From: Aristotle Pagaltzis Date: 10:32 on 02 Jan 2008 Subject: Subversion and credentials If you stopped reading after the first word in the subject, you took a pretty sensible decision. Anyway, so: Subversion only stores auth credentials you supply on the command line if it used them successfully. If the server refused a request for some reason, it won't store the credentials. If the server doesn't *ask* for credentials, Subversion won't use them to begin with, and you cannot make it. This means you cannot deposit credentials ahead of time if you only need them for some actions -- say, because the repository you're working with only requires credentials at commit but not for checkout. Notably absent is any form of credentials management. You can specifically ask it not to use any cached credentials when it otherwise would, but the only supported form of managing stored credentials is to delete files inside the ~/.subversion/auth/ subdirectories. Which is reasonably doable without the aid of tools, because you can easily inspect these files: Subversion stores *everything*, and that includes the passwords, in pure, untarnished clear text. A marvel. That anyone ever thought this fuming pile of manure is great. Regards,
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 04:24 on 25 Dec 2007 Subject: Mailman admin Dear Mailman, you keep mailing me about this mail that was held in the moderation queue because it came from a non-subscribed address. Unlike other such notifications, though, the quarantined mail is not attached, nor is your standard "reply to this to delete the mail" message. You just tell me to look at the admin interface. So I do, only to find that that part of your schizophrenic brain tells me there's nothing pending that I need to take action on. Which is probably because I told you to delete this very message when you first saw it, you scatterbrained piece of massive fail. And now you see fit to send me one of those pointless bloody reminders every single day. Kindly make up your worthless mind and let me delete whatever remnants of the message still give you indigestion or get bloody lost. With plentiful bile,
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 01:55 on 17 Oct 2007 Subject: mutt list-reply and lists with multiple address Sorry for the dupes everyone. I can't figure out why mutt feels the need to put both list addresses in To: when I hit list-reply, and I don't know how to give it a dose of sanity. Hate. Regards,
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 03:40 on 17 Sep 2007 Subject: GNU tail $ tail -10 /var/log/messages [ 10 lines of output ] $ tail -10 /var/log/messages /var/log/syslog tail: invalid option -- 1 Try `tail --help' for more information.
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 03:27 on 05 Aug 2007 Subject: The hates-software archives So, each poster's thread gets archived under a host named for their email address. There is no way whatsoever to link to individual posts on these pages; only entire threads get an address. Just great!! Who needs links anyway -- this web thingamajig is silly anyway! Whatever, I was trying to look up an old post from Aaron Crane (as it turns out; didn't know it at the time), in a thread from Yossi Kreinin. Yossi has a dot in his mail address. You guessed it: there's no way to get at his threads. Note that http://hates-software.com/authors/ lists http://hates-software.com/authors/yossi.kreinin/ which seems good, except it redirects... to http://yossi.hates-software.com/.kreinin/ -- 404. Does it get any MORE broken? Yeah. I noticed that this page lists an author called "pagaltzis" whose threads appear under http://pagaltzis.hates-software.com/ ... which is *not* http://ap.hates-software.com/ as I configured it yonks ago. But wait -- the latter still exists! It has my old threads. The other one has my newer ones. AAaaaargh. So I clicked to try to change the configuration. My password was rejected. And I cannot find any password reminder or password reset link. Trying to re-register with the same address just makes the server crap itself and return a blank page. Great, just great. So I idly clicked the "siesta" logotype, and discovered that there is a SECOND archive: http://siesta.unixbeard.net/siesta/archive/hates-software/ This one actually has one page per post -- whoooo. Of course the newest post in it is from the end of March, some 4.5 months ago. Thankfully, the post I was looking for is older than that, so I was able to find it. Exim may be hateful, but I'm still glad that it runs the actual mailing list delivery for hates-software, otherwise even that wouldn't work. Regards,
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 23:05 on 17 May 2007 Subject: Is this software hate, people hate or both? > From: "McRae, Andrew" <Andrew.McRae@xx.xxx> > To: "A. Pagaltzis" <pagaltzis@xxx.xx> > Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: vim, and the configuration thereof > Date: Thu, 17 May 2007 22:47:21 +0100 > Message-Id: <4BBEC328C75D10489184E6C35AA3A89C0450C543@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.xxxx.xx.xxx> > > I am out of the office until Monday 28 May. > Please contact gs-pb-it-risk-internal with any questions.
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 22:53 on 15 Mar 2007 Subject: Where "always" means "come hell or high water" Alternative title: How to turn what Works As Expected into an aggravation So we all know that Firefox brought tabbing to the masses, right? And users love it, or so we're told. Well, it's not a lie; for the most part, I don't hate it. Or at least until a few months ago, I found no reason to. Then came Firefox 2. You see, I like to enable the setting "Always show the tab bar", because I use both tabs and multiple windows a lot (a window is a thematic group of tabs), and I don't like the jumpiness caused by the tab bar appearing or disappearing. I like things to stay in place. And that works fine and dandy. Except that in Firefox 2, "Always show the tab bar" apparently means "even if you have to rescue the browser window from destruction to ensure that the tab bar can continue to shine in all its glory." That is, the Ctrl-W shortcut now has the same demented behaviour that the close-tab button always had: when there's only one tab left, Ctrl-W closes the tab AND THEN OPENS A NEW ONE WITH THE HOMEPAGE!! RAAAAHHH! DIE!! Die, dammit, and get outta my face! Really, it's very hard to excite me past my usual "grumpy crank" level of annoyance, but the past couple of months, even though I only used Firefox 2 lightly (my main machine is still at 1.5.x), the frustration caused by this deranged behaviour has driven me batty. You might say it could be justified on the grounds that it aligns the behaviour of Ctrl-W with the close-tab button. And I agree that making similar gestures behave similarly is a good UI principle, who DOESN'T want closing the last tab to go away?? Who ever preferred the close-tab button's behaviour? If there really is such a clientele, this NEEDS to be configurable. Yes I know preferences are costly. I don't advocate their willy- nilly addition either. But turning off the "Always show the tab bar" setting CAUSES CTRL-W TO ALSO CLOSE THE WINDOW WHEN YOU CLOSE THE LAST TAB. !!@)@*#&&!^!&!&!!!!!!! What dimwit ever thought that conflating these options in a single preference in this manner was a sane thing to do!? It took me AGES to realise why the damn Ctrl-W shortcut no longer worked as I expected it to. Googling for close to two hours or so in total turned up no solution, but did turn up the hint that A COMPLETELY UNRELATED-SEEMING OPTION controlled this behaviour. So I finally caved and turned off the "Always show the tab bar" option in order to regain my sanity, even though now I have to live with jumpy window content that keeps jarring me out. Good grief, Mozilla people. Way to completely arbitrarily make a nuisance out of something dead simple AFTER YOU HAD ALREADY GOTTEN IT RIGHT. Thanks a whole steaming heap,
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 22:30 on 01 Jun 2006 Subject: Brain-dead trouble ticket mailer code Dear trouble ticket system programmers, the In-Reply-To header is there for a reason. (So what if your system can accept comments via venues other than email? If an incoming email causes you to eventually generate an outgoing email, then here's my Message-Id for you to keep track of. I don't care what happens inbetween. Figure it out.) Annoyedly yours,
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 17:44 on 18 Nov 2005 Subject: Mailing list digests Fellow software haters, may I just register my seething contempt for any mail client which will let a user [Reply] to a mailing list digest? Additionally -- though slightly off-topic --, I need to express the same contempt for the idiots who do so. (One particularly bad apple keeps replying to the digest, *top posting*, *without* culling *anything*. I'm already subscribed to the non-digest version of the list -- thanks very much for also supplying me with the digest, and shoveling extra copies of everything into the archive, dimwit.) And a pox on the mailing list software which generates such a bloody useless format as a flattened digest in a single mail, which makes it impossible for dimwitted users to reply to anything in a sensible fashion. Of course that alone won't do -- the extra brain damage of accepting posts from users who are subscribed to the digest only is inevitable. Digests suck, mailing list software sucks, mail clients suck, users suck. May bit rot, pest and cholera befall all of them. With cordial malice,
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