Ten Points Random

So today, at work, we rolled out a new system that affected practically everyone in the company.  As we were planning it, we knew that it would affect pretty much everyone across the board, so I sent out an e-mail, via my manager, to all the important heads of departments who forwarded it on to their worker bees as they saw fit.  In this e-mail, I addressed some of the features that would be new to the system, and some current features that, presumably unused, would not be carried over to the new system, unless additional feedback showed otherwise.

I received some feedback from this and subsequent e-mails and adjusted the new system accordingly.  Because what was changing was so big, this process (asking people to look over the new system and present feedback on what they would miss) was repeated no fewer than four times.

Finally I found out about a final go ahead and we released the system today.  Everything went smoothly for the first few hours until my team lead walked up to me and told me the one of the VPs from another department needed xxyy feature added back in ASAP.

Frustrated, but willing to overlook a mistake by the head of one of the most important teams in the company, I began working on adding said feature back in – adding an optional check box that allowed them to activate the feature at will.

Partway through implementing the changes, a thought occurred to me.  I went to ask my manager for clarification on that point.  In the ensuing conversation, I discovered that what I was adding back in was not to be an optional feature at all – but mandatory for everyone everywhere.  What more, this was not a casual want, but one that was, apparently, vital to the very system I was working on running smoothly.  How did we manage to go through 4+ rounds of checks and double checks while every manager and owner received notifications, the first and foremost of which stated explicitly, as a potential point of concern, that this feature was not going to be added unless it was needed, and not have anyone manage to mention anything toward keeping this feature in the new system?

Anyhow, I’m pissed.  Not immortally, eternally angry.  Just pissed for the moment.

RFC 2606: Reserved Top Level DNS Names

So the other day I enabled my catch-all mail account.  (A catch-all account is an e-mail account that get’s all the e-mail going to non-real e-mail addresses like [email protected])

As you would expect, I got the regular share of SPAM from the regular random spamming, but I noticed something else that was a little more interesting: mail from newsletters and sites that didn’t appear to be the regular, per se SPAM random addresses: many of them were rather specific along the lines of asdfs, sdfasdfasd, asdf, asdfahf, etc.

Which raises the question: when the spammers were setting up and testing their scripts, is it these addresses they used to test it?  I can easily see someone going through and filing out a form and entering [email protected] as their e-mail address, just to fill the bo.  Of course, this is in total contravention to RFC 2606, which says that if you’re gonna test something on a  live server/document something, you should use the dummy domain example.com.

But hey, like like any thing else ever stopped them.

No, I didn’t hit any.

I’m note sure what it it.  As I was driving to church today there was a guy walking his son and 3-4 small, white, fuzzy dogs.  (I’m assuming they were Bichon Frisés.)  Anyhow, none of them were on leashes, so they wandered wherever they wanted – including onto the road.  I stopped for one, who thought its walk would be better spent on the other side of the road.  I stared to go again.  Just as I was starting to get up to speed, another dog that had walked on ahead decided it wanted to cross the road too.  Right in front of me!

Since I was keeping a wary eye on it already, I was able to stop just fine, but what is it that possesses people to think it’s okay to take a whole bunch of dogs out, without training or leash, and just let them run around as you “walk” them?  Anyone who was driving with less care/who was driving distracted would have turned that fuzzy creature into a splat on the road.  Admittedly, it’s the driver’s responsibility to watch the road, but even the best driver can’t go from 65 to 0 when something darts out ten feet in front of him.

Anyhow, be sure to keep your dogs on a leash, or don’t scome crying to me when I run it over.

So.

I do web development for a living.  And I don’t have a website.

It’s time I get one.

Here it is.