Whack-a-mole

This go around with Linux, I'm working with RHEL 4.3, which is admittedly pretty nice. I'm very pleased with most of it, and consider it to be a fine OS. However, I have serious issues with this company. When I reported a bug in one of their configurators (bugzilla 208289), they told me that they knew about the bug, and that it was fixed in Rawhide. They even told me how to fix the problem I was having. Only, the fix didn't actually, you know, work. They also suggested that I contact Redhat support if I needed a fix for 4.3 (as opposed to 5.0, which isn't out yet). I began doing that, but when I filled out the ticket, the form exploded with a big fancy ORA-P00P01 message in red text (on a grey background! eeks!). Now, despite the fact that, as a customer, I should never have seen the ORA message, and despite the fact that they're using Oracle on a Free operating system (when Postgres is tres fancy and more Free by lots), and despite the fact that this created a work stoppage for me, two things really piss me off.

First, when I complained that their system was broken, we got a rather-too-glib message back saying that the reason it crashed was the explanation I gave them was "too long." I guess that is plausible enough, so I didn't think too much more about it. I've been sick, so I wasn't in the office to trim it down and retry the ticket. What bugs me about this is that they did not test to see if this was the case. They pointed the finger at me, the customer, and said that I had fucked up, when they didn't know for sure. That's an assumption that pisses me off. Much though Sergei Tsarev and I disagreed on some things, one thing he taught me when I worked for him at AOL was to always back up what I was saying with a repeatable, demonstrable use case. If I am going to say that one of our peers or customers is a fuckup, I had better be able to prove it. So, in this case, I would have created a test case to make sure that a long error message borked the database before telling the customer to piss off. This is not what happened here.

Second, I am very unimpressed with what is broken in their support system. As it turns out, when you include text with the characters (# foobar) in the "problem summary" (analogous to the "subject" in an email), the backend craps and says that there's a problem with the ticket. Now, this doesn't sound like much, but you really need to think about how this happens. The only way the database actually cares about what is in that field is if it is evaluating the text in it. That is fucking retarded, with a capital J. Your application should be truncating the text to fit into the box you provided the user (or spitting it back at the user), and it should be doing some nominal filtering to make sure what the user is providing isn't, as Sungo liked to say, a 2GB TIFF file. Because users will do shit like that to you. They see a box that says "please enter your first name" and some motherfucker is going to give you eight hundred thousand words out of a three century old Zoroastrian text. So their coding here is 100% amateur.

That's pretty disappointing. It tells me that while RHAT may have some gifted people doing development for them on the Linux end of things, that elsewhere in their company they have a few pretty typical low-end people. Microsoft strove to overcome that image, and I don't think they've ever done it. Apple has been putting themselves more and more in that category every day (in their defense, they added millions of inept users to the fray with the release of the iPod. now, the people who work for the company are sick of the "wah wah, there's sand in my panocha, please fix my ipod" complaints, and pretty much blame the customer by default). It's a truly rare company that cares about evaluating these sorts of situations to make sure they don't look like a complete ass. Sergei was right to push me (and all of us) very hard in that direction. If RHAT had actually evaluated any of the things they'd said to me, before firing off some glib email, I would be sitting here tremendously impressed, rather than wondering how the OS can be getting better, while the company can be getting worse.

I almost miss the frontier days of Linux... you know, when people who were using Linux were all geeks because, hell, you couldn't run it unless you were a geek. This meant if you sent an email to the guy who maintained the SCSI driver for your particular computer, he knew what was wrong if you presented a bug to him. Same for the company. RHAT used to be a company full of bright people like Alan Cox. Now it seems they've started recruiting people from the Dell support department.

Tsk. It's pretty sad that they've managed to reduce the overall very good impression of RHEL 4.3 made on me. I'm back to thinking, "well, Linux is an okay operating system for me to hack on and play with at home, but when my job counts on the software (and the company behind it) working and supporting me, I'm going to go with a company like Sun that actually understands." Casper Dik is a shining example of what companies like RHAT need to recruit and retain.

This concludes today's public service announcement.

&c...

I have switched to the beta of blogger, at Google's insistence. No doubt, it will catch fire tonight whilst I sleep.

I have received my first spam, despite Google's best efforts (hah) to prevent it. ftw.

How are you feeling? Well, thanks for asking. Feverish, sure. Congested? Yep. Coughing and spluttering? Yep. Bloody noses? Uh-huh. But, my patented fungiometer (the one installed right above my jaw) is indicating I've been hijacked by a virus. The cursed bugs seem to be cowering in their soup of bifidus, acidophilus, and spite.

I'm not dead yet.

It's Julian's fault.

Just when I was starting to think that maybe the 535i or 550i is "enough car" (despite both their failing to beat the 'ru down Akina), I run across this from Julian. You know, it's bad enough that I watch the various car mangas, and read the magazines, drive the goddamn STI, and test drive cars for fun without him showing me videos like that. I was just cooling off from that when I headed over to the pharmacy to pick up the next round of drugs (more cough syrup, more nasal decongestant, and antibiotics, just-in-case) when I ran across this monstrosity in European Car. Good grief! It's one of the new 3 series cars (which I'm not especially fond of) with a fucking 5L V10 out of an M5!

I was just telling Cormac that maybe, just possibly, I didn't need an M5. That, really, using 500hp on the street isn't that easy anyways. And, with that money I could pay to put a proper RB26 in the poor Z (currently lurking in an Arlington garage). I mean, would I really think "gosh, I wish I had an M5" as I'm out driving my 535 or 550? That twin-turbo six is pretty swanky, and it's not as if the V8 sucks at all. We could probably even get a 535xi sportswagon and I could go tearassing around Akina and Usui tail-wide in a wagon. Nice, that. But, given I'd be leasing the car (it just doesn't make sense to buy a BMW, not as a second car, that's for sure), I can't just tack on more power when/if I want it. If I start with the M5, I won't ever think "gosh, I need to put more power in this car." It's right under the ///M button, under my right thumb.

M5! M5! M5! M5!

And now I have somebody to blame for the car payment. We'd be in the neighborhood of $RENT per month in car notes, but we'd also have damn close to a thousand horsepower (more, considering el Z) on tap for the next appearance of Mount Akagi's white, black, and red comet(s).

It is satisfying to think about being able to put the hurt on some M3 owning java programmer with either sauerkraut (the preferred dish of bavarian ass-whuppers) or fried rice (which we seem to be dining on frequently). The Z? Hm. Minamata Hamachi? No rice, really.. Just a smelly, crusty, polluted (but oh-my-god-what-just-crushed-my-skull) fishslice.

And it's Julian's fault. I swear.

Photos from the NoVA Bush

moon_detail_final.png,
originally uploaded by avriette.

Went out to Shenandoah to see the stars and moon, hunt for mushrooms and other fungus. Unfortunately, it was tres cold out there, and it appears I've gotten my cold back. Or a cold, anyways, because it doesn't really look like the candida has returned. On the other hand, it's my throat and lungs that are bothering me, not my mouth. So maybe I managed to piss off my immune system enough that it could come back, and it just hasn't attacked me as thoroughly as before yet. I am half tempted to go to the doctor's just to get some nystatin as a preventative measure.

I'm thinking of getting one of the Takahashi refractors and the DSLR adapter for stuff like this. They have a little portable one with a triplet reducer (it's tiny) that should make stuff like this turn out a lot better. Maybe could get a Ca-K filter for it, too.

We also had a look at the lodge at Big Meadows. Looks like it would be an excellent place to go stay this winter. The 'ru is certainly the car to take out there, yeah?

Confusion

I've known that the speedometer in the Subaru is a little optimistic. When the cops are nice enough to leave those automatic radar thingies sitting around, our speedo always reads an indicated +2-3 mph, depending on how fast we're going (you know, say 30-55mph in town).

I have also heard from NASIOC, a couple people at the dealer, and some of the informal Subaru crowd that I know. The top speed of an unmodified STI is "145 mph, drag-limited." In the past, the STI has been able to reach an indicated 135 mph. This was in 6th gear, walking up from 80 mph and backing off at 135. Today, we had some competition on the course. So we made a trip up to 110 mph, again walking up in 6th. Feeling confident that the car was okay, we decided to ditch the competition, which was sticking to us a little more closely than we'd like, and walked up to 130 mph, indicated. Sandy and I both decided the competition was still closer than we wanted -- we wanted more room between us and them for the bends in the course. So the next time they got close to us, rather than walking up in 6th, I shifted down into 5 at 80 mph, and pulled all the way to 120 mph (not quite 7000rpm), went into 6th, and pulled again, up to 145 mph. I was kind of shocked, I expected to hit some sort of brick wall in power. No such thing. The competition eventually came back to us (we were sort of lounging our way around). This time, I decided to put a lot of room between us, and went back down to 5, pulled up to 120 (with a brief excursion into 7250rpm), and again up to and through 145. We ran out of room for a slight right uphill bend, and I backed off. At an indicated 155+ mph. This, in 6th gear, with no indication of a lack of power (which is what "drag limited" means), at about 6,000 rpm. So I get the impression that we'd be able to do 160-165mph, indicated, when we run out of tach. Mind you, the climb up from 120 to 155 takes a little while (maybe 10 seconds), and it's at 100% boost the whole way. So I don't think that doing 120-165 mph and then bouncing off the rev limiter is the hottest idea, anyways. The question of the day, though, is whether 165 mph indicated is actually 145 mph, or maybe if the 2006 is a little faster, or even if our factory-installed cat-back gives us more top end.

Heaven knows the aero is howling at that speed, a high pitched whining-howling noise. However, the car is tucked down to the ground, and behaves as I expect it to.

Worth mentioning is the more or less lack of braking power after these consecutive straight-of-ways. However, unlike some of the footage we've seen, there were no sparks from the pads, no smoke, not even a funny or unhappy smell. The brakes just faded. After pulling into the pit, I had a good thorough look at the car. Everything looked as it should: brake fluid looked fine, oil looked fine (and not aerated), radiator was content, brake rotors looked fine, and pads looked fine. It appears that we just need to get better pads on the car. I think probably some Porterfield R4S's are in order, and we will probably be fine.

Also worth mentioning is my getting the inside front wheel to hop and chirp on a sharp downhill right at about 85mph not too long ago under maximum-effort braking. So it would seem that under most circumstances, the brakes are pretty well sorted out for the car.

Our competition? A slightly modified RSX Type S. Of course not much of a match -- I did say we were lounging. His response to the speed and pulling away? "Is that thing stock? Man, I need to get forced induction."

We also found Northern Virginia's Usui Pass. e-mail me if you need to be put in contact with the Sil-80.