Arbeit Macht Frei

Work rant. Only interesting to geeks.

I’m working at a client site. Last week I had to ask the person who runs their testing team whether they test a particular feature before releasing their software.

The staffperson figured the best way to find out would be to do a text search on the files they use for testing. Nothing could be simpler, right?

Well, not so fast! This person was a unix weenie. So she opened up a commandline window and entered a find command and piping that into grep. Not so simple, but I guess it works for some.

Well, not really. See, those files had spaces in their names, which causes unix to gag unless you know how to deal with them. Our heroine didn’t. I continued to stand around, waiting for an answer, while she dorked around in a laborious attempt to enter random command options in hopes that something would work.

After several minutes of watching this farce, I suggested she consider using Windows’ find utility, which would have done the job in less than fifteen seconds, without having to rely on her all-too-fallible monkey brain’s recollection of unix’s intentionally difficult-to-use command set. My comment wasn’t even given the honor of a grunt.

After a few more minutes, our erstwhile heroine looked at me and mumbled, “I guess I’m going to have to write a perl script.” Yeah, you’re going to recreate an entirely new text search utility from scratch, when there’s a perfectly good one built into Windows, and when a little RTFM action might allow you to perform the function in the precious unix you apparently don’t know as well as you think…

But then the topper came. “I wonder if Eclipse has anything that would do this?” Yeah. I imagine a full, bloated Java IDE would have a search function built into it. Of course, that’s a bit like using a Boeing 747 to deliver your pizza, when there’s a perfectly good car standing nearby.

This is why it’s important to be technology agnostic. Your favorite tool may be great at one thing, but it’s not the only tool there is, and often other tools will do a better or faster job at solving your problem. A carpenter whose toolkit only includes one belt sander is pretty stupid, and it’s downright pathetic when he doesn’t even know how to use that properly…

Not to open up the whole OS wars thing, but I’ve never seen the appeal of unix, and I’ve worked on it a fair amount. Its editors suck, and its command syntax sucks. Not that Windows is much better. It’s incredibly inefficient bloatware, and is ludicrously susceptible to system hangs and crashes. And Macs remain an oddity, never anything more than a footnote in the personal computer’s evolution.

I stopped using IBM’s VM/CMS mainframe operating system back in 1994, but there are things I still miss about it. It was stable. Its commands were powerful *and* intuitive at the same time (OMG!!!). And in the two dozen years that I’ve been coding under other operating systems, I’ve never found another editor that could hold a candle to Xedit. In fact, I’m composing this very article in Kedit, an excellent Windows port of Xedit. It rules, although I'm also thinking about checking out THE

And while I’m ranting about work, how about this one? After struggling with mysterious database connection issues and seemingly resolving them, I was asked to walk some of the client’s clients through part of the system. In the middle of the demo, the system starts having database connection issues. I have to abandon the demo in shame and attempt to triage the issue.

What did I find out two hours later? The client’s client’s IT people were in the server room, physically moving the server around, and kicked the power cord, dropping the entire database machine. Great. They have all kinds of siloed testing and formal processes to move programs from testing through production, but they pay a generous salary to a big hairless ape who randomly takes the server boxes out for constitutional strolls around the server room! Gee, what are we gonna do today, Brain?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in more than a decade of consulting, it’s that no clients (and certainly no client’s client) should ever be allowed to touch a computer.

They're looking out for our health

Another work-related post. This one’s of more general interest.

Men’s bathroom has two sinks, and a sign which reads: All Foodservice Employees MUST wash their hands with soap and warm water for 20 seconds before returning to work!

First problem: There is no hot water. At all. It’s all cold. It’s not even room temperature.

Second problem: The water will not run unless you are actively pressing on the faucet handle. Since the water shuts off the moment you take your hand off it, it’s actually impossible to wash your hands properly. There’s no way to rinse your hands and leave without touching the faucet handle, which you (and others) have already contaminated with your dirty hands!

Third problem: Uhh, hello? There aren’t any male foodservice employees in the building’s cafeteria, nor have there been in the eight months I’ve been here.

I’m glad someone got paid good money to make and install that sign, tho. It’s good to know that someone cares about the safety of the food they serve here!

My world and welcome to it

Some good article pointers. Cred to somervillian for the bike-related ones.

Married Bed Death and Sexual Play

Several good points here, like porn and BDSM having value, men not being depicted as sexual predators, and so forth.
 

Male Bisexuality

Interesting points, not just about sexuality as a continuum rather than two discrete opposites, but also how sexuality can vary, leading to a host of problems for people who cling tightly to the idea of sexuality as an “identity”.
 

The Most Energy Efficient Method of Transportation in the World

Especially good is the last set of data, where it’s shown that an automobile requires FIFTY TIMES more energy per mile travelled than a bike.
 

The Most Popular Method of Transportation in the World

And here’s another interesting tidbit: there are three and a half times as many bikes on the road as there are cars. So you’d better get used to ’em!