“Stop listening to celebrities. They do what they do for money— that’s all. I don’t even know why you’re listening to me. I’ve done commercials for both Coke and Pepsi. Truth is, I can’t even taste the difference, but Pepsi paid me last, so there it is.”
— Dave Chappelle"Fun" with Jira
Twelve days after moving the company from Bugzilla to Jira, it looks like we’re mostly out of the woods.
Except for people whose workflow is built around archived links to Bugzilla URLs, and still try to use it even though I’ve made it read-only, moved it to a different URL, and replaced the old URL with a list of links mapping old bug numbers to their new issue IDs.
And people who crash the Jira server and take down corporate email by using the bulk-update feature to rearrange hundreds of imported bugs at the same time on their own initiative, without disabling notifications.
Bulk updates are now restricted to three users, not including the admin group. Naturally, the person who sent 8,000 emails on Monday abused admin privileges to add himself to the new bulk-update group and send 4,000 more this morning, costing him his admin privileges (and his consciousness, if I could have reached through the Internet and throttled him). Perhaps another day I’ll do an “ambitious Russian developer” rant, about the sort of contractors who would rather break into a server to restart a daemon than send email to IT.
The #1 problem with Jira is that it sends out notifications every time a user picks his nose, so even when people aren’t abusing the bulk-update feature, users are complaining about getting five notifications when someone edits an issue.
My response is to say, “this is what you asked for”.
Even More DanMachi
A few months ago, I observed that DanMachi must be doing well, because there were two series of spinoff novels, in addition to the manga and the anime.
Well, guess what? There are also two 4-koma manga series (1, 2).
Pretty sure the second season of the main series is on the way, although I don’t see any announcements.
Zyr's Law
The ancient wisdom passed down from father to son was “don’t stick your dick in crazy”. In the 21st Century, a new truth emerges:
“Don’t let crazy stick zyr dick in you.”
Dragon Crush, Cock Twister, Heartless Regen, and Groundhog Day
DanSora 11
Good Lefiya: well, that certainly qualifies as “casting while moving”.
Bad Lefiya: just beg for a piece already, sheesh.
Bonus Lefiya: congrats, you finally ended up sleeping with somebody.
More and more, I wish they’d made Tiona the focus character. She’s the most interesting of Aiz’s gal-pals. There’s a novel in this series that’s focused on the Amazon twins, but we’re not going to get anywhere near it this season.
Eromanga-sensei 12
In which sinister dom Sagiri abuses Elf and Dere-Dere-Dere Muramasa in the service of her muse, leaves her subs to suffer as she discovers The Secret Rival, then finds a new ecchi hobby that she doesn’t know dick about. In the aftermath, Megumin provides definitive proof that she is both a virgin and a total noob, and Muramasa demonstrates that she pays attention in art class. Even with her help, though, Sagiri still has a hard problem to solve before she can really nail this new style. Maybe Elf can swipe some videos from her brother, although that might lead to other problems.
Also, bookstore-chan tries the just-kidding-only-serious method, which Our Hero is naturally oblivious to.
If this ends next episode, I’m guessing the big finale will be Sagiri setting foot in the front yard. By the way, if that’s the Aunt in the OP, she’s running out of time to show up.
Slight change to the ED this week, revealing more about Our Hero.
Doctor Who 10.11
The beginning of the end, with terrible Zathras impression. Also, more third-rate meta.
Could they have found a less-convincing way to stage Bill’s death? “Okay, I need you to stand right here so the Doctor can get into position to not help you, while we flashback and flashforward to complicate this very simple setup for turning you into a crude Cyberman. Now, be sure to keep standing for a long time after the blue guy blows a giant hole in your chest, because we really need to pad this out to make it a three-part finale.”
Dark Matter 3.4
I guess every writer and director has a Groundhog Day episode they need to get out of their system. While nothing can live up to the ones done by Xena and SG-1, this wasn’t bad, and made good use of Three’s character development and Anthony Lemke’s talents.
Quote saved to use on Rory:
“No. You can’t just make up your own words. You have to actually repeat the words that I say.”
$10 says Old Five’s future-spoilers turn out to be 90% nonsense that they threw out just to sound cool, and the other 10% are cribbed from the upcoming scripts for this season. Aside from that, since the time clock is lit up in the future, Android obviously didn’t destroy it when she shut it off.
Dear Samsung,
The gentle slope on the top of my new clothes dryer came as quite a surprise to me.
And to the open bottle of fabric softener.
On the bright side, the floor in the laundry room smells very nice now.
By the way, did it occur to anyone that with all of the advanced controls on your user interface, you could implement sound controls more sophisticated than “completely silent” and “play a jaunty ‘done’ tune and echo every keypress REALLY REALLY LOUD”?
Dark Matter (the series, that is)
I’m not sure why I’ve never mentioned watching the SciFi Channel’s series Dark Matter. I just caught up on the start of the third season, and I can’t really say anything to praise it, but somehow I keep watching. It’s shallow and clichéd and cheesy and Canadian, …and just as good as it needs to be.
Three, Five, and Six have plenty of sf-ghetto cred, and of course series regular Truffault goes all the way back to Forever Knight, making her time in service longer than Five’s life. Three did the best job of selling his character at first, but I’d say he and Six hit parity about halfway through the first season. Five is fun, but she suffers from having to be the genius teen who can do amazing things with technology (perhaps it’s no coincidence that Wil Wheaton has been a guest star…).
Two is a newcomer to the SF ghetto, moving from Canadian Idol and Broadway Éponine to “mildly-psychotic semi-superpowered space mercenary captain”, but she’s doing a solid job, and quickly grew out of the “badass eye candy” they wrote her as initially. Android is an acquired taste, but the actress has been able to have fun with the role.
If you’re counting, you’ll note that I’ve left out One and Four. While Four’s been driving the plot recently, so much of it revolves around him being King Of The Assholes that I kind of wish it was over (“dear writers, pleasepleaseplease kill off Misaki before her dialog and delivery kills me”); the more central his story has become, the less interesting he is as a character. One was Captain Whitebread from the Planet of Sensitive New Age Guys, so I can’t say that I object to his story being wrapped up abruptly.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the show is that the original pilot graphic novel had Two as the only female, which would have made things a lot less interesting. And a lot less decorative, even though Android rarely lets her hair down, and Five’s awesome bosom is generally concealed to pretend she looks like a teenager.
In the end, maybe I like it because most of the actors have managed to make their characters work. It’s no SG-1, where the entire cast hit the ground running, but it works.
[Side note: the gang’s handler Calchek hasn’t showed up nearly as much as Truffault, but not only was he a villain in Forever Knight, he goes all the way back to Friday The 13th: The Series.]
Reasons to have an OpenBSD router at home, Amazon Wand Edition
Since the new Amazon Dash Wand is effectively free for Prime customers, and it gives you a home-automation controller, bar-code scanner, and a hand-held Alexa device that is not always listening, I ordered one.
When it arrived this morning, I followed the instructions, opened the Amazon app on my iPhone, and went through the setup process. Wifi Fail. Wifi Fail. Wifi Fail. “You should contact customer service”.
The first 20+-minute call went through a bunch of cookbook questions about who my Internet provider was, and how to change the channel on my router. I had a brief flashback to the Seventies, then realized their script assumed Comcast meant “all-in-one cable modem, router, and wireless access point”. I played along, knowing this would make no difference, and the call eventually ended in an RMA.
I was curious to see if it really was a wireless problem, so I logged into the OpenBSD router, checked the DHCP logs, and found an entry for a new Amazon MAC address. I fired up tcpdump and went through the setup again, and sure enough, the device got DHCP, connected to the Internet for DNS, connected to an Amazon server, and then started trying to talk to a public (non-Amazon) NTP server to set its date and time.
It failed every time. Annoyingly, it wasn’t even looking in DNS for its NTP server; the addresses were hardcoded in either the build or the config it had downloaded.
So, armed with the knowledge that the hardware was fine, I tried to get back through to customer service with this knowledge. An hour later, after two different people tried to debug phone app, wireless and bluetooth problems (including telling me to turn on GPS on my phone!), I finally got someone to twiddle the right bits so it could connect to servers that were up, and then cancel the RMA.
Now I have a Dash Wand. Ho, ho, ho.
