I click when I walk.
I wear cheap steel toes, and the heel of the sole wears down such that gravel gets into the honeycombing, but then can’t get out again, and it rattles around when I walk.
This morning, I was thinking about how I might miss the sound when I get around to replacing these shoes. Then just now, as I was walking back to my desk, one of my cow-orkers asked me why I make noise when I walk.
Much like the t-shirts, it would seem I’ve gathered another expected affectation.
Upgrading 30+ different kinds of UNIX boxes’ STAF installations is a pain in the but under the best of circumstances. It’s made all the more annoying be a recent development where their “InstallAnywhere” installer will randomly fail with:
Stack Trace:
java.util.zip.ZipError: jzentry == 0,
…
This Application has Unexpectedly Quit: Invocation of this Java Application has caused an InvocationTargetException. This application will now exit. (LAX)
Out of the 4 times it’s happened so far today, 3 times I was able to get past the error by just trying the install again, after removing any leftover /tmp/install.dir entries. I might have been able to do that with the 1st failure as well, but I tried a different build package first that time.
UPDATE: Oh great, a new error on zlinux,
./STAF345-setup-zlinux-32.bin
Preparing to install…
Extracting the JRE from the installer archive…
Unpacking the JRE…
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive…
Configuring the installer for this system’s environment…
strings: ‘/lib/libc.so.6′: No such file
Launching installer…
./STAF345-setup-zlinux-32.bin: line 2472: /tmp/install.dir.2598/Linux/resource/jre/jre/bin/java: No such file or directory
./STAF345-setup-zlinux-32.bin: line 2472: exec: /tmp/install.dir.2598/Linux/resource/jre/jre/bin/java: cannot execute: Bad address
# ls -l /tmp/install.dir.2598/Linux/resource/jre/jre/bin/java
-rwxr-xr-x 1 1003 513 58042 Dec 14 2009 /tmp/install.dir.2598/Linux/resource/jre/jre/bin/java
We have a push to production today for the project I work on. My go-live task is to verify the support website is updated correctly, so I’ve been waiting all day for the message that the process is done. The message comes, so I begin my task, and find that the person who sent the message didn’t bother to make sure they’d actually finished the task successfully. EVERY page is a 404, so she didn’t even make a single attempt to verify her work.
GRAR.
We use a kanban board at work. Somewhen between friday and monday, someone put a card up in my section, as a highest-priority-customer-affecting-issue, “Get Coffee”, with a number that doesn’t appear in our bug tracking system. No one in our department admits to putting it up there, and I don’t drink actual coffee at all, haven’t for years. I did use to go with my morning breakfast buddy to the nearest Starbucks so he could drink his water down coffee (aka Americano), and I used to be able to get a half-decent hot chocolate, until they dropped the Signature line. Maybe someone from Starbucks corporate broke into the office over the weekend to encourage me to start going again?
I don’t recall doing anything stunningly sleepy last week that would provide a cognitive neighborhood in which to place such a card, as a joke, so I’m really at a loss as to why it’s there.
UPDATE: d’oh, I dunno how I spaced on Friday being april fools, or that 040111 parses into 04-01-11, not 040-111. I have marked the issue as blocked due to Starbucks no longer carrying the Signature hot chocolate.
I get that in the midst of a cooling failure, you’ve got to shut some machines down in the lab. What I don’t get is why you went through unplugging some machines at random, while leaving others still running, but in basically-dead-state so that they were still generating heat, but weren’t usable to anyone. And didn’t tell anyone.
I’m popping in and out of one of the computer labs, checking on something, and on my way out, I think I hear one of the machines beep. So, I reopen the door I was in the process of closing, and listen. listen. listen. nothing, OK, maybe I didn’t hear a beep.
Start to close the door, and again I hear the sound just as I’m about to finish closing the door. Argh, listen again. listen. listen. Still nothing.
Start to close the door, and again I hear the sound, but this time it’s an ah-ha moment. I’m hearing the door hinge, not a computer beep.
d’oh.
Sigh.
Oh developers.
I sympathize with your plight in making things look like they work the same as they used to, even though the underlying code has changed radically. That said, telling me the programming side of a problem is too ugly for you to consider attempting is not a reasonable reason to not fix a bug. How it looks to you isn’t half as important as how it looks to the customer. In the case of a security product, you can’t just start leaking information, even teeny bits, just because fixing the problem is ‘hard’. Our customers don’t pay for you to have an easy job, they pay for stuff to be consistently secure.
“Xid, you look like you’re wasting away!”
“in Margarittaville?” I replied with confusion.
“no, here at work”
Seems like a strange thing to say to someone.
I already had 3.5 weeks of vacation time I had to spend by the end of the year, and now there’s another 5 days (unpaid, sigh) I’ll have to take off in September alone. I’m thinking whatever I do, it has to be cheap, which probably means local. Maybe I can take the scooter on the ferry, see how far it can go with an assist. =p
I really wanted to take a ride on the zeppelin that’s visiting town, but at $400 for a ride, I think not, at least not anymore.
Nothing like finding a release stopping bug 24 hours after you burnt the final CD’s to send to manufacturing.
ARGH.