All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

The Woodwork
You tell that other boy, not to touch the woodwork…

I've been trying to put my finger on why I think a particular set of classes a previous programmer wrote to interact with a payment gateway annoys the hell out of me. At first I just felt overwhelmed by the number of classes and their interactions. I then listed out the classes and used a simple diagram to show basic interaction. Class A has a process that uses data from Class B, runs it through Class C, dumps the results into Class D, & somewhere along the line Class E gets used as well.

Avatar had some great action sequences, but I just felt beaten to death with stereotypes and Captain Planet's message that business is evil. We have the stereotypical kill everything military leader taking orders from the stereotypical I only love money business henchman, with a stereotypical green peace I hate the military science leader, and a blind sheep going which ever way he's pushed until he realizes unobtainium is just unobtainable with the suffix -able switched to -ium.

I was having an issue on my Windows game box with firefox stating it didn't have the latest version of flash installed. It had also been a couple of days since I had last run firefox and I didn't recall having any pages require a java applet loaded the last time (and today it opened the Java web start). I was also having issues with player controls in firefox on a particular site and games were crashing so it was time to reboot my computer. After I logged in up popped a window for flash stating that it was ready to finish installing the latest version of flash.

After several years of using Wordpress I switched my blog back to Drupal. There's several reasons for this, but some of the more important issues, to me anyway, included being able to easily do certain things like add external links to my "Pages" section. The only 2 ways I could figure out how to do it with Wordpress was to either a) hack the theme or b) make fake pages and then use Apache redirects to forward the URL to the real link. I also wanted to be able to quickly add a link or other content without it cluttering up the blog posts or forcing it onto every single page under the blogroll.

I was also having issues adding a blog post which I thought might be due to a broken Wordpress installation, but I later discovered was actually due to an Apache security module preventing me from mentioning certain file locations (such as /etc/passwd). After I figured that out I was able to break it up with spaces in order to post it, then dug into the database in order to fix it... In several places as Wordpress kept multiple broken versions of the post and I wasn't sure which version needed fixing.

I recently upgraded my mythtv setup to Ubuntu's Koala and had some permissions issues. As all UID/GID settings in /etc/passwd and /etc/group were previously set up correctly so that NFS would work correctly across multiple computers the only thing I can think of is that when the upgrade process removed certain packages in preparation for re-adding the newer packages it also stripped those users and groups out of my /etc/passwd and /etc/group files. As my desktop had the old UIDs and GIDs I compared them to the new UIDs and GIDs on my mythtv backend and my mythtv frontend and all 3 had different UIDs and GIDs.

In attempting to fix the issue on my mythtv frontend I ended up screwing up a couple of things and decided to do a clean install of xubuntu. After it set up the new file system (and before rebooting and adding more packages) I copied the /target/etc/passwd and /target/etc/group to my desktop, injected all the various users and groups I needed across all my boxes (making sure UIDs and GIDs didn't overlap), and added a couple items to /target/etc/shadow.

I then allowed the installation process to eject the live CD and reboot the computer. When it finished booting I logged in and started installing a few items I knew I needed - mythtv-frontend (making sure it wasn't installing the backend, which would be redundant), vlc, k3b, kaffeine, amarok, sun-java6-jdk, php5-cli, php-pear, php-getid3, and mysql-client. In the process of trying to add all of these I noticed that mysql-server-core-5.1 was being automatically installed... Why?