lolflameeyes

The importance of documentation in the workplace

2008-05-30T16:13:00.004+01:00

I've already pontificated about the importance of documenting everything as much as possible. You might remember reading it, it was warm, too warm, and you were having trouble sleeping, at least until you started reading what I had written. I'll remind you of how I was reminded, I almost died, which in turn reminds me how I was almost raped.

Without going into specifics, I'd like to point out that I have a) a job, and b) had to sign a motherfucking NDA. That's right bitches, I've hit the big time now, it's just a shame that the agreement covers such a small topic, or perhaps I would be at home with a nice warm cup of shut the fuck up right now, instead pissing into a coffee pot, percolating it, and then using a ruby script to convert the taste into this post.

I'm wasting so much time trying to cover up for other people's mistakes, oh, if only they had kept minutes of meetings they attended, and anyone had read them.

Announcing my retirement

2008-04-06T18:21:00.003+01:00

Haha, tricked you, lulz.

You might or might not know that I started working some time ago on a bugzilla plugin for rbot. From this information you can probably infer that there exists a shit plugin for bugzilla, that has been badly written by myself, that there's probably at least 100 other plugins that do the same thing but betterer, and that my one will be forgotten about and left to bitrot any second now.

What I’m hoping to implement in the next days also is announcing bugs, again, kinda like jeeves does. This is because not only do I write shitware, I insist on emulating packages that already work perfectly well and aren't going anywhere

P.S. I'm working on a dictionary, how do you liek it?

Maturity: Agreeing with everything I say

What can I do with twenty floppy disk drives?

2008-03-16T21:51:00.002Z

I've decided to shove them up my ass, in parallel. I'll do it in parallel because that's a much of efficient method of data transmission that serial. You might be thinking, "is that even anatomically possible?" I assure you, good reader, than when you talk as much shit as I do, fitting twenty floppy drives up your ass is a piece of cake.

Some words about global variables

2008-03-16T21:48:00.003Z

If you think I'm wasting more of my life reading this pointless shit. Let's all just assume I wrote a few thousand words on "optimisations" that have little benefit it the real world. At the expense of readabilty. ZZZZZZZZZ

How to avoid unused functions to creep into final binaries

2008-03-16T21:45:00.002Z

It's not worth it, the costs to maintainability vastly outweigh any apparent benefit. Please pretend you read over 500 hundred words of non-sensical bullshit before I admitted this

Summer of Code ideas for other projects

2008-03-13T13:46:00.004Z

I know I already filled the Gentoo SoC project page with a load of shit, but this morning I had 8 weetabix for breakfast, and man, that stuff if full of fibre, so I've come up with some ideas for other projects.

For lighttpd, a PAM-based authentication module. Because PAM is the solution to unified log on
For libarchive, who gives up fuck? both users?
for glib a confuse-like configuration file parser, so that I could get rid of that dependency on unieject. You rememeber unieject, it's the shitty eject replacement I half wrote and abandonded, you'll recognise it because it's not what you're using for eject.

Blog mis-uses

2008-03-12T16:07:00.006Z

Blog, possibly short for weblog, is probably one of the most hated methods of communication between developers, especially open source developers. It is also one of the most used formats, lately.

A lot of projects now appear to rely on blogs for communication. The Gentoo Linux project for instance, now pretty much only develops through the blogosphere.

It is hated a lot because it is often mis-used. Look at the blogs of so-called leading Gentoo developers, rarely do they contain any indication that these people posses an ounce of nous, let alone any techical ability to sustain their perceived loft position. Then add blogs like mine, and you realise that finding anything of use on a blog is nearly impossible.

But I do prefer blogging, it's much better than mailing lists or irc, both of which have serious problems in the modern age.

IRC

Flooding: No one on IRC likes flooding
Realtime: Irc is essentially realtime communication, which requires real time thinking in argument

Mailing Lists

Control: No one likes it when mailing lists are moderated, and it's hard to agree what should be moderated, although, obviously, it should be people who don't agree with me, aka the intelligentsia

Blogging

Unified World View: With blogging it's much easier to portray the truth. If people disagree with me, I can just delete/moderate/edit their comments
Flooding: With a strong hand and a steady mind, no one can stop you writing pages and pages and posts and posts of whatever vapid shit fills your head

Author's note: due to not having unlimited time on my hands, this post must end prematurely

Learning to love myself

2008-03-11T20:24:00.003Z

It seems like my motivation, since I left the hospital, is about the same as before, I start a project, say re-inventing the wheel, but my version will be only for use in hot climates, and I'll build it out of ice-cubes, and then for some reason I'll get board of it and abandon the project, along with anyone stupid to have started using it. Still, I like to think you get what you pay for.

This is my reason to start ruby-elf and the whole pointless analysis of the wrong thing. Unfortunately, it appears my detractors are right, and I am trying to solve the wrong problem from the wrong direction.

Add to that a couple of dull paragraphs, where I list some more stuff that I don't know, including c#, elisp, Ada, pretty much any functional programming language, and you're under.

The intrinsic support for multithreading is what I'm more fascinated from, because I'm too stupid to learn pthreads, let alone C++0x threads. I'd also like the opportunity to spend the remaining three years of my life writing a parser in Ada, since the pain of dealing with strings that have to have a fixed size at compile time will mask the pain of my dying alone and unloved.

I'd also like to experiment with generics, since I heard that template metaprogramming is really cool, but my shitty highschool education didn't teach me enough mathematics to understand Haskell and I can't use C++ because then I'd have to admit that I was wrong.

I am really afraid of what the pancreatitis did to me. But every cloud has a silver lining. Before, I was an just an inadequate developer with an over inflated sense of my worth to the projects I was a member of. Now I'm dying, so people can't be mean to me, and they can't do things like quote "I'm too geeky to find a girl who can tolerate me" and decry it as the self-indulgent, adolescent, petulant bulllshit that it is. They can't tell me that geek isn't even a real fucking category of person. That people who, if geek was a category, are geeks, like Alan Cox, and Linus Torvalds are married, apparently they were "able to find a girl that could tolerate them." Even Hans Reiser managed to be married for a while, and it's not like anyone ever liked him. Now I have something else to blame the horror of my existence upon.

But nevermind these depressing thoughts, I've still waiting for someone, anyone to contact me about the Summer of Code

Working, my personal hell

2008-03-11T09:05:00.003Z

If I am to go to hell, I know already what it will look like. It will be lots of people who don't agree with whatever half assed crap I come up with, and when they don't agree with me I won't be able to leave, because hell is worse than #gentoo-dev.

It so happens that my current job requires me to work to actually produce useful results, this is quite an alien concept to me, but I struggle on. Then some crap that it's too early to read properly, but I think I'm using something called "~~Borland~~, sorry, CodeGear C++ Builder" which is a seriously fucked up name.

What is the problem? Well. who. seriously. is. supposed. to. give. a. fuck? The rest of this entry is in precis form.

Whine whine whine windows whine whine codegear whine whine i can progam honest whine whine I use emacs, as if you couldn't guess, whine whine whine mention XML twice whine whine whine XPath XPath XPath XPath whine whine whine Parallels, Oh, I could draw you a few of those, whine whine whine.

I sincerely hope that one day I can find something interesting to write about.

Uniject moves to tears

2008-03-09T21:12:00.004Z

It's not like I love GIT unconditionally. Love is a human emotion, and one I know I'll never feel. However all the cool geeks are using it now, and so I feel I should use it for everthing too

Uniject is the shitty little eject program I wrote, back when I was still attempting to edumacate myself, before the most recent time I left gentoo in floods of tears, and probably even before the time I left before, when kloeri for some reason convinced me to have a little holiday instead. Blah, blah, blah I couldn't work out how to use git-svn properly, just call me flametard, and now I have worked out how to use it, probably after someone marginally less incompetent than myself showed me how to use it, so being a git fanboi, I have moved the source for this pointless and unnecessary and incomplete and badly written app to git.

I'm now debating with myself. It started out as a small debate, but it's gotten bigger, and harder, and now I think it qualifies as a mass debate. I've also been considering whether to resume work on gitarella or to use cgit. Let's be honest, there's no fucking point in me continuing on gitarella, as unlike Magnus Magnusson I've never finished something I started. Plus cgit is written by someone who isn't me, so may show some traces of competence. However, there is a major problem, cgit doesn't have an ebuild, and I have no idea how to create one, so maybe a gentoo developer could create one for me.

One last thing I've forgotton about apologising to users of the following arches ~arm ~m68k ~mips ~ppc ~s390 ~sh ~sparc-fbsd ~x86-fbsd gentoo keywording policy is a bit complicated for me, and as for the complexeties of repoman, that's a story for an exceedingly dull 2000 word blog post. Suffice to say as Bug 212585 shows, I could really do with my commit privileges being revoked, while I spend a few months trying to do the quizes again.

Checking for signs of life on this planet

2008-03-08T12:27:00.002Z

Dear lazyweb, I'm asking for help. I maintain some ebuilds. It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it, and we all know, deep down, that I'm the eurofag for the job. Because I do this it means that you, the LAZYweb are now my bitch, and have to do my thinking for me. I need your help to keep these ebuilds up to date, as those bastards upstream don't use freshmeat.

I usually check their homepages several times a day, however this is starting to interfere with my more importanter job, that is, blogging incessantly. I'd like you, dear lazy web to suggest some sort of "software" that can check these pages for me.

Optimally, I would use my amazing skills in shell scripting, grep, curl, or netcat. I won't even mention my Uber skills in ruby that I could use, but that again would interfere with my preciousss blogging time. So, instead of writing this script, I'm going to write a blog post about it, killing two birds with one stone.

So desperate am I to not write this script that I'll even write the ebuild to for one someone else had written, then I'll put in gentoo-x86, then I'll maintain it, then someone will call me out on being a fucktard again, and then I'll abandon it along with a load of crap I've stuck in cvs which no one else wants.

Private thoughts should remain private

2008-03-08T12:08:00.004Z

One more addition to this pointless blog is being made, in it I'm going to moan about how many useless fucks don't even understand how to use TMP and TMPDIR properly.

All I seem to do these days is write pointless blog posts, once upon a time I felt the sun upon my skin, now all I do is sit in front of several cheap, badly made lcd's pouring my heart out to an uncaring world

I'm going to dribble on about TMP or TMPDIR, so if I were you I'd skip forward a few paragraphs. I'm also going to point out how many many popular projects are very badly designed because they ASSume that they should just use /tmp for temporary files. Allah be praised, I am here to explain where, how and why their design is faulty. I'll be using my extensive training in software design and engineering, er I mean my extensive real world experience. By experience, of course, I mean a fragrant history of starting projects, and then abandoning them when they become boring, i.e. pretty much immediately.

I could drip on for this for a bit longer, but unfortunately I have to go and get some sunshine.

Aggregating Statistics

2008-03-07T14:45:00.002Z

One thing that my mistake made me think about is a way to spy on what a given developer is doing or has been doing. This will enable me to try and throw some statistics in their face about how they are slackers, and I am the God of open source.

CIA is a good starting place, but unfortunately I consider everyone else too stupid to be able to aggregate their statistics. Fortunately for you, I was lucky enought to get mine aggregated already, so even if I commit as Diego 'Flametwat' Pettenò, it shows up. This is important because we all know that the number of commits we make is directly proportional to length of our penis.

I don't know is a sensation that I experience a lot, it's probably because I had to drop out of University and ended up with a job licking envelopes. I've resolved to never let my lack of edumacation stop me giving an ill-informed opinion, as I have plenty of those to give, and I feel real world experience of doing it wrong is moar valuable than book learning.

Ohloh is another commit aggragater that I know fuck all about, however, I do know the following revision control systems and source code managements systems: CVS, Subversion, GIT, Mercurial, Darcs and Bazaar DVCS, CVS, Subversion and GIT, Mercurial (xine), Darks (himerge) and other minor DVCS. See how amazing I am, I can provide lists of things, perhaps I can start some sort of collaborative media effort which anyone can edit, and we can use it to collate lists of things we think make us look clever. I think I'll call it Rápido.

In the long run, I hope to be able to bring about world peace by blogging as much as possible about things that don't matter, and maybe after that I'll get back to writing the documentation for pambase

Reducing the drift between my mouth and brain

2008-03-07T11:00:00.005Z

One of my projects is now unleashed in the tree. pambase is now being keyworded by ALL arch teams so that it can fuck up ~arch systems.

I'm also preparing some documentation about it, but unfortunately I'm too busy boring you with three blogs in one day to actually finish the documentation. However, as reading whatever vapid thoughts are currently in my head is compulsory for anyone using ~arch, I'm sure this won't be a problem. Plus, tomorrow the hospital say they will have their new electron microscope installed, there they hope to be able to detect any brain matter within my skull please. Please pray for me.

One thing that pambase is supposed to do is to make life even worse for gentoo linux users by putting more FreeBSD crap that noone cares about in their face.

Today I hit myself to see I still feel, I focused on the Gentoo/FreeBSD, the only thing that's real.

Two really dull paragraphs that contain Gentoo/FreeBSD more times than is allowed by the Geneva Conventions on treatment on prisoners of war.

You should get used to a lot of USE flags in pambase, I've decided that the best "use" of USE flags is to decide default configuration options, they're unlikely to affect dependencies, or any real functionality, but soon I hope to have every possible configuration option for pambase contained in a USE flag, or maybe a USE_EXPAND variable, such as DIEGOS_SHITTY_ABUSE_OF_THE_USE_FLAG_SYSTEM

Talking about pam makes me want to kill myself, so I figured maybe some idiot student could also work on it for SoC, and them maybe kill themselves too. My IDEA for a project is:

Dick around for a few weeks with pam modules so that they're compatible with both linux (the Gentoo that still bizarrely has users) and FreeBSD (the cancer that is killing Gentoo/ALT). This is suitable for SoC because there's no chance anyone who attempts it will maintain interest long enought to finish it, and it's well known that no Gentoo SoC should be allowed to complete successfully. Except luis', sorry again, for slagging you off without bothering to check. Oh, and peper's, but that was for paludis and should NEVER have been allowed to be done under the Gentoo umbrella

So, if you're interested in working with me, please contact me to sort out a treatment program.

Amending some of my lies and half truths

2008-03-06T16:19:00.003Z

I’m always upset to be proven wrong, whether it's in my latest dull blog on farmyard animals, or when I write copious amounts of shit about a fellow gentoo developer without bothering to talk to him first and actually ascertain "the truth"

My mistake was due to my not being able to connect my fingers to the part of my brain, called Shatner's Basoon, that would stop me typing about things I don't really have any comprehension about. If only there existed some methods of communnication in this world other than blogs, perhaps I could have asked luis about the status of his project, but that would have been far too close to actual research, and what I was trying to measure was the amount of shit I could write about gentoo and SoC, not a comparison of the relative successes of gentoo SoC projects.

Once again, I'd like to apologize to everyone to whom my inane, lackwitted comments have offended, in the future I promise to try understand a situation before shouting my big mouth off about it.

(Joshua, Alec, whoever, feel free to link this blog in the SoC page).

Blogging on the Internet

2008-03-06T15:39:00.001Z

One common problem when fixing the world to conform to your view is that sometimes not everyone else in the world is an idiot. This means that when writing 665 words of what is essentially bollocks, people will disagree with you, and post comments informing you of this.

What is wrong with this structure? Well, when these people disagree, they will post comments to your blog, this will cause you to have to try and respond with well-reasoned arguments. Also it will fill up a table in your database called "comments." If this table is indexed correctly, your entire website may slow down as a "comment" is inserted into the table, causing your database to rebuild the current index. It will also cause siginifnact slowdown when rendering your blog posting, as each comment will require an extra trip to the database to fetch.

This is actually quite common, someone posts complete bollocks on their blog, and they are corrected by people in the comments, slowing down the website and making the original author look ignorant.

My proposed solution that I accuse people of posting under pseudonyms, accuse them of not understanding the problem, and waste moar time on pointless "optimisations"

When the list of#asdfljasfjkld

Sorry, I don't think I can read any more of this shit, I've had a headache that's lasted for 4 days now. My doctors attempted a lobotomy yesterday, but claimed that there was insufficient brain matter in my skull to be able to remove some and still leave some.