[Lincs] List Politics (Allows / Banned topics)

[James Taylor]

>>
>> * notable exception is that I've acquired a machine on Friday. It hasn't
>> been broken yet. I say yet, I've only had six days, however to counter
>> ballance that one, the machine given to me on my first day at my
>> programming job 1) didnt have the cd drive plugged in and 2) didnt have
>> the right kernel modules for its network card (or rather , it did when
>> it was running redhat but when I installed debian it didn't). Notably,
>> on my third day at that job, I truncated the customer database.
>
> LOL... well done, that sounds like the type of luck i have!
>
Well let me get this straight - I break computers because I push cheap 
computers to the edge and I *use* them. What do you mean you can't have 
four webcams on Usb1.0 - why not? this robot I'm building NEEDS to be 
able to look in four directions at once - Why Can't i make them all just 
talk at a lower rate? Why can't I ssh into the computer that I have 
stashed at my parents and x-forward over that - what do you mean my 
mother wants to use her bandwidth? Pah! What do you mean that you can't 
expect a virtual machine to be able to run a heavy apache server, the 
mysql server, the pg server, the mail server, the spam assassin stuff, 
the custom cron scripts, the auto updater, the radius server and the 
authentication server AND occasionally a civ-server not to mention 
ventrillo and then do stupid maths puzzles in its spare cycles?

Then you have the inquisitive side of me - One bad example is we had 
these Lego robot bricks (some fancy electronics in there) and we had to 
keep care of them, and we where writing in a language called Not Quite 
C, or as well called it, Nothing Like C. Well the OS on the brick was 
useless, and unbeknownst to me at the time, that its memory allocation 
sucked. What should have been a General Protection Error (BSOD) it 
actually allowed me to do, and because of a daft memory arrangment, I 
could overwrite the operating system with my current data that I was 
saving. I thought I was being clever organising my array in memory and 
starting my memory off from position 0 (or as I thought, my virtual 
memory 0, not the REAL memory 0).

Then you have the stupid side of me. There are times when I've worked 
all day and done a few more hours at night for my personal stuff. Theres 
been times at three in the morning where I've, just fixed the server, 
everythings gone ok and typed sudo shutdown -h now into my local host 
and wondered why all I see is "connection disconnected by remote"... oh, 
you have to log out of live before commands work on local. Tiredness 
causes more programming bugs, and more Server Admin mistakes then 
stupidity, and we expect admins to fix problems on a friday night when 
they've had a crap week and just need to sleep. So the more computers 
you work with, the more stories you have, and the faster you learn. Any 
Sys-Admin who refuses to admit he's made mistakes just means he isn't 
good enough to realise that they've cocked up.

And finally you have the honest mistake. I planned a deployment 
including 12 steps, but steps four and five where backwards, and that 
broke the system and cost the company real cash, something that couldnt 
go back on and restore from backup, we're talking really bad stuff.

I'ld like to state that working has calmed me down a *lot*. I now 
document and keep a lab book. I plan my programs, and try to be an 
engineer rather then a hacker [code wise dont start an argument about 
meaning of the word]. I used to rush into a project and get a solution 
then worry about the user experience, and would evolve the project as it 
went along. And, saying that I've written more code, that's both better 
and won't require re-writing this year then I've ever written, even 
though I seemly waste months at a time just "writing".

So yeah, I've got time for people who make mistakes or don't know what 
they're doing as long as they're honest about that and respect that.

JT