March 23, 2005
Rogue Element Award, SDR, Busy
The "I.T. Rogue Element of the Month" award arrived, and was presented with due ceremony to February's winner. I'm not sure whether you can see it, but the thing on top of the cup is the back part of a horse.
They had a whole box of these at the trophy shop.
Ironically enough, on the same day that the award was given for last month, we got a candidate for this month's winner - a screw-up that involved accidentally piping the output of ls -arl to bash, as root, on one of our old IRIX boxes. This caused many mysterious and worrying problems, like having many of the basic unix commands disappearing from that (moderately important) machine. However, the person responsible for that particular faux pas may still have defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, since there's still a week or two of March to go.
Incidentally, one of the positive outcomes of this award is that it spreads knowledge about what not to do. Last month's winner showed us the dangers of running a script that deletes stuff without doing some testing to make sure that you know exactly what you're going to be deleting, and this month's winner emphasises the dangers of running as root by default (and that handing the output of ls -l to bash can cause problems because soft links look like redirects from not-existent programs, and make the target zero-sized). So it's not just a public mocking of brain farts.
Though there is an element of that, too. ;)
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I'm single too, but I think I've gotten slightly further through the game than this guy... on the other hand, I don't have his Solar Death Ray, either.
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I haven't actually seen my flatmate for a couple of days - I think he leaves around six, and I haven't been home until quite late. In some ways, it's pretty restful - I never went into his room anyway, so it's quite similar to having the house to myself. :) No doubt I'll have to interact with him at some point over the weekend... but not tonight, because of Jenni's; and not tomorrow, because of Giffy's; and probably not Friday, because it looks like I'll be going to a movie with a girl I met at the Carnival.
Oh, and her partner. ;)
(She was one of the senior students when I was working for Vic - it'll be nice to catch up. :)
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Is it actually being inscrutable when you've nothing that people could scrute? I guess it's hard to say...
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I'm taking advantage of the relative lack of full-scale disaster at work to write documentation, and plan how to write the FileMaker databases for our next project. It's nice to be thinking forward and tidying up for a change. Unfortunately, I think I've got a mild dose of whatever cold it is that's going around, so I'm not quite as quick-witted or able to concentrate as I normally would be. Not bad enough to stay home (especially not with a mortgage), but bad enough that I notice. It's kind of annoying.
Of course, it probably doesn't help to stay up until 11pm reading and/or writing stuff on the Net. I guess that's my cue to go to bed. ;)
Posted by svend at March 23, 2005 10:16 AM