ARGH!

Supervisor: I need you to take over development of X.
Me: Sure. What do you want me to do?
S: Oh, nothing for now. Focus on Y and Z (both long term goals) first.

(a month later)

Me: Ok, whoever wrote this in the first place didn't plan for any changes - in fact, most of the code is either broken or held together with spit and string. Here is a list of things that don't work.
S: Ok, but keep forcusing on Y and Z. Also, we don't have funding for X any more, so we're putting it on hold.

(2 months later)

S: WHERE ARE THE FIXES FOR THE BUGS YOU FOUND? THIS IS DUE IN 2 WEEKS!
Me: ... Ok, I'll get on it.

(next day)

Me: Ok, here is a demo of the things I changed to fix (half the bugs on the list + others that I found while coding)
S: OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU SHOULD ONLY FIX THE PROBLEMS, NOT ADD ANY FEATURES.
Me: ... These ARE the bug fixes.
S: NO NO DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING UNTIL I APPROVE IT, WE DON'T HAVE FUNDING FOR IT! JUST FIX THE BUGS.
Me: (just shoot me now)

Repeat after me:

A master document is not a tree. It can be viewed as a tree, but when an element has more than one parent, it is not a tree, no matter how badly you wan to call it one. NOT. A. TREE.

Also, displaying the content of a set of elements is not coupled to how said elements are stored. That's called designing before implementing, and using wrappers for displaying.

STOP!

One of these days I'm going to flip out. I'm sick and tired of almost getting run over by drivers that think that a red light or stop sign mean "slow down in case there's a cop around watching". AND THE BIKE LANE IS NOT A DAMN TURNING LANE!

Robot drivers. I can't wait for them.

F you, GE and Sylvania

I really loathe GE and Sylvania for advertising their extra-bright headlight bulbs. No, people don't need to see further so that they can drive faster. People need to get a bloody clue and not drive at breakneck speeds at night, and they need to learn to use the damn high beams. There is NO reason for having excessively bright headlights on at all times.

DON'T PANIC!

I'm getting tired of all the news articles regarding people being outraged at the CERN staff for building the LHC. No, they're not going to blow the Earth to smithereens. Or have it sucked into a black hole. Or turn it into cosmic gravy. Or open a portal to the 8th dimension. And for chrissakes, don't feed trolls like Mark Millar. It's already bad enough that he's a narcissistic, sexist bastard. Don't make him a preacher.

Anathem

I recently picked up Neal Stephenson's latest work, Anathem. It is a fascinating piece of literature, not only because of the science fiction in it, but particularly because NS's novels are very well-researched. He covers topics from a wide variety of fields, spanning geometry, rhetorics, metaphysics, cosmology, and sociology among others. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a fictional work that does a great job at meta-inspection of the knowledge of Western society.

Leopard firewall issues:

Symptoms:

• The firewall will ask you if you want to allow configd and mDNSResponder when you boot up.
  
• Adding the above to the allow list for applications does NOT fix the issue.
• Restoring the com.apple.kerberos.kdc keychains does NOT fi the issue.
  
• Setting the firewall to "allow all incoming connections" temporarily fixes the problem.

Probable cause:

• You removed the battery from your machine, or let it drain, or the OS was not shut down before powering off the machine.

Solution (for me):

• Reset the firewall configuration by restoring /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf.plist

Edit: Nope, that didn't fix it either. And coreaudiod is on the fritz too. I'm thinking of just disabling the alf altogether (e.g. prevent it from starting in the first place).

Rodent woes

The other day I was worried because my mouse (a VX Revolution) was acting up.  It was jumpy, laggy, and generally unresponsive.  Nothing I did to the mouse would make it work better.  I changed the battery - no change.  I Unplugged and re-plugged the receiver - no change.  I changed to a different mousepad, to the table surface - no change.  I was despairing, because the mouse is no older than a month, and other than that episode of unresponsiveness, it was working great.  And then it hit me.  The mouse works on the 2.4GHz band.  My router works on the 2.4GHz band.  I was, at the moment, doing a CVS checkout of considerable size.  Putting 2 and 2 together, I stopped the download, and BAM! - The mouse was working again.  Lesson learned?  Not everything wireless is wonderful.  I am still keeping my mouse - but I am considering switching my home network to 802.11n gear and let it work on the 5GHz band.