Shroedinger’s iNode

“current” is a symbolic link to a directory.

[root@server dir]# rm current/
rm: cannot remove directory `current/': Is a directory
[root@server dir]# rm -f current/
rm: cannot remove `current/': Not a directory
[root@server dir]#

.. wait, what?

The Reduction Reduction and Other Things

Friday was a night fraught with two bottles of wine and samurai movies. It was that kind of week, you understand, and I needed some reminder that the world was a good place, somewhere.

Somehow, the next day I managed to ice skate, despite still processing a liter and a half of gewurtstraminer. Though it came out when two children decided I was an obstacle to be skated around.

“Child,” I said, “you do that again, I will clothesline you.”

“What’s clothesline?”

“Oh, you’ll find out.”

My days as a gymnast came back to me slowly, in the form of not falling as much as I thought I would, and even coming to do a few spins and arabesques.

Acorn suggested I use my arms to spin. The ice didn’t know what hit it, but I certainly did.

That night I went to a Mushroom Reduction Reduction Party, hosted by friend-of-a-friend whose name starts with a B and continues on in other letters which elude me. Sharp, blonde, wears glasses, and as I found out nearer to the end of the night, also interested in networks and information assurance. The latter ‘Reduction’ comes from her having far too many cookbooks and seeking to reduce them. The first comes from cooking (“reducing”) mushrooms. Clever.

I didn’t know anybody, so I spent my time being helpful in the kitchen, then finding one person to talk to and cornering them. That, and playing with the two cats, who loved my black coat very well.

Sunday was spent working and chores-ing. I need to find out a few things, like how much wainscoting costs, what it will take to replace my garishly green carpet with hardwood, and where in the process of this I will find money for a new laptop, new motherboard/processor, a PlayStation 3, and a new garbage disposal.

My class is going well, but I fear my teacher may be a bit out of touch. She is skipping ATM, declaring it “unimportant.” Someone should certainly tell my work and our customers that, because I get the feeling they hold a different opinion.

Hitler Banned

Link

An oldie but a goodie.

World of Wifecraft

I know many who would chuckle at this video.

Not sure how many visit this page though.

But you can’t buy Thunderfury.

At Least He Didn’t Ask if it Was on the XBox

Shopping at Fry’s is a singular experience, and for those who have yet to live through it, consider yourselves blessed.

I have had many a poor encounter with its denizens, and far too few good ones to counterbalance.

Today’s encounter left my little gamer heart irritated.

I searched the aisles for three games which I still need to get: Zelda, Metroid, and Okami. I, as the little Nintendo nut that I am, have been derelict in my fannish duties. You’ll have to forgive me. I spent last year graduating university, leaving one shitty job to another shitty job, then leaving that shitty job for a great, but stressful, job. Let this one slide.

Also I play far too much World of Warcraft.

Zelda and Okami were both at full price, so I was curious to see what Metroid was marked at. Unable to find it, I approached the man in charge of the games department at Fry’s.

Man: Can I help you?

MD: I’m looking for a game. Metroid.

Man: Meh-troy-duh. Let me look it up.

I am, at this point, concerned by his slow pronunciation of the name. I understand it’s not “Halo” but still, Metroid is one of those games. Those games where if you know a sodding thing about gaming, you know the name. (Sure, people think Metroid is the name of the player in the suit — it’s not, she’s Samus Aran — and yes, she’s a she — but at the very least they know the name.)

Man: And how do you spell that?

Are you kidding me?

MD: M-E-T-R-O-I-D.

Man: What system is that for?

Are you frakin’ kidding me?

MD: It’s for the Wii.

Man: [typing] Wee Metroid

MD: Um.. It’s spelled W-I-I.

Man: Oh. Right.

MD: You know what? I’ll just go find it myself. Thanks.

And then he went on to tell my friend that the RGBHV cable would work for the A/V input. Yes, just plug one of the inputs to the video input. Pick a color. It’ll work.

Right.

The Sometimes Bug

There are few moments better than solving the Sometimes Bug.

You know the type. “We need you to fix this.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It breaks. Sometimes.”

“Sometimes. What sequence of events lead to it breaking?”

“We don’t know. Fix it.”

And then you do.

I may have done a wee dance.

Portal Remix

I’m going to share another of my loves: video game music remixes.

Download.

I may just start sharing these on a weekly basis. Normal music on Fridays, and gaming music on… Tuesdays.

Tuesday is the nerd’s day, after all.

Good Coding Practices

I’m fresh to the industry, but I know a thing or two about good coding practices. And one of them saved my sanity today.

I’m learning Qt, as it is something they don’t deign to teach you in school. Moreover, I didn’t even know a tool like this existed until I entered this company. Something that converts UI development into drag-and-drop? Sign me up!

I like UI development. But sometimes you really just want things to be pre-made for you. Like trees and tabs and radio buttons.

In this thing I’m working on, I had to find a way to convert this Tree Widget to go from single-select to multi-select. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the stupid function call I needed.

Eventually, I gave up and guessed.

And I guessed right.

How could I possibly guess right? Consistent naming conventions. It’s something so simple, so basic, but so often ignored. I can’t tell you the nightmares I’ve gone through in the month-and-a-half I’ve been on this team with code that is inconsistent in how things are done, not just across various components, but even internally, within small sub-divisions of the application.

Naming conventions. Learn them. Use them. Enforce them.

Mass-Market

A post by Abby Zidle spawned this.

I will open by saying I am a snob.

I make my coffee exclusively with French Press and despise Starbucks because they don’t understand the phrase “short pull.” I shudder at the phrase “Top 40″ and proudly proclaim that I got sick of an album before you had even heard of the band. It isn’t enough for me to just know the philosophy of Nietzsche. I have to have read his works and then tell you why you are wrong for calling him a nihilist (you are, by the way).

I enjoy mass-market books.

There is a distinct and unfortunate snobbery against mass-market. I can understand the basis of the snobbery, though I do not comprehend. I will say there’s an intellectual distinction between reading Sartre versus Steele. After too many Dresden books, I feel the need to crawl into something intellectually redeeming lest I drown. It is a gasping for breath, like a landed fish.

But, on the other hand, after sitting down with something heavy and bold, I need something light and refreshing, like pairing a fillet mignon with a vinaigrette salad. Something that I don’t have to analyze, pick apart, and heavily tax my mental faculties in reading it. I toss aside Brothers Karamasov and shout, “If I ever read another literary book, it’ll be too soon!”

In my personal life, I hide my intellectual pursuits. I’m shy to come forward on the things I read, unless they happen to be mass-market. I proudly shove light reads around, and hide the philosophy at home. I’ll openly show the books I’m reading so long as they’re fun, simple titles. I hide the spines of the smart books when I’m reading on the lightrail or at Coffee Society.

This is not because I am ashamed of what I do. I bravely put forward that I minored in philosophy, that I have a steadily growing library of the stuff, that I want to give Hume and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche hugs and punch Popper and Descartes in their faces. Oh, and Kuhn totally deserves a high-five. Seriously, Structure of Scientific Revolutions kicked my ass and I loved it.) I love this stuff.

The problem isn’t me. The problem is other people.

I was a member of a philosophy club in college. Weekly meetings were held in a basement, tucked away from prying eyes, where we sat with professors and discussed varying topics such as “What is Humor?” and “Does Language Form Thought?” We had the throwaway topics of “Brain in a Vat” and things like that (“What if… what if your red was my blue? How would we even know?” … “Woah.”), but by and large we tried to keep it relatively interesting and fresh.

There were several stereotypes to be had.

There was the classicist, who spouted Aristotle, Plato, and Parmenides and decried anything that came after 400BC. He seemed to somehow believe that since all philosophy spawned from the Greeks, that they had it right and we’ve been mucking it up ever since.

The smug know-it-all who just read the Cliff’s Notes on every major theory of western civilization, brushed over a copy of Tao Te Ching, and laments the west’s ignorance of the brilliance that is eastern philosophy (this person is a wonderful addition to life, if you think about it).

The scientist, the realist, who demanded that all things hold up to the scrutiny of experiment (I had a fun time with her when we discussed the problems of inductive logic). The materialist who firmly held faith in a Unifying Theory.

I was the pedantic asshole who liked to challenge the professors to their faces when they said something outlandish (they did it to get the other students thinking – I eventually caught on and let them have their way).

Then there was this girl. She and I had a tenuous friendship, which was brutally severed when she said that the college of engineering was a “trade school” and should be removed from the university. (There is hardly a faster way to make an enemy of me than to talk down engineering, math, or science.) She wore nothing but black, every day, in the vein of the stereotypical beat poet, the kind you see made caricature of in Dot’s Poetry Corner on The Animaniacs. She sneered at everything and was all but a nihilist.

She loved Nietzsche.

As a direct result of her, I was unable to enjoy Nietzsche. I read Thus Spake and The Gay Science for my existentialism class; I loved them, adored them, the words resonated in my soul. It was exactly what I wanted to hear, and when I wanted to hear it. But I grit my teeth and kept disliking him, because in my mind, to like Nietzsche was to become her.

But the day came when I called her out on being incorrect on her analysis of Nietzsche. I could see my existentialism professor breathe peacefully as I did so. Perhaps my dislike of Nietzsche weighed heavily on his heart. Perhaps he was just glad to see her get some comeuppance. Either way, I walked out of that room on fire. I walked out of that room able to like Nietzsche, but only because I had proven that I am not like her.

There’s a difference between being a snob and being an asshole. I could scoff at people who count themselves as superior for their love of trade books and their lofty scorn of mass-market, for instance. I could sneer at their Dells, their Compaqs, their eMachines. But I don’t. Because I’m glad they’re using a computer.

At the end of the day, I’m glad people are reading. I’m glad they are buying books.

Computer Problems, Part the Final

You thought I forgot. Nay. I just had to wait for a day with nothing interesting to share.

Unfortunately, the rest of the story doesn’t play out to be nearly as exciting as the first bit. Even the second bit was a letdown. From here I came to discover two sad facts: one, Microsoft matches the product key to the system disk, so the disk I got was useless; and two, it was, in fact, my video card that died.

So I bought the GeForce 8600.

“Why didn’t you just get the 8800?”

Because the 8800 is the 8600, you’re just paying $125 to get it overclocked.