A few gripes…
Okay, don’t get me wrong… Life has been great lately for the most part. But… I would like to take this opportunity to get some things off my chest.
Gripe 1:
As many of you know, I’m moving out soon. So, I switched my house from DSL to Cable for our broadband pipe… It’s cheaper, a little faster, and tends to be a little less reliable. The reliability makes DSL worth it for me, but my family will never know the difference. So yeah, I made the switch about three days ago, and like clockwork Charter started having city-wide outages. Every fucking 15 minutes the cable TV will go out and, unlike before, take my internet connection with it. I can’t begin to explain how annoying this has been.
Gripe 2:
Silence is Defeat is a free shell project that I co-founded and have been running with a friend in California since the year 2000… The primary server has been up for over a year now without any major security breaches, which is *incredible* to those who completely understand the technical side. Basically, there are hundreds of very talented active users, some of which who are aggressively trying to take over the box, and to this day no one’s been able to do it. Since we haven’t had any problems, I started to get a little lazy and forgot to set certain file permissions back to the way they should have been set. So, some douche bag decided it’d be fun to abuse apache’s file permissions and delete everything apache had write access to. He or she ended up deleting all of the PHP files on chrisbrunner.com, silenceisdefeat.com, and wordsfromiraq.com/forum. Naturally, the latest backups from silenceisdefeat.com are a month old and I hadn’t yet backed up chrisbrunner.com or wordsfromiraq.com… That *REALLY* sucked. I was ready to break something. I thought everything was gone. I was so pissed.
It sucks even more for the idiot users who chmod‘d their entire home directories to 777 out of ignorance…
Well, I (obviously) ended up being able to recover chrisbrunner.com since very few files had their permissions set incorrectly. We are in the process of recovering silenceisdefeat.com from backups, and I was kind-of able to partially recover the WordsFromIraq forums. Anyway, I’ll live.
Gripe 3:
For those who don’t know, most of my programming experience is with C++ and PHP. I knew BASIC when I was 6 and learned QBASIC pretty well at some point in elementary school, but I haven’t touched those much since. I love C++ and PHP. They’re excellent languages in my opinion. Well, I agreed to learn ASP.NET for a new job that’s coming up. In all honesty, I don’t really want to touch ASP. I like PHP a lot and would much prefer not to learn a language that was invented by Microsoft. But, I figured, no big deal. It’s just a language. I’ll pick up a book, spend a few days on it, and add it to my list of experience. The problem is that in order to use ASP.NET, I need to learn either VB.NET or C#. C# has a good bit of support in the OSS community, and I’ve heard a lot of good things about it. Since I already know and dig C++, C# would be an easy next step, and it seems cool that I’d be able to develop stand-alone apps with the same language that would enable me to code web apps. In addition, there is lots of support for C# in the OSS community. So, I could code apps for both Linux (my primary OS) and Windows with the same language.
But, the people that I’m going to be working for already stated that all code must be in VB.NET. As a C++ programmer, this really sucks. Instead of being able to spend my time learning the “next step” that would be ultra-advantageous and of interest to me, I’m going to have to take time to learn an inferior language. It feels unnatural… like I’m taking a major step backwards… I want to puke.
Of course, I’m going to do it anyway. I’m sure it’ll pay off. I’m sure it’ll be easy, so it won’t be so bad, and it never hurts to have another language and more experience on your resume.
Gripe 4 (Bonus!):
I’m starting to question the merits of a CS degree thanks to slashdot articles like this one.
Wow, I hope you’re not still reading. If you are, thanks for listening. That had to be boring as hell. Anyway, that’s all for now. Later.