OMG! That's freaking AWESOME!
I love despair.com - I have several quotes from them in my repository of taglines.
wk2x
@wk2x
Best posts made by wk2x
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RE: Art of Demotivation posters
Latest posts made by wk2x
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RE: Art of Demotivation posters
OMG! That's freaking AWESOME!
I love despair.com - I have several quotes from them in my repository of taglines.
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How not to change your resolution
A few years ago the company I was with was in the beginning phase of a
very large facilities management project for an even larger
airport. We were putting together a "proof of concept" using some
of our existing embedded boards and a few linux workstations, and it
fell to me to load Linux onto the allocated boxes. Thankfully
there were two, as I'll explain later.
A few days after I had loaded the boxes and turned them over to the
consulting firm we'd hired to do that portion of the development, their
leader-type person calls me up and the conversation went something like
this:
him: I've got one of the linux machines that won't boot, can you help?
me: yeah, I think so - what's it saying when it fails?
him: it says it can't mount the hard drive and stuff like that - it keeps saying permission denied.
me: it shouldn't do that. did you change anything?
him: just the screen resolution.
me (scratching my head): that shoudn't do anything - what did you change it to?
him: 640x480
me: that should be fine - I assume you used system-config-display ...
him: no, I just edited the file and changed it for root
me: the changes should be for everyone, not just root - I don't think there's a way to specify it for a single user
him: no, there was a line in the file that said 'root 0:0' and some other stuff, so I changed it to say 'root 640:480'
me: wait a minute ... what file are you talking about here?
him: /etc/passwd
me: okay, I'll be right there <click>. WTF?!
Sure enough, somehow I was able to see /etc/passwd and he'd changed the
UID and GID for root from 0 to 640 and 480, somehow thinking that a
file named 'passwd' had something to do with X display resolution ...
brillant!
I had to remove the hard drive from that machine, place it into the
other linux box, mount it and fix the passwd file, then take it back
out again to place back in its proper machine in order to get things to
work right again.
I also promptly changed the root password and didn't give him the new one.
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RE: Best error message ever
Yeah! Now you're talking!
The new one was something like "fatal error: <filename> does not
exist or is corrupt," substituting the actual file name where it's
obvious. But of course when that release went out, they'd fixed
the problem with the file as well, so no one ever saw that particular
error message.
Oh well.
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RE: Best error message ever
Several years ago I was working on a scan tool for an automotive
company here in Detroit. It was a small embedded processor with a
monocrhome LCD display, basically. On boot, there were a few
binary files of executable code that had to be read from a flash ROM
into ram, and we had a simple directory structure that told the
firmware where in the flash ROM the files were - the result of the
company not wanting to buy a real flash filesystem. Anyway, as
you can imagine, if one of these files was missing, the whole thing was
pretty much hosed. And, of course, when I inherited this code
there was no error checking - if a file wasn't actually there, it
loaded garbage and executed garbage.
So I decided to put some error checking in. If, by some bizarre
stroke of wtf-ery, one of the files was missing, I'd display an error
message. Since the customer didn't know what they wanted to have
displayed in this situation, I simply printed out a string in the
middle of the screen reading "WE'RE HOSED!", turned off all interrupts,
and entered an infinite loop (which is all you could do if this stuff
wasn't there).
Of course, in the next release of the software, the "impossible"
happened and one of those key files didn't get burned to the release CD
... so everyone's tool started popping up the "we're hosed"
screen. It was hilarious.
Needless to say, the customer decided on a slightly more appropriate string pretty quickly.
Is it a bad sign that all of the wtf's I've posted so far are my own? :O