it is 0657 on sunday, 27 february. i have been in the office since 0900 yesterday; awake since 0700. i went to sleep friday night at about 0300 saturday morning. before that, i had been awake since 0600 friday.
i think i am seeing colors.sitting here listening to The Charm of the Highway Strip — which makes pretty darn good working music, by the way — and actually getting work done. feeling pretty good about today, thus far, which is odd and certainly unanticipated.
went out to kasey’s last night for beers with johnny and whirl, and unexpected others turned up, which was a good time. we talked about bingo and the shitty shitheads at insurance companies, argued over which Who album was the best (i, of course, voted for Quadrophenia, mick for Who’s Next, and whirl for Tommy), quizzed each other over various all-time favorite songs, and generally entertained ourselves. this is, i think, part of the reason that i’m in a good mood today. after-work decompression is an important part of continuing one’s ability to put up with wack-ass nonsense during the work day. for the record, i found it extremely difficult to pick out any all-time favorite songs, but said that “Everyday” by Buddy Holly and “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead were definitely right up there, along with Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” beyond that, i found it too difficult to assign ranks, even within categories. such is life. oh well. back to beating up on sendmail and pals for me.don’t hold me too tightly, don’t whisper my name
sad-eyed baby, i’m not that kind of girl,
when the dice stop rolling, there’s no more to the game.
ugh. am so frazzled with everything at work i can barely remember what day of the week it is. much less the date; i have to look over to my calendar, then think about what day it is (usually in terms of “well, X was due today, so it must be Tuesday/Wednesday/whatever”).
today was the day whereupon we turned harper into a mailserver. that was fun. except for the part where apparently you can’t override the values that sendmail automatically populates $w with. you can add values, but i’m damned if i can figure out how to eliminate entries that it has acquired via gethostbyname(3) or other mystical means. this seems to be just plain stupid, to me, and so i figure that i must be wrong. i mean, i must be, because surely no one would be so stupid. right? in twenty years of development no one else thought of a case where one might want to wipe out $w and start over? i must be wrong. this is what i keep telling myself. and yet, and yet… if you can do it, they did a bloody brilliant job of hiding the documentation as it’s apparently not on sendmail.org, in the bat book, or anywhere google indexes. (situation: this machine “harper” needs to deliver mail for a hostname, “cshell.uchicago.edu.” however, it absolutely needs to *not* deliver as local mail addressed to “harper.uchicago.edu.” this is primarily because for the past five thousand years or whatever, harper has been quasi-interchangeable with @uchicago.edu (don’t ask) for the purposes of addressing mail. but now harper’s a mail server for only a very few people who don’t want to leave unix mail. so all the majority of people who have been using an address @harper for all these many years are not actually “harper mail” users, so harper must not deliver mail as though they are. however, sendmail stuffs “harper” into $w and i can’t seem to find a way to force it back out. i can’t use virtusertable because that takes effect only after local deliveries; i can’t use mailertable because that only affects hosts not in $w. i can’t manually set w with a C line because that only adds values. ARRRGH! i ended up having two completely separate sendmail configurations; one in the default sendmail.cf which is a nullclient and blindly forwards everything back up to the mail exchangers, and the other is the config for the listener. so the listener believes it’s harper, but it shouldn’t actually ever *get* any mail for a harper user; meanwhile, locally-created messages get the “duh, i dunno” response and harper just passes it up to uchicago.edu. OH BOY DID I HAVE FUN WITH ALL THAT THIS MORNING.) finally i get harper up and done (or so i think…) and we discover, via this really catty email from a user (because that’s how you get a response out of those slovenly, slacker computer people, you know; they’re like oxen, you have to hit them for their own good), that a software update i applied to puremessage last night blew away some of our customizations to the end-user interface; notably, bits of the authentication subsystem. that’s okay. people didn’t really need to log in or anything. get that fixed, and then harper’s nfs decided to flake out, which of course brings incoming mail to a grinding halt because without home directories we can’t read .forwards, etc., so i have to drop fucking everything to reboot the machine in the middle of the damn day. blah de fucking blah. did i mention i got to work at 2 this morning? today sucks. i want to go home.backstory: we’ve been having some minor difficulty with some of our anti-spam systems, because they keep running out of disk space. i opened a trouble ticket after about the third time that running out of disk space resulted in breaking the product’s update management software, requesting that they change the package manager to stop truncating its “here’s what i have installed!” file. tech support told me to stop running out of disk space. i’m kind of proud of this analogy.
I’m sorry, but from a programming standpoint, that’s not an acceptable answer. C’mon, seriously. That’s like saying that if you run out of gas on a deserted country road in east Texas on a dark moonless night and have no way to get back to civilisation, when the Beastman comes out of the woods and tears your car into bits and eats all your favorite CDs, you just have to make sure that you never run out of gas. While that’s fine advice in principle, a better response would be to be prepared in the event that the Beastman attacks you so you can recover. In real life, just as sometimes you run out of gas when the Beastman is on the prowl, sometimes you run out of disk space when ppm is trying to make a write. And much like carrying Beastman repellent while travelling through east Texas, checking to make sure that you have enough disk space to write a new copy of the ppm.xml file before you smash the old one is a good way to lead a happy, long life. Yes, yes, there’s a backup, that’s well and good, but it would be even better if you never corrupted the live one to begin with. (And if you can’t do that, at least throwing a giant glaring message out on standard error that says “Yo! Your ppm.xml file is now worthless! Go restore the backed up version or suffer the consequences!” would be nice.) grumpily,
–sabrina
seriously. how hard is it to (a) write the new ppm.xml file, (b) check status and size and make sure it is what it ought to be, then (c) move the existing ppm.xml file to the backup file, then (d) finally move the temp ppm.xml file to be the real ppm.xml file? sheesh.
also, that analogy was drawn on slightly-exaggerated real life experience: i almost did run out of gas on a country road in east texas last summer. fortunately, i passed through some tiny podunk town when i was down to like 30 miles left on the tank. which is good, because i wouldn’t want the beastman to attack and eat all my favorite CDs.i had wild boar for lunch on saturday. it was v. good.
hey bill — as it turns out, we are bad people. i love iTunes music sharing. one, because it lets me listen to music that i don’t own — the beforementined Melissa, a little bit ago, and now eighties Michael Jackson — but also because it gives me endless fodder for mocking the students with laptops. because, you see, iTunes lets you assign your computer an arbitrary name for sharing your music. currently in the lineup i see, among others:- ????
- allison’s musicccc — – the extra C’s stand for cwality!
- B is for Bethlehem (1949 Songs/5.1 Days) — that’s nice, dear
- Brightly Colored and Shiny — finally, a name i can support!
- Eric Ottesen (A REALLY random collection) — listen, you do the sharing, i’ll do the determining of what’s “REALLY” random.
- If you want to listen to History lectures, rock on.
- In Societ Russia, the music listens to YOU (AIM: [someid]) — one of my favorite naming trends is putting your IM handle in there. presumably so people can IM you and go “my god, your music collection is so fucking excellent that i want to have all your little babies.”
- old punks never die, sadly — i’m pretty sure that’s max’s computer…
- So much to do…So few people to do it for me. — amen.
- Thom’s got yah ass (aim: [someid]) — well, that’s good, as Thom’s apparently got no spelling skillz, and will need a career to fall back on after he flunks out of the Harris School.
- and my favorite advert-bearing title, Visit policyforum.blogspot.com — i can’t wait to open up *your* music collection and listen to all those fabulous dance hits like Henry Kissinger singing “I Wanna Sex You Up” and Sandra Day O’Connor’s “I Touch Myself.”
… oh, shit. that last bullet point gave me a really unhappy mental image.
