Reminder: when they say “Warmest March in recorded history”, they really mean “…since the invention of the cash register”.

Truly, it was a force for change.

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Best bouncy castle ever.

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The Perforce conference was entertaining and educational. San Francisco is a hole, but we were pretty much in the hotel all the time, except for a party/“dinner” and a walk down the street to the training facility for those of us who took classes as well.

When I first mentioned the conference, David commented about how one of his clients who tested it had serious performance issues and felt it “really, really disliked binaries being checked in”. This would come as news to the many companies who talked about checking in all their build artifacts, and to the large game companies who check in hundreds of gigabytes of digital assets for all their projects. (or even the last three companies I’ve worked at…) Git and Mercurial have problems with large files and big repositories, but Perforce? Nah.

(not that there aren’t companies who’ll sell you solutions to speed up Perforce, but that means things like “massive parallel checkouts in seconds” and “scaling to petabyte repos”)

My only complaint about the show was the limited amount of vendor swag. They tied everything into a “social” app where you checked in by scanning QR codes and built up points by posting chatty little updates. This was of course gamed to the point that the only actual prize, an Oculus Rift, was won by the person who relentlessly spammed the app with “social” updates. Most of us were there to actually pay attention to presentations and corner the development team, so it wasn’t much of a contest. I figure I’ll have our new sales rep scrounge up some of the leftover swag when she comes out to meet the team.

For me personally, I brought home a lot of good information about how to improve our current server and integrate our wanna-git devs. Their current interim gitlab-to-p4d shim is working for a lot of people, but I have to workaround some issues to use it in our environment (being a little too git-like, it bypasses some of the security features in Perforce, which I can’t allow).

9/10: would kill bad robots again.

After weeks of occasional mystery outages on our office network, lasting minutes to hours, always ending as mysteriously as they started, this morning I was able to get into the router and get something that looks an awful lot like a smoking gun: connection attempts to port 80 on a single IP address from 725,000+ machines around the world.

The catch? The destination address wasn’t on our network. It belongs to an ISP in Spain.

So, somehow, our ISP’s global routing table decided to forward this attack to us. Given that their response to the previous outages was “gee, looks fine to us”, I’m looking forward to eavesdropping on our network manager’s conversation with them.

…and I’m not afraid to use it. Shamus Young’s Good Robot is now available on Steam.

[Update: buy the version that comes with the soundtrack; it makes great background noise at work, and reminds you to get home as soon as possible so you can kill robots.]

fark.com had an amusing April Fool’s day page. Only one I’ve seen worth noting so far.

The award for Most Annoying Verbal Tic On A TV Food Show has to go to Rachael Ray for constantly spelling out “EVOO” and immediately following it with the complete phrase “extra-virgin olive oil”. Made me want to drive a steak through her heart any time I accidentally flipped past one of her shows.

She didn’t invent the acronym, which predates her first cooking show by at least ten years, but she certainly made it trendy, to the point that things like this exist:

Note that my local Safeway didn’t put this stuff with the salad dressings or the olive oils, instead squeezing it in between the cooking sherry and the balsamic vinegar. Probably not a top seller.