step: you must MANUALLY TELL THE SOFTWARE THAT THE CHANGES ARE TO BE REFLECTED IN THE SOFTWARE'S IDEA OF WHAT IS IN THE ROBOT. Because, you know, there are many reasons why you'd want the software's idea of what is in the robot to be inconsistant with what is _actually_ in the robot. Like for example... um wait no, I can't think of any. If you miss the last two steps, the software will try to load the media it thinks is wants, and then go and sulk because it isn't there. And if you have changed the tape you have been saving your backup databases on, you must manually go and tell the software to use a different tape (ie the tape which is _actually_ there) instead of the old tape (which is, you know, now gone). If you miss _this_ step, NetBackup will refuse to do _anything_. Including complain that there's something wrong, and you won't find out until the next week when you go to rotate out the weekly backups which never happened because NetBackup couldn't find a tape to dump its databases to. Say what you want about NetVault (and believe me I will), but it gets all this RIGHT. Which is stunning when you consider how much else NetFault gets WRONG. _HATE._
From: Michael Leuchtenburg Date: 22:01 on 20 Nov 2006 Subject: Excel's chart title sizing A very specific hate, I know. But there it is. I hate Excel's chart axis title sizing. Excel, very helpfully, automatically sizes the axis titles. However, it sizes the vertical ones WRONG. And then it doesn't let you resize them. Because, after all, it couldn't possibly have done it entirely incorrectly, cutting off most of the title. Nope. Totally impossible. It then proceeds to display resize handles on them. They're useless, of course. You can move the title around, but you can't resize it. And so the handles just sit there. Mocking me. At this rate, it would have been 10x faster to save the chart as an image and edit it in an image editor than it's been to make it work properly. HATE.
From: Timothy Knox Date: 07:44 on 20 Nov 2006 Subject: Hating the Mac OS X installer So Software Updater recently told me it wanted to update X11 and iTunes. No problem, sez I, 'cause neither one needed a restart (I hate that). Go ahead, sez I. And so it begins. After a few minutes, the installer pops up a dialog that says, "You must quit X11.app before updating it. OK?" (or words to that effect). I clicked "OK", expecting the installer to either quit X11 for me, or to stop the install. Nope! It just popped that d*mned dialog box, over and over AND OVER! HATE! Worse yet, when it got to be time to update iTunes, yes, you guessed it. The whole d*mn cycle repeated. HATE! HATE! HATE!
From: Roger Burton West Date: 02:16 on 19 Nov 2006 Subject: OpenSSL how I hate thee Verify return code: 21 (unable to verify the first certificate) Why can't you verify it? Does it perhaps not chain up to the CA certificate at which I have just pointed you? Or maybe the expiry date is confusing you. But you're not going to tell me. Sometimes you will say "unable to get local issuer certificate" instead. "Unable to get"? The file's there; could you not read it? Was it the wrong shade of pink? Evidently I am supposed to know what's wrong by my Kewl Psychic Powerz. Still, I have seen how much worse the alternatives are. Hate. (And sleep.) R
From: Yossi Kreinin Date: 17:56 on 18 Nov 2006 Subject: But WHY are you "Re-executing" yourself, you fucking wanker?!! I'm debugging a makefile. I have no fucking choice: I work on a system built with a big, hairy, stinking pile of intertwingled make snippets. Fuck my life. I need to support (GASP) *auto-generated* source files. Auto-generated *header* files are NOT AN OPTION: the bloody wanker will fail while generating dependencies of a not-yet-generated file - NO WAY to explain it that it should WAIT until it generates the damned file ITSELF several rules down the pipe. So I manually write kludgy headers which #ifdef on whether it's generating dependencies or not, and #include generated .h files when it is "safe". But I thought I can at least compile generated *source files*. So I have this program listing the source files to be generated and built. Never mind that if it prints errors, the fucking make system will treat the errors as source files and spectacularly fail. Conditionally calling $(error) from $(foreach) based on the results of $(shell) is not a thing I plan to do soon. The REAL problem is that currently I only have 2 ways of writing the wretched make code: Way #1 will fail to convince make to actually build the source files. Way #2 will convince it do that AND enter infinite recursion calling itself. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN #1 & #2 IS THE ORDER OF STATEMENTS. Not funny. Make is "designed" to make order of statements "unimportant" most of the time. Unless you spawn processes depending on values of variables. Or use := instead of =. Or mess with order of pattern-matching rules. Or... The problem is that I tried quite some permutations, and all I get is #1 or #2. And what does make -d, the ultimate debugging facility, tell us? "Re-executing: make <args>..." Fucking lousy masturbating piece of excrement. WHY, WHY, WHY would someone actually WRITE A NEW MAKEFILE using this "special-purpose" (but failing to complete any task useful for that purpose) language making tcsh, prolog and SQL sound like fun?? Even sed has a debugger written by some brainfuck-kind-of-hacking lover, but how does one debug THIS shit?? -- Yossi
From: Zach White Date: 02:58 on 18 Nov 2006 Subject: Undelete hatred Undeleting a file on a FAT32 disk is a pretty simple thing. You troll the FS looking for filenames that have been marked as deleted. Then you see if all the data for said file is available. You'd think that by now someone would have written a simple program to do that under some sort of open source license. Apparently not. Of the many programs listed on download.com as "free", half of them are crippled versions of costly utilities, 1/3rd of them only work for certain file types, and the rest aren't actually undelete utilities. I finally try FreeUndelete. It actually finds the files I'm after. So I click on the enclosing directory, tell it to restore, and I get a crash dialog. Lovely. I have to select each file individually. If it were only that, I wouldn't be writing this. No, it does the most infuriating thing any software can do. It pops up a dialog box. After. Every. Single. File. It. Recovers. HATE -Zach
From: Luke Kanies Date: 02:12 on 10 Nov 2006 Subject: RubyGems deciding version formats I currently spend all my time in Ruby, but I fortunately don't have to deal much with RubyGems. I say fortunately, because, like all software, it's hate-worthy. I personally think it's a bit more hate- worthy than it should be, and here's an example. Some people run released versions of my software. Some people use the software directly from Subversion. It's important to know which they're using when they're filing bugs, so I want some way to differentiate them. So, reasonably, I add 'svn' on to my version number. *I* don't mind. Ruby doesn't mind. But oh now, RubyGems declares that I cannot have a version number that looks like that: Malformed version number string 0.20.0-svn Yeah, thanks. This means I can't even use my Rakefile for anything, because it can't even create the gem task (which it always does, even if it won't be executing it). Stupid gems.
From: Nicholas Clark Date: 14:29 on 07 Nov 2006 Subject: muchoshite Word Sooo, sadly I appear to be compelled to be writing a document using muchoshite Word. And in among the row of icons at the bottom of the window there is a little book icon. And as I type it is animated. And this cutesy little motion distracts me. But try as I may, there is no obvious way to turn it off. KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN I want my SS20. And I know where I want to fire it. [And dear hateful london.pm mail archive, please give me my review back] Nicholas Clark
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Generated at 10:28 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi