Working from home today, I log into OWA to check my email, and I notice there's something in the spam folder... it's internal to my company, so of course I want to mark it not spam. The not spam button helpfully presents you with a checkbox that says, "always trust emails from {sender}" so I check it. And here's what I see:

Ok well that's reasonable, emails internal to my org will never be marked as spam. But... but the reason I'm here is because one was in spam. But... I can't mark the user as trusted because he's internal to my org and those senders are always trusted. But... but this one email ended up in spam. But... it can't be in spam because the sender is trusted. But... it is in spam even though it can't be and I can't trust the sender because they're already trusted and even then it ends up in spam...

Scanners, I loved that movie...

 

Seems they have infiltrated Microsoft.

blakeyrat:

Ok well that's reasonable, emails internal to my org will never be marked as spam. But... but the reason I'm here is because one was in spam. But... I can't mark the user as trusted because he's internal to my org and those senders are always trusted. But... but this one email ended up in spam. But... it can't be in spam because the sender is trusted. But... it is in spam even though it can't be and I can't trust the sender because they're already trusted and even then it ends up in spam...

This isn't OWA-specific; it happens to me in Outlook too.

*gasp*  But Outlook's a profesionally-developed system. It's not even Open Source or anything!  It's supposed to have had a bunch of planning and usability research and testing and whatnot behind every detail of the interface so stupid stuff like that doesn't happen.

...right?

Right.

Mason Wheeler:

*gasp*  But Outlook's a profesionally-developed system. It's not even Open Source or anything!  It's supposed to have had a bunch of planning and usability research and testing and whatnot behind every detail of the interface so stupid stuff like that doesn't happen.

...right?

Well shit, if you're going to start that fire, you may as well mention something about the licensing scheme for a PostgreSQL database system.

nonpartisan:

Mason Wheeler:

*gasp*  But Outlook's a profesionally-developed system. It's not even Open Source or anything!  It's supposed to have had a bunch of planning and usability research and testing and whatnot behind every detail of the interface so stupid stuff like that doesn't happen.

...right?

Well shit, if you're going to start that fire, you may as well mention something about the licensing scheme for a PostgreSQL database system.

Oh boy, Postgres: the database that actually sucks worse than MySQL. I mean, it's great, if you don't care about performance, don't care about scalability, don't care about easy replication, want a permissions system that's a royal pain in the ass.. of course, in that case there's always sqlite.

Mason Wheeler:

*gasp*  But Outlook's a profesionally-developed system. It's not even Open Source or anything!  It's supposed to have had a bunch of planning and usability research and testing and whatnot behind every detail of the interface so stupid stuff like that doesn't happen.

...right?

Oh my God, somebody found a bug in a Microsoft product! That completely makes up for the shittiness of FOSS!


I am ashamed every single day to work in an industry with people this moronic. "Oh, yeah, it's great being surrounded by pseudo-intellectual sperglords who think they're smarter than everyone else because they spent high school playing AD&D 3rd Edition instead of getting laid. A real peach."

That's like 80% of Slashdot comments. "Linux adoption stunted by poor usability." "Yes well... Microsoft Bob wasn't very usable!!!"

blakeyrat:

That's like 80% of Slashdot comments. "Linux adoption stunted by poor usability." "Yes well... Microsoft Bob wasn't very usable!!!"

Oh Bob, M$ really screwed up with that one! They'll never recover from that mistake!


How do I get Flash to work in my browser again? Does it involve recompiling my kernel?

morbiuswilters:

Oh boy, Postgres: the database that actually sucks worse than MySQL. I mean, it's great, if you don't care about performance, don't care about scalability, don't care about easy replication, want a permissions system that's a royal pain in the ass.. of course, in that case there's always sqlite.

Of course, you're not up on PostgreSQL 9+.  But that's okay.  Despite what you think, you can't be an expert at everything.

nonpartisan:

Of course, you're not up on PostgreSQL 9+.

The latest version in most distros is 8.4. Of course you can install newer versions, but they're unsupported by the distro which is a no-go for many organizations.

Regardless, I have worked extensively with 9.1 and everything I mentioned was from that release. I mean, shit, Postgres didn't even have proper replication until a little over a year ago. And streaming replication is such a streaming pile of crap.. you've got to carefully binary copy all the table data and then you can only replicate the entire cluster. And failing back to the primary is like "HA HA, fuck you". It's a bitch to monitor and debug; until 9.1 it required superuser permissions to even work; stopping replication on a slave so you can do something is also like "HA HA, fuck you".

Oh, and the 9.0 release was called the "Great Leap Forward" and had a Maoist theme. That's right: they used an event where the Chinese government killed tens of millions of its own people--and tortured and oppressed tens of millions more--as a marketing gimmick. What a bunch of sick, retarded fucks. Maybe they can call 9.2 "Lebensraum" and have a "Transaction Log of Anne Frank" theme. Worthless pieces of shit.

MySQL replication is far from perfect but it's still lightyears ahead of Postgres. And their "synchronous replication" isn't really synchronous, it's semi-synchronous; an error in nomenclature which doesn't give me much confidence in their ability to understand real world HA concerns.

morbiuswilters:

Oh, and the 9.0 release was called the "Great Leap Forward" and had a Maoist theme. That's right: they used an event where the Chinese government killed tens of millions of its own people--and tortured and oppressed tens of millions more--as a marketing gimmick. What a bunch of sick, retarded fucks. Maybe they can call 9.2 "Lebensraum" and have a "Transaction Log of Anne Frank" theme. Worthless pieces of shit.

Why do so many open source projects lack a "good taste" gene? Or do they realize how awful their naming is, and do it anyway to "rebel" or something? I don't get it.

blakeyrat:

Why do so many open source projects lack a "good taste" gene?

"Good taste" would imply an understanding of things like marketing, which FOSS people seem to look down on (in addition to things like user experience and usability).

blakeyrat:

Or do they realize how awful their naming is, and do it anyway to "rebel" or something?

That's certainly a possibility.

Don't you just love how never more than two replies are related to the thread topic? And how it's always the same people going on the same tiring spiel?

morbiuswilters:

How do I get Flash to work in my browser again? Does it involve recompiling my kernel?

You install the package for Flash, and the package for the browser integration. Typically, you will get a package of both as the first result for "Flash" in the package manager.

Of course, this is great when it works (it works right now), but distro maintainers seem to break it surprisingly often. Then you have the alternative of downloading a Flash package packaged for your Linux distro from Adobe, and installing it (by double-clicking it and entering your password). This also works, although probably not for much longer because Adobe have apparently decided to package their Linux version of Flash only for Chrome in future.

All in all, it's a pretty meh situation. It's quite likely to work upon doing the obvious things, and if it doesn't, it might work doing other obvious things, and otherwise, you're out of luck. This describes every third-party project ever on every operating system ever.

blakeyrat:

Why do so many open source projects lack a "good taste" gene? Or do they realize how awful their naming is, and do it anyway to "rebel" or something? I don't get it.

I think it's the nature of programmers to come up with hideous names, but unlike proprietary projects, the open source projects don't have competent marketing people to stop them.

True I guess. The dev name of the tool I'm building right now is "Hawkwind."

blakeyrat:

True I guess. The dev name of the tool I'm building right now is "Hawkwind."

Speaking of which I'm currently building an application for a school to keep track of their students, courses, etc and I have no idea what to name it. Anyone have any ideas? I am this close to using some obscure anime reference.

DOA:

...I have no idea what to name it. Anyone have any ideas?

Big Brother?

Cassidy:

Big Brother?

Actually that's the name of the custom internal app I made to keep track of the health of our remote servers, so it's taken.

Why don't you name it "Obscure Anime Reference", it's so meta.

morbiuswilters:

Oh, and the 9.0 release was called the "Great Leap Forward" and had a Maoist theme. That's right: they used an event where the Chinese government killed tens of millions of its own people--and tortured and oppressed tens of millions more--as a marketing gimmick. What a bunch of sick, retarded fucks. Maybe they can call 9.2 "Lebensraum" and have a "Transaction Log of Anne Frank" theme. Worthless pieces of shit.

 

Can't wait to see what they come up with for version 9.11.

DOA:

blakeyrat:

True I guess. The dev name of the tool I'm building right now is "Hawkwind."

Speaking of which I'm currently building an application for a school to keep track of their students, courses, etc and I have no idea what to name it. Anyone have any ideas? I am this close to using some obscure anime reference.

"ChildWatcher"

"KidSpy"

"ExposedYouth"

DOA:

Cassidy:

Big Brother?

Actually that's the name of the custom internal app I made to keep track of the health of our remote servers, so it's taken.

There are several free, reasonably-good monitoring apps. Why would you ever write your own??

veggen:

Don't you just love how never more than two replies are related to the thread topic?

You're right: we need more comments on the exciting topic of... spam filtering.

veggen:

And how it's always the same people going on the same tiring spiel?

I, too, hate that Mason Wheeler and nonpartisan always have to derail threads with their FOSStardedness.

DOA:

... to keep track of their students, courses, etc and I have no idea what to name it. Anyone have any ideas?

• "Teacher"
• "ChalkBoard"
  
• "Watchdog"
• "Rover"
• "Envoyeur"
• "Sentinel"
• "BratGuard"
• "Raincoat"
• "CrashMap"
• "KFCStaffRegister"
• "TheMan"
  
• "Student Higher Institution Tracker / Course Outcome - Combined Knowledgebase"
  

DOA:

.. the custom internal app I made to keep track of the health of our remote servers...

Presuming these servers can be SNMP-enabled in some way, what's wrong with common packages line mrtg, cact, Nagios, etc? 

morbiuswilters:

There are several free, reasonably-good monitoring apps. Why would you ever write your own??

At the time I was clueless. Even if i did know however those servers carried all kinds of different linux flavours and versions, some of them quite old. I suspect trying to get a single app to install on all those would be akin to using ground glass as eye drops.

DOA:

I suspect trying to get a single app to install on all those would be akin to using ground glass as eye drops.

That totally works if you're that horta monster from Star Trek.

Damn, Morbs beat me to it.

DOA:

At the time I was clueless. Even if i did know however those servers carried all kinds of different linux flavours and versions, some of them quite old. I suspect trying to get a single app to install on all those would be akin to using ground glass as eye drops.

.. and yet you managed it... by writing one yourself?

Anyway... that's beside the point. I recall my days when I'd roll my own solution without investigating what was already available, only for someone to remark how similar it was to something already available - except mine looked amateurish, lacked features, was limited etc.

Either way, if you're monitoring several servers, you don't need to install monitoring S/W on each - you just need some kind of metric gathering off the servers (SNMP) then something that collects and reports upon these metrics. An advantage of having the minotoring off-server is historical stats should that server be unavailable.

Cassidy:

Damn, Morbs beat me to it.

DOA:

At the time I was clueless. Even if i did know however those servers carried all kinds of different linux flavours and versions, some of them quite old. I suspect trying to get a single app to install on all those would be akin to using ground glass as eye drops.

.. and yet you managed it... by writing one yourself?

Anyway... that's beside the point. I recall my days when I'd roll my own solution without investigating what was already available, only for someone to remark how similar it was to something already available - except mine looked amateurish, lacked features, was limited etc.

Either way, if you're monitoring several servers, you don't need to install monitoring S/W on each - you just need some kind of metric gathering off the servers (SNMP) then something that collects and reports upon these metrics. An advantage of having the minotoring off-server is historical stats should that server be unavailable.

Agreed. Although, Nagios doesn't usually gather server stats via SNMP--it can poll SNMP, but most server stats are gathered with NRPE (or by running the plugin over SSH). Nagios plugins are dead-simple to write, they just need to return an exit code to indicate the status (OK, warning, critical, unknown). It's also a good idea to return a text description of the status, for display in the web UI and email alerts, although it's not necessary. You can also append statistics information to the end of the text description and Nagios will parse it out and put it into an RRD so you can display graphs, which frees you from having to install Cacti or the like.

DOA:

Even if i did know however those servers carried all kinds of different linux flavours and versions, some of them quite old. I suspect trying to get a single app to install on all those would be akin to using ground glass as eye drops.

At a bare minimum, all you needed was SSH to run plugins; they're just command-line programs that need to return a status code. As for the plugins themselves, many use Perl (or even Bash) and should run fine on pretty much an distro. The C plugins are a bit of a PITA, but can probably be coaxed into compiling. At the very worst, you could just rewrite the plugin in Perl or something, which is a lot less hassle than rewriting all of Nagios.

Cassidy:

I recall my days when I'd roll my own solution without investigating what was already available, only for someone to remark how similar it was to something already available - except mine looked amateurish, lacked features, was limited etc.

I did that once when I implemented linked-list support in Stratus PL/1.  The project leader (who was living with and later married to a big-deal Stratus tech) told me I should have used a set of system calls that handled the same operations.

Told her I would have done that, except that I had no way of knowing about those system calls, seeing as how they were unpublished.  The next time Stratus rolled out an operating system update they were all documented as "new features".

Cassidy:

Anyway... that's beside the point. I recall my days when I'd roll my own solution without investigating what was already available, only for someone to remark how similar it was to something already available - except mine looked amateurish, lacked features, was limited etc.

Not much of an accomplishment to remember back to yesterday.

blakeyrat:

But... I can't mark the user as trusted because he's internal to my org and those senders are always trusted.

A while ago I tried to use this block feature to stop receiving birthday announcements (and other boring stuff) from HR, but Outlook would not let me block someone from the organization, so I created an Outlook rule to redirect emails from HR to a junk folder. Of course at some point someone from HR came to my desk to review a report and said that she had sent the link by email, so I had to go in the junk folder to get it while she was watching. A bit awkward. Nowadays I use a folder called "Corporate".

but... Nagios is OpenSource crap !

TimeBandit:

but... Nagios is OpenSource crap !

Eh, it has a lot of problems*, but it probably belongs in the tiny "Good" FOSS pile, or at least the slightly larger "Adequate" FOSS pile.


* Most of which center around performance and UI for tens of thousands of service checks. If you're just doing a few dozen service checks, it's not noticeable.

DOA:

Cassidy:

Big Brother?

Actually that's the name of the custom internal app I made to keep track of the health of our remote servers, so it's taken.

So did you write THE Big Brother or are you just infringing some copyrights?

 

morbiuswilters:

DOA:

blakeyrat:

True I guess. The dev name of the tool I'm building right now is "Hawkwind."

Speaking of which I'm currently building an application for a school to keep track of their students, courses, etc and I have no idea what to name it. Anyone have any ideas? I am this close to using some obscure anime reference.

"ChildWatcher"

"KidSpy"

"ExposedYouth"

"Pennywise"

morbiuswilters:

"ChildWatcher"

"KidSpy"

"ExposedYouth

Hey, DOA asked for naming ideas, not the list of your "special" folders

morbiuswilters:

they used an event where the Chinese government killed tens of millions of its own people--and tortured and oppressed tens of millions more--as a marketing gimmick

For a moment there, I though we were talking about Apple, then I read the part about China and I became certain.

serguey123:

morbiuswilters:

they used an event where the Chinese government killed tens of millions of its own people--and tortured and oppressed tens of millions more--as a marketing gimmick

For a moment there, I though we were talking about Apple, then I read the part about China and I became certain.

"The new iPad 3 can crush over 5.1 megadreams per-second! When you see the new Retina screen you'll think you've died and gone to Heaven, just like the child labor who assembled it (except for the Heaven part)!"

Each pixel is a hand-picked undernourished Chinese embryo, convulsively switching a microscopic colored card after a tiny electroshock delivered by the iPad's battery.

 

dhromed:

a hand-picked undernourished Chinese embryo

morbiuswilters:

the child labor who assembled it

Where did you think the magic came from?

serguey123:

morbiuswilters:

the child labor who assembled it

Where did you think the magic came from?

 

ohhh, that kind of labor.

dhromed:

serguey123:

morbiuswilters:

the child labor who assembled it

Where did you think the magic came from?

 

ohhh, that kind of labor.

And why do you think you can't change your own battery?


Because it's actually filled with amniotic fluid.

morbiuswilters:

amniotic fluid.

\ Tasty...it would also make for a great beauty shower

 

blakeyrat:

I can't mark the user as trusted because he's internal to my org and those senders are always trusted. But... but this one email ended up in spam.

It's possible your organisation has server-side anti-spam software which places messages it thinks are spam into the recipient's Junk Mail folder. If so, there's a reasonable chance that it won't whitelist everything sent within your organisation - we recently discovered Trend's anti-spam was doing this.

 

serguey123:

morbiuswilters:

amniotic fluid.

\ Tasty...it would also make for a great beauty shower

 

This thread is so bad

dhromed:

This thread is so bad

I'm waiting for the punch line

serguey123:

dhromed:

This thread is so bad

I'm waiting for the punch line

This thread is as shitty as your mom's G-string.