From: Zach White Date: 01:57 on 14 Dec 2007 Subject: When is a POST not a POST? When it's a GET, of course! So, I don't know who is to blame, or what they were thinking, but someone on the Apache team needs to spend some quality time with Bubba and his lart. It seems that if you POST to url which maps to a file, Apache2 (on redhat and ubuntu, at least) serves that file as if you had issued a GET. Apache 1 as shipped with OpenBSD (properly) throws a 405 error. HATE, TOPPED WITH BILE, WITH A GOOD SPRINKLING OF SCORN ON TOP -Zach
From: Zach White
Date: 04:08 on 05 May 2007
Subject: How do I hate CPAN, let me count the ways...
So I'm installing RT because we need some sort of ticketing system at work.
I build a box, install everything I can from packages and check to see what
has to get installed by hand. Only 4 perl modules missing, not too shabby.
So I run "make fixdeps" which supposedly uses CPAN to install what's
missing. Mistake number 1.
Install module Date::Format
You didn't configure CPAN shell yet.
Please run `/usr/bin/perl -MCPAN -e shell` tool and configure it.
*** Error code 1
I guess including a set of sensible defaults for CPAN is out of the
question.
Ok, so I run that, it asks if I'm ready for manual configuration. Knowing
I'll just end up hitting enter a bunch I decide to let it pick defaults
which should be sensible. Mistake number 2.
CPAN: Storable loaded ok
CPAN: LWP::UserAgent loaded ok
Fetching with LWP:
ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
LWP failed with code[400] message[FTP return code 150]
Fetching with Net::FTP:
ftp://ftp.perl.org/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz
Couldn't fetch 01mailrc.txt.gz from ftp.perl.org
No matter what it does CPAN can't seem to fetch that URL. I can fetch that
URL with curl. I can fetch it with FTP. I can fetch it with lynx. Why can't
perl fetch it? Even with lynx -dump?
So, maybe I shouldn't have gone with the defaults. I find a friend who
actually uses the collection of bugs known as perl and ask him how I
redo the cpan config.
A bunch of enter pressing later followed by picking a couple sites and I've
configured it.
Is it really so hard to include a sane set of defaults with CPAN? Why must
I go through these acrobatics? In 2007 do we really need to make each and
every person who uses perl set paths to programs that are standard and
located in the path? Is it part of some conspiracy to wear out my enter
key? How many questions can a(n) (in)sane person put in one paragraph?
-Zach (Who was mostly sane before starting on this nonsense today)
From: Zach White Date: 02:58 on 18 Nov 2006 Subject: Undelete hatred Undeleting a file on a FAT32 disk is a pretty simple thing. You troll the FS looking for filenames that have been marked as deleted. Then you see if all the data for said file is available. You'd think that by now someone would have written a simple program to do that under some sort of open source license. Apparently not. Of the many programs listed on download.com as "free", half of them are crippled versions of costly utilities, 1/3rd of them only work for certain file types, and the rest aren't actually undelete utilities. I finally try FreeUndelete. It actually finds the files I'm after. So I click on the enclosing directory, tell it to restore, and I get a crash dialog. Lovely. I have to select each file individually. If it were only that, I wouldn't be writing this. No, it does the most infuriating thing any software can do. It pops up a dialog box. After. Every. Single. File. It. Recovers. HATE -Zach
From: Zach White Date: 02:38 on 04 Oct 2006 Subject: Websites that require a username I had a long rant typed out here about the USPS, and their use of logins to do something as simple as print a label and buy postage for the package at the same time. The rant didn't read very well, and boiled down to this: YOU DON'T NEED ME TO COME UP WITH A UNIQUE LOGIN NAME. For years now I've put up with seemingly every website I attempt to use, buy something from, or in some way have to identify myself to, requiring me to come up with a unique login to use with their site. If the site is at all popular the two logins I use everywhere and can actually remember are probably already taken. We already have something that can uniquely identify someone, and these sites already require users to give it to them. What's that, you ask? Why it's an email address. You know what else is great about email addresses? They're globally unique. You already limit people from signing up with multiple accounts using the same email address, why make them come up with another unique string that they aren't going to remember? I've had it. I will no longer register at a site that doesn't use my email address to identify me, unless there's a good reason for it. I won't be able to remember my login, and likely your system for digging it up will not work. -Zach (Who ended up ranting anyway, but at least this time it's readable.)
From: Zach White Date: 19:24 on 10 Jul 2006 Subject: Start -> Shut Down -> Log Out Can anyone think of a more asinine proceedure for logging out? Not only is it completely unintuitive, but the very way it operates is hateful. I have this particular Win2k box I log into once a week or so via RDC. About a month ago I had to reboot the box, after it had been up for months. So of course, when I follow my normal log out proceedure, everything goes as planned until I get to the Log Out phase. Because I've previously rebooted, Windows assumes I want to reboot again. Never mind that in over a year of operation I've logged out 50 or 60 times and rebooted maybe 5 or 6 times. Granted, WinXP and 2003 get this better, and admittedly I could use the logout option in the start menu itself that can be enabled, but that action isn't burned into muscle memory from years of hitting Win, u, enter every time I wanted to log out. -Zach
From: Zach White
Date: 01:14 on 26 May 2006
Subject: sendmail, user catchalls, and other MTA hate
So I'm rebuilding a machine that at various times over the years has run
qmail and courier. Both of those pieces of software have a really nice
feature where you can email user-<something>@domain, and if
user-<something> doesn't exist on the machine the mail will get delivered
to user. In fact, I'm pretty sure that qmail originated this feature, but
I'm too hateful right now to verify that.
So in rebuilding this machine, I decide that rather than install a
different MTA, I'll go with sendmail, which comes with the machine.
Contrary to past experience, sendmail really isn't as hateful as I was
prepared for it to be. Except when it comes to making sure that my
623,612 subscriptions that use zwhite-<listname> still work without
specifying each one in either aliases or virtusertable.
Nothing in the documentation about how to do that. Nothing in the FAQ.
Nothing I can find using google. It doesn't help that google ignores the
+ and - characters in searches, either.
According to a friend who is a sendmail ninja, I'll have to change the
source. Good thing that + isn't used very often in code, isn't it?
root:/usr/src/gnu/usr.sbin/sendmail:35# grep -r '+' . | wc -l
4336
HATE HATE HATE
Generated at 10:27 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi