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When my parents were up for a housewarming / birthday visit, my dad brought a box of fine cigars with him. My personal burn rate on cigars is approximately 2 or 3 per year…and I’m now the owner of 24 good ones. So I bought a humidor. A humidor is the humidified box that keeps your stogies fresh and pliable. It’s basically a cedar box with a hygrometer and a humidifier in it.

It’s been sort of fun “tuning” the box to maintain a 70% humidity. You wipe the inside of the box with a moist towel and then close it and allow the wood to absorb the water. Then you give it about an hour to stabilize. When the humidity gets to your desired level, you fill and install the humidifier.

The guy at the cigar store was archetypical. A smoked out cigar clamped in his teeth, phlegmatic mannerisms. If you had asked me to draw the owner of a cigar store, I would have drawn this guy, almost perfectly.

Back to the support lines. We’re buried in requests for custom work. It’s cool, but I’m cranking through two or three major cluster customizations per day. Fun and exhausting. Just wait ’till we ship the Linux version. Then we’re well and truly doomed.

“The people that are into humanities, and are into Blake’s concept of enlightenment, they are not looking at the words,” she said. “In their mind the words register correctly.”

Ahem.

Dear freakin’ stupid “web design” morons and your freakish little sycophant buddies,

Please make your pages fail gracefully. Please.

The glorious beauty of the web, the one single cool thing that has enabled all the other cool web things that have happened in the last decade is that it’s based on open protocols and graceful failure. The rule is that if a browser doesn’t understand a certain tag or directive, the browser will quietly ignore that tag or directive. It is therefore the job of the page author to ensure that their content is written in one of those open protocols.

Let me repeat. It is the author’s job to publish the content on the web, and since every single web client out there fails gracefully in the face of unknown tags, it is not my fault that I can’t access your stupid idiotic page because I’m using an Apple, because I don’t use Netscape, or because I don’t update my software. This is not my fault and your stupid please upgrade to a modern browser message has offended me.

If you find yourself writing a server side message blaming me for not being able to read your page, then your page sucks. It is not my job to update to your fancy non-standard screwy content-hiding weirdness. It is your job to make your content available to me.

Do not design by explicit inclusion. Do not start off with Netscape 7 for Windows ME and make it work if and only if the browser calls itself “Netscape 7 for Windows ME.” Do not provide a “you suck” message to any browser that does not identify itself as Netscape 7 for Windows ME.

If you have some sort of content, start off by writing a page containing your content using stock HTML. If you don’t recognize the browser id, then send this stock HTML. You may, at this point, include a small mention that people with your very favorite widget will get a more colorful spray of crap. If you do it this way, then everyone in the goddamn world will be able to read your content. If, having done this, you wish to use some sort of non-standard weirdness based on the browser-id tag, go for it.

To summarize: Anything that claims that it is the client’s fault for not being able to parse the screwy custom funky spray-of-crap-o-matic is wrong and should be destroyed.

Love, F’dm!ts.

Today was pretty cool.

I got to talk to Pfizer about the software I’ve been writing. No, they don’t actually have large bowls of Viagra sitting around on the desks. That’s a myth. Looks like I haven’t been fooling myself about how cool this stuff might be. Or at the very least, now someone else is fooled along with me.

Made small changes to the installer for our software. Put said changes on disk. Said: “no! no! Test THEN ship!” as I watched the disk sail out the door. This could get ugly.

Got to fix a 230 node cluster that we hadn’t even known about before 3pm today. I wouldn’t have thought that something that big could sneak up on me, but it did. It’s mostly better…but these people are going to have to do some serious thinking in the not too distant future. 230 is well above the threshold for some architectural decisions that cost substantial money. It’s possible that they’ll be the first group ever to (for example) not get bitten by how brittle NFS is, but I doubt it.

Talked to a general contractor about the house. He’ll fix it. It’ll cost money. Wheeeeee.

Next week, training at MIT. That’s right, me training them. I should take the rejection letter from my application when I was an undergrad. 🙂

Income tax in Rhode Island is about 9.5%.

I’ve only now begun to realize how high that is.

As a thought experiment, take your annual income, remove a “0” from it, and divide the result by 3,000. That’s the number of perfectly usable, stable, used cars that you could buy PER YEAR with around 9.5% of your income. Yeesh. And to think, the state is just putting it towards buckets of cocaine or something.

However, I work in Boston (at least, the server I log into for work is in Boston, and my direct deposits originate in Boston). This means that MA will first take 5.2%, and then Rhode Island will take the remaining 4.3%.

Screeeeeeeeeee!

I sit on the porch
waiting for the air to clear
I love wireless.

http://www.youforgotpoland.com

I love the use of Shame as a law enforcement tool. It’s cheap, it’s effective, and it’s constitutional as all-get-out.In order for a taxpayer’s name to appear on this list, their total liabilities must exceed $25,000 and must have remained delinquent for a period of 6 months from the date that the taxes were assessed.