He got one frame in the Agile Scrumfall of the Rings. I could have found more for him, but then I would have ended up turning this short rant into a three part epic, and then crammed in characters and subplots that had no place there, and really just ruined the whole thing in an attempt to be "complete" and "sufficiently epic".
Posts made by Remy
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RE: Why Lord of the Rings is too much like going to work…
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Why Lord of the Rings is too much like going to work…
I threw together Why I Hate the Lord of the Rings, drawing upon my experience in Enterprise IT and editing here.
We are all Samwise.
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RE: I am uncreative, initiate me properly!
@Lorne_Kates - I do check these once in a great while. Just let us know when you want back in. There's always room.
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RE: [completely NSFH] Remy Porter and his sexy inflatable dragon?
Okay, that's not me, but the resemblance is creepy and disturbing. I will have nightmares about this, so thanks for that.
The sad reality is that the most embarrassing picture of me on the Internet is this. The 90s were not my best decade.
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RE: The Daily WTF Wants Writers...Again!
Not to put words in Mark's mouth, but this happens on TDWTF time, which is, "We're not going to say, because we honestly don't know."
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RE: Java is a statically typed language which couldn't care less for type safety
The result is a terrible compromise. At the very least, they should have never added lambdas, without fixing that. The result is a "me too" feature that doesn't work.
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RE: The Daily WTF Wants Writers...Again!
I also gotta be honest- I'd love an article that's a collection of FizzBuzzes written in esoteric programming languages.
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RE: Java is a statically typed language which couldn't care less for type safety
I only learned about Java's type erasure recently, and my brain exploded. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?
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RE: The Daily WTF Wants Writers...Again!
hit the mark I am aiming for
Hitting the editor in chief is also going to get you dropped from consideration. NO VIOLENCE!
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Speaking Technically: Characters and Personification
As a follow up to the announcement about my upcoming workshop, I've put together a brief essay on using personification to make technical details more interesting.
The key point of the essay, is that we can endow technical objects, like the Oracle cost-based-optimizer, with personality by talking about it like it's a person. I didn't put too fine a point on it, but if the Oracle CBO had a personality, it'd be a passive-aggressive jerk, with a petty streak a mile wide.
"Oh, you gave me a hint? Well, screw you and your hint. I'm going to ignore it, and while I'm at it, I'm going to ignore the index you want me to use too."
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RE: @SCOTUSblog
The ruling applies to those sorts of entities. It may extend to other corporations, but at this time, that hasn't been settled by the court. Essentially, we have to wait for Larry Page to convert to Christian Science and then try and stop offering health insurance before we know…
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RE: @SCOTUSblog
Here's the process: the ACA basically said, "If you're an employer that meets this criteria, you must provide your employees with health insurance, and your policies must meet this standard to comply." That standard included contraception, which is a pretty common sense sort of thing to include in a health care plan which will cut down on long term costs very effectively.
Then a bunch of religious institutions said, "Whoa, hey, we're not cool with that, and we're religions. We don't have to comply, right?"
And the Federal government said, "Well, you don't have to write the check for it, but yes, the health insurance policy has to contain this feature. But hey, there aren't a lot of you, so here's what we'll do- we'll pay for that part, and you just pay for the rest."
Then Hobby Lobby said, "Wait, we're religious too!"
And every sane person went, "FFS!" Then the Supreme Court thought about it, and was all, "Hmmm… yeah, sure, I'll allow it. 'Closely held' companies can be religious. Just not Google or Apple, which are already religions for all practical purposes."
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RE: Feature Request: Cornify tag!
I am in favor of this proposal. @apapadimoulis, @codinghorror, whaddaya say?
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RE: CSOD ASP.Net webforms
And this is why WebForms is awful. All of this idiocy exists because as late as 2008, Microsoft was still actively opposed to the Web. ASP.NET WebForms were built to be as un-weblike as possible. The event driven architecture, with the control-oriented UI design was intended to make web development feel like client side development. The flaw in this logic became painfully apparent when you tried to use their ASP.NET AJAX controls, which were the cruftiest, kludgiest things I have ever had the displeasure of working with. It was a stupid idea back then, and it remains a stupid idea now.
ASP.NET MVC doesn't have any of these issues, and I'm perpetually stunned by how many .NET developers haven't used it. It's our standard around the office.
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
We have no hard date. We have a test instance that we've been experimenting with. There are also a lot of other balls in the air at the moment- because changing our forum and comments system is only [i]one[/i] of the upcoming changes. OMINOUS CHORD
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
Also, I've checked. [img]http://i.imgur.com/aFhcKfz.png[/img] Discourse doesn't rehost images if you use BBCode.
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
@blakeyrat said:
Just when the internet FINALLY gets reliable rich-text, WYSIWYG editing in every browser on every site
In what universe was [i]that[/i]? I have yet to find a web based rich text editor that isn't a complete POS. I've built applications where we used rich text editing, and it's always been a miserable experience and routinely jacks up my formatting worse than Word does. In any case, Markdown was never released as a spec- it was a set of Perl scripts that one guy made and used to publish content on his blog. He released the scripts, other people liked them, and Markdown became popular as a result. The main reason Markdown is popular is that it lets you format content in the way people naturally format content when writing in plain text- strong and emphasized text fall out naturally, links are convenient.
In any case, this discussion is academic, since the same editor also supports BBCode, just like Community Server, so for all intents and purposes, you've lost nothing and gained a live preview.
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
[img]http://i.imgur.com/PFtiIjH.png[/img]
Perfectly possible in Discourse, though. That, to me, is one of the biggest issues with Markdown- too many different implementations with their own approaches to things.
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
The post box supports [i]either[/i] markdown or BBCode, and I tested- if you use BBCode in the post, the markdown processor won't run, and thus won't eat your underscores.
Personally, I rather like Markdown- it's how I write all of my articles.
As for infinite scrolling... I have mixed feelings on it, and it depends on the application itself.
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
I think that should be our next OMGWTF contest!
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
The skin and appearance of Discourse will be as close to TDWTF's look as possible. We won't let the two things feel like separate sites.
You raise a good point- I'm not sure if it's possible, but maybe what we'll do is turn off new topics on this site, but leave the comments active for awhile.
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
You have to escape the text with backticks to keep Markdown from eating your underscores. [img]http://i.imgur.com/OfbO4xj.png[/img]
And before we open this to the world, we are going to migrate existing accounts over to the new environment, which should handle most of the squatting issues.
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RE: Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
Actually, it was reading some of the forum discussions on the subject that kinda put us over the edge. We've been batting it around among ourselves for awhile, and when we read through the forum discussions here, what we saw was a transition from, "this is weird and different, and we don't get it," to, "oh, so it's really just oversold and not this revolutionary, completely weird thing, and while I have some niggles with the UI, it's actually kinda nice" (I'm paraphrasing, and also including a little of my own experience with it).
While I'm not going to claim that Discourse is a perfect solution, it seems like it's a good fit for our forums. It'll also replace the comments system on the articles, which I don't care who you are- the article comment systems are [i]awful[/i]. It'll be different and strange, and it'll piss some people off, but honestly- that's true no matter [i]what[/i] changes we make (including no changes at all). Also, the folks at Discourse are really engaged in the process, and are giving us a lot of help, and want to work with us to make it good [i]for you[/i].
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Changes at TDWTF: Goodbye Community Server
The Daily WTF is turning 10 this year. Like any ten year old, that means that it's time to start undergoing some changes. The first thing that's going to change: Community Server.
Yes, that venerable old beast is finally going to be put out to pasture. Your posts here will continue to live here, but our plan is to, early this year, put these forums into read-only mode.
To replace them, we've been talking with Jeff Atwood (of Codinghorror fame) about migrating to his platform- Discourse. Discourse offers a lot of really great functionality for having discussions. BoingBoing has had some great success with their new comment system, and we really like what we see when we look at it.
There are no hard dates when this is guaranteed to happen, but it will happen soon (we're currently playing with it ourselves). When it finally does, we will move your accounts over to the new system. We will leave this forum up, in read-only mode, so you won't lose anything. We won't continue to let you do bizarre things with unicode symbols in the tags on your posts. We will give you a great new way to post messages, discuss the articles, and generally be awesome.
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RE: I can't get enough of this video SPLINK
That's the third Doctor, yes. And "The Green Cross Code" is the cipher you can use to pass secret messages to UNIT.
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RE: You just went full hungarian
Isn't a reverse unicorn the same thing as a double frogman? Or am I getting it confused with a rusty venture?
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RE: The case of the do-nothing programmers
The danger of a trial in the court of public opinion is that we do not have all of the facts. One of the other editorial things we do to submissions is try and weed out any sour grapes- and there are a lot of those. We're only getting one side of the story (the submitter's), and they likely don't have the entire picture anyway. Many of them are submitting something which upset them, or at least annoyed them, which means they might not be explaining things in the fairest way.
If you want a bunch of histrionics over complaints from random people on the Internet, go visit Consumerist.com.
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RE: The case of the do-nothing programmers
Actually, in many cases, we have to [i]remove[/i] details. The act of writing a WTF starts with reading through a submission to find the "core WTF". The goal from that point forward is to communicate that core WTF, using supporting details from the original submission, as well as stealing details from our own IT experience. I won't lie and say that we're always 100% successful in communicating a story that's true to the submission. Then again, I've written stories that were 100% accurate recountings of things that happened to me, and commenters have piled on about how "fake" that was, so "success" has to be measured on a sliding scale.
Submissions rarely include dialogue, but narrative fiction should. So we try and take the facts of the story and express them through conversation when we can. Submissions rarely describe the physical space where the story happens, so we will often fabricate details about things being "down the hall".
What we don't fabricate is the core WTF. If the story is about a roach-infested server, we might add some details to make the story grosser, but there really was a roach-infested server. If the story is about an incompetent manager making bad decisions, then we may invent some dialogue where the incompetent manager says stupid things to support their stupid decisions. Again, there really was an incompetent manager who made bad decisions.
If you're wondering how the characters eat and breathe, or other science facts, repeat to yourself "it's just a story, I should really just relax."
Oh, and no, I won't tell you which stories actually happened to me. -
RE: Hit with the stupid branch...
I'm always blown away by senior developers who say, "Oh, our team couldn't understand branching and merging."
WHAT? It's not rocket surgery. Anyone capable of programming is capable of managing branches and merges, especially if you set policies to define who merges what and when.
I worked with a guy who did understand it, but he deeply believed that no one else was ready to handle that. He came up with increasingly baroque solutions to keep people from using branching. Eventually, he went to a different team, I inherited the TFS responsibilities, and immediately started teaching people about branching.
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RE: Flash vs HTML 5
HTML5 is perfectly easily blocked, much like any other HTML element is easily blocked. I usually abuse my AdBlocker to achieve this, but I have complete control of what my browser renders and how.
Related, I can control which HTML5 elements render, meaning I have far more fine grained control over HTML5 than I do over Flash (does Flash give me the power to block one button but not the rest of the Flash blob? No). It's far more fine-grained than simply using a flash blocking plugin or browser settings to prohibit that.
As for "whole sites", since HTML5 is a super-set of the HTML4 standard... um... I'd hope people were constructing their entire site using it. Are people going to abuse it and throw animations into every inch of the screen until you vomit from the horror? Of course they will. That's not unique to HTML5, though. That goes all they way back to the introduction of the img tag.
I'm not really sure what you mean by segregation of multimedia content. Multimedia content, in HTML5, is a resource loaded by the page. I'm not sure how this is the "opposite" of segregation.
While HTML5 does create a whole new class of vulnerabilities that other HTML specs lack, the surface area of HTML5 is still markedly smaller than Flash. And more important- browser vendors have control over those vulnerabilities, at least until they hand off multimedia to codecs outside of their control. They don't have to rely on Adobe to provide fixes and patches. You also don't have to worry about the interface between the browser and the plugin. That's the sort of linkage that's ripe for exploitation as you're crossing that memory boundary.
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RE: So I decided to take Oracle for a spin
It's not that you can't use "@" signs, it's that you can't use "@"s with tools that connect via "ezconnect", which I'm guessing was happening here. Ezconnect manages its DB connection string like so: username/password@[//]host[:port][/service_name]
See the problem with "@" signs in the password? There are other connection modes that don't have this issue. Yes, it's completely insane.
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RE: Phone company security
The phone book, if you have one, is the best choice. The number on the back of your card is okay, but it depends on how old your card is. Theoretically, the phone company doesn't recycle numbers very quickly, but mistakes have been made. Further, it's not implausible that a malicious user might try and camp out on a commonly misdialed number- if your bank is 1-888-555-4656, they might grab 1-888-555-4566, or something similar- something easily mistyped on a keypad.
Now, realistically, I just use the number on my card, and don't worry about it too much. But phone numbers are an incredibly exploitable addressing system.
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RE: Phone company security
I had a similar issue with a bank a few years back. They called me, and started trying to get me to validate my identity, and I explained- "No, that isn't how this is going to work." I explained to the poor lady why I wasn't going to authenticate myself, and I'm sure she didn't care but she was very surprised.
I dialed the official number for the bank and got things taken care of that way. Here's the thing that annoys me, though: just because I get the number off their website doesn't mean it's accurate. You start thinking about how incredibly insecure doing business by phone truly is.
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RE: What do you guys think of Light Table?
InstaREPL is not something Visual Studio already does. And it's pretty awesome. I've been using Light Table for a few weeks- it needs better lein integration, it's still buggy as hell, but it's one of the nicer IDEs I've worked with. Cutting out the visual cruft of menu bars and toolbars is alone worth the price of admission.