When UI guidelines conflict. Which one do I click to cancel the defect?
Category: Rants and Stories
CA$1 Short
The Canucks fire Gillis. Oh happy god damn day.
Finally. If only we could rewind the last year or so of decisions this jackwagon has made. Only had to piss away two All-Star caliber goalies, lock up some aging veterans to illogical contracts, replace a stuffed shirt coach with a goon, and turn the farm system affiliates into an utter shambles before ownership finally saw the light.
Automation
Trying to automate all the crap we have to do since corporate policy doesn’t allow static service account/password combos any longer. Hey, no problem, we could use RSA keys. Except, hey, Windows doesn’t do that. So now we’re spending $FOO on some stupid utility to manage, in bulk, Windows service account logons. And $FOO is cheaper than figuring all of that out on our own. Oh, and for some reason one of the bog standard VMs we’re issued isn’t responding to RPC even though the other fifty or so do.
Who knows why? It must be a party!
Oh hai! What about all of the *nix boxes that need their sandbox tokens refreshed? Cool, we could use SSH from the same Windows box to run commands as a user remotely. Of course, Microsoft forgot to roll in an SSH client into their operating system. Oops!
“No problem, use PuTTY,” they say. And then you figure out that PuTTY is an utter dick about handling RSA key files. No way! Who would have ever thought doing something completely routine on any other operating system would be such a turdgargle when it comes to Microsoft?
How to solve? Install a bash client on the Windows box and then just do stuff right. Yet another afternoon lost to the joys of Microsoft. When can my employer start billing Redmond for my time?
Hit that O Face
Sometime reality television isn’t. Or, more probably, reality television is always a fictionalized take on reality that plays to everyone’s stereotypes and prejudices.
For an example we could look at Council Bluffs’ recent brush with fame. Jon “Bar Fistula” Taffer spent some time with the folks down at the O Face bar and created a documentary straight out of the Omaha collective mind [1]. I watched it and I was completely turned off by what I saw.
I also read that goldmine of Omaha dive bar information, Hit That Dive [2]. While a bit abandoned until very recently, HTD is a great resource for finding a neighborhood bar no matter what neighborhood you find yourself in anywhere near the metro area. Sometimes he gets distracted by non-essentials like who has the best hot wings, but for the most part, dead-on stuff.
HTD was pulled in by the Bar Rescue folks for background when they were looking at doing a series of shows in the area. From the beginning, he wrote about the way the show breaks from reality in order to provide a more entertaining television experience. This post [3] does a great job of summarizing the Bar Rescue experience in Omaha leading up to the unveiling of the O Face show.
The best, however, is a little video chat [4] reviewing what took place at O Face and some assertions that what transpired on everyone’s television set was more or less completely fabricated. Things that are false:
- The owner did not ring a bell when she wanted a drink, this was a prop brought in by the production staff
- The fight between the daughter and the shot girl was completely staged
- The two of them actually friends IRL
- Firing the daughter was pre-planned. She was “promoted” into that position months earlier so that the firing could be integrated into the show
That’s just a taste, and who’s to say they’re right? I know which way I lean, however, and I think it is sad that Taffer used the Tuck as a ratings boost given that everyone in the area already has the preconceived notion that this is how we roll. On the other hand, keeps the pretentious folks in Midtown/West O.
[1] http://www.barrescueupdates.com/2014/03/bar-rescue-oface-bar-update.html
[2] http://www.hitthatdive.com/
[3] http://www.hitthatdive.com/2014/03/hitthatdive-bar-rescue-omaha-weekend.html
[4] http://www.hitthatdive.com/2014/03/here-you-go-bar-rescue-fans.html
Opening day
Happy Selig-gimmick-free, Monday-afternoon-game-in-Cincinnati, real Opening Day.
Let’s play ball, gentlemen.
Wagon-free
A year and a few weeks since I last drank hard alcohol of any sort. I’m here to report things went much better this time. That and that a properly made old fashioned is a damn tasty beverage.
If I’d known the bartender was doing buy-backs I probably would have downed several more.
Groan
Actually groaned at me when I told him not to work too hard on my way out the door this morning.
The doomed
Went visiting the waterheads downstairs to answer version control questions. They wanted email added to a post-commit hook. I recommended subscribing to the RSS feed our installation of Fisheye provides. They didn’t know what RSS was.
They’re ostensibly web developers.
A little bit of me died on the inside.
Working smarter, not harder
New-to-me Windows DOS commands that are equivalent to bash commands that I always use. Another in a long series.
- runas [1]
- Equivalent to sudo, allows one to run commands as a different user assuming one knows the password for that user
- pushd [2]
- Maps a network location as a volume
- popd [3]
- Drops that mapping
Use them in combination and you’ve got remote filesystem mapping from the CLI amongst other ways of doing work on remote machines without having to actually remote out to them. I’ve learned three things today. Can I take the rest of the week off?
[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490994.aspx
[2] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490978.aspx
[3] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490969.aspx
It has begun
A sign my brain is out to get me:
All morning by brain has been singing to me a mash up of Billy Joel’s Big Shot and Run DMC/Aerosmith’s Walk This Way. Mostly it’s the words to Walk This Way as sung by Billy Joel and to Big Shot’s melody.
And I hate the musical stylings of Billy Joel.