Octopus Overlords

dbt1949 wrote:Ah, IOW it tastes like barf.

Did I say sprinkles? Did I say foofaraw, flavors, or swirls? Or did I say gimme a damned Scotch?

Somebody used the word 'foofaraw!' Holy archaic vocabulary, Batman! I haven't heard that in years.

That's about as long as I can ever manage to adult.

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... The origins of 4/20, explained .. in case, you know, you've been living under a rock

KDH wrote:.
... The origins of 4/20, explained .. in case, you know, you've been living under a rock

When I was in high school my mom was in a Tuesday bowling league, so she always came home late on Tuesdays. I took advantage of those couple hours of peaceful privacy to invite friends over to get high, and "bowling day" grew into our slang for any semi-regular excuse to get together and smoke bowls.

Maybe if we'd been savvier about marketing "bowling day" would have taken hold like 420 did. We were content to keep it within our little clique, where it remained an inside joke for years.

My poor mother.

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.. from our friends at the Minnesota Po'leeece

AWS260 wrote:Name of the Year 2017 time!

Some very strong contenders. Christian Joo could be a dark horse pick, although he's in the same bracket as Chardonnay Pantastico.

And the winner is...

Kraken wrote:

KDH wrote:.
... The origins of 4/20, explained .. in case, you know, you've been living under a rock

When I was in high school my mom was in a Tuesday bowling league, so she always came home late on Tuesdays. I took advantage of those couple hours of peaceful privacy to invite friends over to get high, and "bowling day" grew into our slang for any semi-regular excuse to get together and smoke bowls.

Maybe if we'd been savvier about marketing "bowling day" would have taken hold like 420 did. We were content to keep it within our little clique, where it remained an inside joke for years.

My poor mother.

She knew. She knew the whole time.

[Retroactive paranoia sends Kraken into cold sweat.]

the manager of my regional library branch is "Darth Nielsen"

This NYT profile of Uber's CEO is a pretty great read. The guy is a piece of work:

With Red Swoosh, Mr. Kalanick started exhibiting his hallmark aggressiveness. When the company struggled, Mr. Kalanick and a partner took the tax dollars from employee paychecks — which are supposed to be withheld and sent to the Internal Revenue Service — and reinvested the money into the start-up, even as friends and advisers warned him the action was potentially illegal.

For months, Mr. Kalanick had pulled a fast one on Apple by directing his employees to help camouflage the ride-hailing app from Apple’s engineers. The reason? So Apple would not find out that Uber had been secretly identifying and tagging iPhones even after its app had been deleted and the devices erased — a fraud detection maneuver that violated Apple’s privacy guidelines.

Inside Uber, Mr. Kalanick began codifying the pillars of the company’s culture. He particularly admired Amazon, the e-commerce company that espouses 14 leadership principles including “learn and be curious” and “insist on the highest standards.” So he created 14 values for Uber, with tenets such as being “super pumped” and “always be hustlin’.”

I love the fact that he fixated on the number of principles instead of, you know, actual principles.

Just think, someday you're going to look back at this time and say "I sure wish I could feel that good again".

dbt1949 wrote:Just think, someday you're going to look back at this time and say "I sure wish I could feel that good again".

Corey Feldman for President!

Our misanthropic developer decided to run a sql script against a production database before leaving for the day that has generated well over 200 connections, effectively bringing the system down. Thankfully it's a production system for internal time and expense tracking and isn't something we did for a client. But I'm anxious to see how he explains this away tomorrow morning. I'm assuming that I'll be to blame somehow. Although for the life of me, I can't figure out how he'll be able to spin this considering he told absolutely no one he was going to perform such intensive maintenance on the system on the busiest day for T&E's.

I got a $20 gift card in the mail from Express for my birthday. Everything there is like $40.

hepcat wrote:Our misanthropic developer decided to run a sql script against a production database before leaving for the day that has generated well over 200 connections, effectively bringing the system down. Thankfully it's a production system for internal time and expense tracking and isn't something we did for a client. But I'm anxious to see how he explains this away tomorrow morning. I'm assuming that I'll be to blame somehow. Although for the life of me, I can't figure out how he'll be able to spin this considering he told absolutely no one he was going to perform such intensive maintenance on the system on the busiest day for T&E's.

So the obvious question is why does a developer have access to production?

Which is not to say that giving read access to developers is never a good idea, but usually a copy of prod is enough, and if it isn't, only responsible, senior developers get to look around in prod, mostly during off hours, if your system has those.

200 open connections doesn't sound like a huge amount on Linux or Solaris or AIX. Is this a windows system?

Daehawk wrote:I got a $20 gift card in the mail from Express for my birthday. Everything there is like $40.

Congrats on the 50% off coupon.

GreenGoo wrote:

hepcat wrote:Our misanthropic developer decided to run a sql script against a production database before leaving for the day that has generated well over 200 connections, effectively bringing the system down. Thankfully it's a production system for internal time and expense tracking and isn't something we did for a client. But I'm anxious to see how he explains this away tomorrow morning. I'm assuming that I'll be to blame somehow. Although for the life of me, I can't figure out how he'll be able to spin this considering he told absolutely no one he was going to perform such intensive maintenance on the system on the busiest day for T&E's.

So the obvious question is why does a developer have access to production?

Which is not to say that giving read access to developers is never a good idea, but usually a copy of prod is enough, and if it isn't, only responsible, senior developers get to look around in prod, mostly during off hours, if your system has those.

200 open connections doesn't sound like a huge amount on Linux or Solaris or AIX. Is this a windows system?

When I took over this network, the developer of our core app had unrestricted access to do whatever they felt like doing during production. It didn't last long, and users have commented clearly on how much more stable things have been since I came in, like I waved a magic wand and things spontaneously got better. Nope. I just stopped the people who had been making things worse from coming in.

GreenGoo wrote:
200 open connections doesn't sound like a huge amount on Linux or Solaris or AIX. Is this a windows system?

He's essentially God around here so gets to do whatever he wants. But even this has pissed off management.

200 connections on the database side is fine. 200 connections over a microsoft jdbc driver for Apache Tomcat with a configured maxtotal in the server.xml of 100? Not so much. The normal connection number during the end of the week rush is never more than 20. He generated hundreds of emails with his script (confirmation of changes made by it)...and each of those were logged in the database over the jdbc driver in increments of less than 5 seconds. With a max idle timeout of a little longer...well, you can probably guess what happened.

And I was right. When I told him about it this morning, he blew up at me and told me that the database was fine and that he didn't do anything wrong. After he did a little more research though, things have been very quiet.

hepcat wrote:After he did a little more research though, things have been very quiet.

Louis CK agrees.

In other news, I have my yearly physical in about 90 minutes.

hepcat wrote:

GreenGoo wrote:
200 open connections doesn't sound like a huge amount on Linux or Solaris or AIX. Is this a windows system?

He's essentially God around here so gets to do whatever he wants

Ah.

Well, enjoy then.

Document, document, document.

So my mom came over and helped me do a survey to prioritize yard work on my week off. I got about a half an hour in to working and became light headed and felt nauseated and my hands started tingling a lot. I've already done the stress tests and they're satisfied that my heart, while not good, is not going to up and kill me from a half an hour's work. In fact, they want me to exercise a half an hour of light exercise every day (which I was doing faithfully until I got sick) Crazy. And I really need to do more than a half an hour of work outside every day between now and Sunday.

You were looking good at Octocon! You're still too young to drop the transmission.

It might be the sun. Hydrate like crazy and that might help.

Sudden lightheadedness and nausea could even be from, well, moving your head too quickly. (e.g. Bending over and then straightening up too fast.)

LordMortis wrote:...

Five more.

hepcat wrote:Our misanthropic developer decided to run a sql script against a production database before leaving for the day that has generated well over 200 connections, effectively bringing the system down. Thankfully it's a production system for internal time and expense tracking and isn't something we did for a client. But I'm anxious to see how he explains this away tomorrow morning. I'm assuming that I'll be to blame somehow. Although for the life of me, I can't figure out how he'll be able to spin this considering he told absolutely no one he was going to perform such intensive maintenance on the system on the busiest day for T&E's.

As a misanthropic developer *without* prod access, I respect and applaud your concern.

Actually, coming from the dev angle, I'm so much happier with restricted access to prod data. I have pretty much free reign in dev, test, and a scrubbed copy of prod. I have all of the tools I need to solve most of my problems. I also recognize the fragility of the system I work with. When I actually need access to prod data, I can usually use the lower environments to devise the query I need against prod. DBAs are typically happy (assuming someone else like a manager else grants access and assumes responsibility) to fetch that slice of prod data for me.

That segregation has resulted in a healthier relationship between dev and DBA. It has also served to foster trust between dev and management. It's an all-around win that strengthens the ties between various IT roles.

IMHO, if this dev with a god complex can't handle environment segregation of this sort, then this person really does not belong in the position she/he is in.

There should never be a 'one-off' script against prod that has not been tested in advance, ideally against a prod-like environment.

For reference, this misanthropic dev is 22 years in the biz and currently serving an architect role.

hepcat wrote:After he did a little more research though, things have been very quiet.

Any chance a conversation with TPTB could give you the ability to lock down prod to ... well ... those that actually *need* it? Or screw that - just do it, then cite X, Y, and Z as reasons it had been done, when those that whine come bitching to your supervisor? You know - that whole easier to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission thing? It may end up with a little more work for the DBAs, but a whole lot more sanity for the production support team, assuming the new policy sticks.

There is one great argument that supports locking down prod access, which I believe that most firms would embrace. All that is needed is a cost comparison between what it takes to fix an untested something that is broken (don't forget to try to factor in cost to the Brand) versus the cost to test that same something first and confirm that it won't have any unintended consequences.

In my experience justifying an action after the fact (if you can back it up as in the interest of the company) typically goes over pretty well. but then I've also had the benefit of supervisors that value process and company over personal promotion. It could be that I've been lucky that way, but I like to believe that everyone that I interact with is really interested in doing the right thing.

I suppose that makes me a naive misanthropic dev. But so far it seems to be working to my advantage.

I was going to make more comments on my own philosophy based on my previous experience as a developer and now as an admin, but it wouldn't add much to the conversation while being very wordy.

One thing to note, that colours everyone's viewpoint, is that a large shop can more easily and more importantly should implement full segregation and processes from their chosen life cycle management strategy. Smaller shops often don't have that luxury for a number of reasons.

As in this case, if there is only 1 person who knows how the system works, that person can often call the shots, because without them everything grinds to a halt. Whether it is intentional or not, corporate knowledge held hostage like this is a risk that should be managed by a good IT manager with enough clout to actually implement policy and have it followed.

Isgrimnur wrote:

LordMortis wrote:...

Five more.

Two days!

...

Today went better but was still embarrassingly bad. We cut down two overgrown yews. I probably put in two hard hours of labor over the course of 8 hours of labor. Man, I suck. Exhaustion after sitting around doing desk work every day is literally killing me. My parents work their asses off all day long and I put in 20 minutes and then go down for a 45. Tomorrow we rest and get back to it on Friday, I hope. I suspect I'll be stiff as a board tomorrow, where I will try and do lighter work of banding up branches with twine until it starts raining. It's a whole hell of a world of difference then pedaling a bike thingy a half an hour a day as has been ordered by my cardiologist.

We suspect yesterday was worse than today because I was working with poison... um, weed and feed... and it was soaking in to my unhealthy ass. Or maybe it was a freak of nature.


What a vacation!

He has achieved fivedom!

How do the fives know how many of them there are?

Is there a name for a number whose digits all match the number of digits?

1, 22, 333, 4444, etc?

A couple of Turkey Vultures on the ledge outside of my office window today.

Holman wrote:Is there a name for a number whose digits all match the number of digits?

1, 22, 333, 4444, etc?

A000461 seems to be the most precise name.

It's also often given as an example of a Smarandache sequence.

Holman wrote:Is there a name for a number whose digits all match the number of digits?

1, 22, 333, 4444, etc?

Would there only be 9 of these creatures or would 13,131,313,131,313,131,313,131,313 be one of them too?

What is it called when a character in a story has a name that matches their character? For instance, Sir Greed is greedy. Is it just allegory?

stessier wrote:What is it called when a character in a story has a name that matches their character? For instance, Sir Greed is greedy. Is it just allegory?

Lazy?

coopasonic wrote:

stessier wrote:What is it called when a character in a story has a name that matches their character? For instance, Sir Greed is greedy. Is it just allegory?

Lazy?

Heh.