.:f4ntasmic studios:.

Not your normal moving day, no. I’m moving all of my web presence over to a new host. It pains me a bit to do it honestly, because I work for a web host. I imagine a McDonald’s employee probably feels weird running into Burger King with their uniform on, at least, that’s how I feel about now. However, I’m justifying it with the fact that Contegix doesn’t really offer anything that suits my needs. I just need a small private server really. Well, realistically, I need a bit more than that, but I can’t afford a bit more than that. Essentially, as a result of this move, the bug tracker, wiki, source code viewer, and such of Darkstar Games will be lost until we can figure out how to handle the situation properly. Honestly, what we need is a JIRA Studio instance, which Atlassian + Contegix *does* offer. Unfortunately, I can’t afford that right now.

Anyways, I’m officially moved over to SliceHost now, and it seems fairly acceptable so far. Memory is a bit tight with only 256M of RAM, but at least they give you 512M of swap. That makes the virtual server at least usable for the most part. Plus, I’m using an incredibly stripped down distribution of CentOS with hardly anything at all installed at the moment. Basically just running a barebones LAMP setup with Subversion installed as well. Most everything, sadly sans wiki, is up and running now at least. Still waiting for some DNS changes to be made by other team members for the darkstar stuff though. After that’s complete, we’ll be officially moved over to the new host. Oh, I also nixxed all Apache logging for the time being to save a bit on processing, and disk usage. Granted, I don’t get enough traffic for logging to be a problem, but it wasn’t something I needed, so I nixxed it. Also, to save a few extra pounds, I’ll eventually migrate away from Apache HTTP over to Lighttpd as well. That should slim everything down by a somewhat significant margin.

Granted, you could say I’m essentially slumming it once again, after being spoiled by being on Chris’s server at work. However, it doesn’t seem so bad at the moment. The hosting is relatively affordable, and a decent bang for your buck. I can install whatever I want, I have root ssh access to the server, and it’s my VM to control as I see fit. I suppose in that sense it’s a pretty nice setup overall. It’s basically exactly what I had previously, except I’m not running my own mail stack, which is a bit sad in the end. Well, I thought it was going to be sad, except that Google rocks, and all my mail is being hosted by them now. So far I’m overly pleased with that situation, since Spam Assassin wasn’t quite holding back te spam as well as I had hoped in my own setup. So, at the end of the day, I’m overall pretty satisfied. It does suck that I’m dumping money into what you could consider a competitor, but hey, the day Contegix offers hosting for poor people with small setups is the day I start dumping money into Contegix instead :).

I just love the word musings I think, it just sounds so ‘eccentric’. That or it’s just so fucking emo cool that I just couldn’t pass up horse shoeing it into my topic. Anyways, I’ve been feeling more ‘writey’ lately (feel free to use that decidely less awesome than ‘musings’ word where you see fit in life). Just a few quick hitters this time around though, as I need some sleep:

Wordpress, seriously, another update? Feels like everytime I write lately that I have to update Wordpress AGAIN. Also, would you guys please stop throwing the version number I’m running in the damn viewable source with each update? Put it in a text file, some admin only area, or something for the sake of non-hackery. As much as I enjoy having a billboard that says “Here’s the list of security exploits I’m vunerable to: …”, I’d really rather just look it up myself in the admin panel, that general people do NOT have access to see. Give me one good, non-selfish, reason for the version number. I want one. Now.

Perl, why are you such an awkward duck of a programming language? I suppose it’s just my nature of feeling a bit confined in the world of C(++ and #) that the gaping openness that is Perl just feels -weird-. I love that I can do things 15 different ways in your language I really do, but at the same time, it’d be nice if anyone knew the ‘best’ way to do things. That, and you’re ugly. I mean, I don’t mean to knock on your physical features, but after writing 30-50 lines of Perl, I can barely understand wtf I was trying to do at line 1. It’s like someone sat on my keyboard. Yet, you’re oh-so powerful, and so fun to play with that this is all forgivable, as you’re only trying to be easy. What’s less forgiveable is CPAN. Yeah, great, a bazillion freaking packages for me to play with, that’s fantastic, and I appreciate that. Can you list the available packages? Oh, you can’t? Can your interface be something less archaic? No? Okay, well I guess I’ll continue to fight the good fight.

Everytime I update my Atlassian deployment script to support a new version of <name your Atlassian product here>, Atlassian releases something new again. I’m starting to feel that shenanigans and conspiracies are at play! In all honesty though, I think I’m just jealous that I’m not sporting my own instances of JIRA and Confluence, and updating my scripts to support the new versions each time just reminds me of that. Eventually I’ll stop being lazy, and figure out a way to have my script not be so dependant on pre-built templates. Then again, it’s a toss up. Making new templates takes about 5-10 minutes per application. Making my script (it’s all in bash btw) grab the specified war (latest WAR is not always applicable), explode it, and place it all properly without making a mess is all time consuming and decidedly more risky. After all, there has been once or twice a WAR file had leading /’s, thus exploding the war dropped the whole package all over the root of a filesystem (what a mess to clean). Thankfully, those days seem to be behind us now. I’ll prolly stick with templates though, helps me keep a controlled environment. Besides, new installs take 3-5 minutes to go from absolutely nothing, to the configuration screens. Can’t scoff at that, considering it can take 20-30 minutes to do it all by hand.

I think that concludes my ramblings for the day. Time for sleep.

I just want to announce that I hate OpenID. I’d love to login to www.stackoverflow.com (my favorite web addiction), and read a few questions, maybe provide some helpful advice to the programming geeks that I pretend are my brethern right now. However, thanks to the joy that is OpenID, I can’t. You see, I chose www.openid.com as my OpenID source. They now are my login point for any OpenID applications that I might end up using (note, there is exactly ONE application, and that’s stackoverflow). So typically, I’d login to ClaimID via StackOverflow, which while incredibly intuitive and confusing for the end-user is a relatively painless process, and then continue to browse the site.

My point is that I just don’t freaking get it. Ok, I have 1 username and 1 password for a potentially endless list of sites that support OpenID. Here’s a newflash, I have generally 1 username and 1 password for all non-security critical web applications that I use. What the hell is OpenID actually providing me? Is there suddenly this rash of users that are using multiple usernames with multiple passwords for their various sites? I somehow doubt it. I’d understand if logging into my OpenID account system allowed me to avoid logging into every other site, but that’s not the case (at least in reference to StackOverflow). Also, with the features of browsers remembering your passwords, and the increasing use of laptops (thus reducing the number of people using ‘public use’ PCs) I just don’t see logging into sites to be this monumental chore. We deal with this same stuff at work, and a lot of companies use Crowd (see atlassian.com) for use management.

Crowd’s sexy, don’t get me wrong, it has it’s cool points. If nothing else, it makes an amazing front end to your LDAP store. I personally prefer Fedora DS, basically because Crowd can’t fully replace it. I believe the bug of orphaned users (Fedora DS’s pseudo fault — not Atlassian’s responsibility) causing Crowd to be unable to read groups still exists for example. That renders Crowd broken in a hurry. So, I get Crowd to some extent. Having all of your user stores managable from one slick web application is handy. Allowing all of your applications to authenticate it is also sensible. I still personally feel that backing it with LDAP is the only reasonable approach, since many applications are not compatible with Crowd, so you at least can authenticate against LDAP in a pinch. What I fail to understand is the single sign on feature. Well, I digress, I don’t fail to understand it. I understand logging into one application thus enables you to automagically be logged into all SSO capable, Crowd authenticated applications in your infrastructure at once, is quite a convenience. With that feature comes a lot of baggage, and a lot of hoops that must be jumped through in order to accomplish it though. Then when it fails, people act like you just killed their puppy half of the time, over what seems from my angle as a completely frivilous feature. Granted, I’m not footing the bill for the Crowd license, so my opinion is subjective at best on the matter.

I guess I just don’t see this whole ‘logging into sites’ thing as such an archaic bothersome process. You enter your user/pass, click login, and click ‘Remember’. Then it’s rarely ever a problem for you again, and when it is it just requires a mouse click. I understand wanting to improve the Web, I really do, but can’t we start with parts that are actually in need of some form of improvement? How about audible CAPTCHAs that actually work for starters? I’m tired of feeling like a flippin detective when I’m registering to sites, trying to decrypt their distorted words just so I can create a user account. Shouldn’t Rule #1 be to not fuck the customer while trying to thwart spammers? Can’t we be a bit less difficult, or perhaps more creative in this respect? Ah well, ClaimID is back up. </rant>

If you hadn’t read my previous post then go do that before reading this one. I think it might add more context to this post, which could be beneficial to your reading pleasure. As for my soapbox ramble at the beginning of the last post, yes I do know where the term originates from. I just always find old sayings incredibly interesting how they tend to stick around, while their origin has long became obsolete. People don’t stand on soap boxes anymore, likely due to soap boxes not existing. It’s nice to know the tradition still exists though. Interestingly enough, the tradition is more prevelant nowadays than it ever has been thanks to the Internet. I can hop on my soapbox whenever I want, without actually yelling at people. Plus, I don’t have to worry as much about people yelling back at me, which is nice. Granted, I envision that people willing to express their views haphazardly in a park to passerbys have something far more important to say than I.

Anyways, I can’t really shake the topic from the previous post, it’s still sort of eating away at me. I’ve come to find that the potential for promotions at work, which should have brought upon a joyous time, has instead raised the tension and stress levels for me. Some have heard my thoughts from my previous blog entry, and are quick to jump to the incredibly hasty decision of hunting for a new job. I don’t really see that being the answer. For one, I haven’t talked to my actual superiors at work about my feelings yet, which I suppose I should probably do. Then again, I’m completely known for my disdain for confrontations and awkward conversations in a face to face scenario. If only all important discussions could be done via text my life would be so much easier! Secondly, these are mainly just rumors flying around so far, and aren’t exactly worthy of basing a major career decision off of. Third, I don’t really net much from a job hunt, as I’m going to end up in an incredibly similar position to my current one, except back a couple steps as I start fresh.

Part of my confusion really is that I don’t know that I really have any exceptionally valid complaints anyways. I mean, my gripe comes off as bitching and moaning as I get passed up on promotion opportunities (at least, if the birdies and my hunches are close to right). That’s part of life in the real world unfortunately. You don’t always get what you want, and life very rarely resembles any definition of the word ‘fair’. Hence maybe I should just shut up, put my head down, and roll with the punches. In the end I likely did this to myself anyways by getting my hopes up for something that is barely tangible, much less possible. I’m fairly certain things will go back to business as usual once everything calms down, the positions are filled, and all the current ‘up in the air’ items fall into place. My utter impatience, and the uncanny patience of my job, often gets the best of me.

Besides, who’s to say that I’m legitimately worthy of a promotion right now anyways. My time will come around eventually, and if it doesn’t, and I find myself completely unsatisfied, I could always move along then. I think at this point I really just need to try and be patient, and suck it up for awhile. I was really hoping for my recent trip to the Ozarks to be more clarifying, but it wasn’t unfortunately. So yeah, for now I think I should just keep my eyes peeled, but overall stay the course. Hopefully the rumors chill out, everything falls into place, and life returns to normal soon tho. That’d be nice.

I’m kinda curious about the soap boxes of the fabled yesteryears that people hopped up on, and let loose their thoughts on how they felt. Hell, the soap I get now doesn’t even come in a box, it’s in a plastic bottle. The soap that does comes in boxes generally comes in a small cardboard box. Hardly worthy of standing upon, that much is certain. For those few chosen ones that happen to be reading this, I must forewarn you, this is likely to be a long, drawn out, rambling rant fest of a blog post. I have a bunch of stuff floating through my head, so without further ado I suppose..

(let’s do this livejournal/emo style)

Mood: Frustrated/confused/worried/anxious :S
Music: Pandora (NIN currently, oh so fitting)

One thing I’ve always appreciated about 3rd shifts is that office politics are almost completely non-existant. It’s just Chris and myself and all we’ve had to worry about is doing what we do. The first half of this week’s been brutal though, as he just recently bought a house and has taken a few extra days off. Congrats to him, glad to see he’s getting his own place, he deserved it. Obviously, the brutal part comes into play with us being a man down at work, and trying to shoulder the extra load at work for the rough 4 hours that isn’t being covered. It’s disappointing because I definitely haven’t strutted my best work out there this week due to rushing through tickets a bit more hastily than I normally have to. That’s my fault, I probably should have enlisted on-call help or something, but it never really felt like the situation was out of my hands. I thought I had everything under control, but after reviewing some of the tickets maybe that’s not necessarily the case. I dunno, I’m not impressed with the work I’ve put forth this week, which honestly is about par for the course. Not really sure how that differs from most weeks, but it does. I suppose it’s because I actually made some mistakes this week. Generally I just feel like what I do isn’t really all that great, I’m just doing my job. So far this week I just feel like I’ve let the “team” down. It’s frustrating, and not exactly impeccable timing. I pick a time right before my review to start stumbling like an idiot, well played.

Speaking of review though, I have been at Contegix for roughly a full year now. It’s been a wild ride, and it still feels like I just started yesterday. I’m not sure yet when I actually get my review. I know historically your review doesn’t correlate with your 1 year mark, and instead typically occurs sometime around 3-6 months after the one year mark. I suppose it’s irrelevant overall though, it’ll happen when it happens. The whole idea of yearly reviews has always made me giggle a bit though. Every company does them, so I’m pretty accustomed to the whole thought process. However, in my experience your annual review really equates to how good you’ve been the past 1-2 months. The idea of bringing up things you didn’t do great in month 2 is irrelevant, because it’s likely been fixed by month 12, and if it hasn’t, and you’ve been doing something wrong for 10 months then management has failed by not informing you of such. Quarterly reviews, with annual raises, always made more sense to me. I think 3 months is a nice time frame upon which to judge someone’s performance. It allows you more flexibility to fix problems with the employee, and to bolster their worth in the company. I know I’m a bit weird on this though. I want the Weather Channel for my performance essentially, so I can know ‘on the 8s’ how I’m doing. Live performance tracking would be pretty stellar! Hell, I’m sure it’ll be part of our fancy new ticketing system (*snicker* inside joke).

Anyways, so, office politics I mentioned above, but quickly side tracked from… We typically get to avoid them on third shift. Sometimes we get wrapped up in them a bit, but not too bad. We’re fairly abstracted from the rest of the company. We do our thing, take care of customers, receive the occasional compliment, and the rare slap on the wrist for our misgivings. We handle the ticket flow differently than other shifts, watch after each other, and never toss each other under the proverbial bus. The only problem is that the third shift joy ride had to come to an end eventually. I love third shifts, I really do, I can’t deny it. At the same time though, I have almost no life whatsoever as a result. I get home at 7 (if I’m lucky), nothing’s open, nothing’s on TV.. I basically get to watch whatever’s on my DVR, eat some form of breakfast food, or maybe go to Wal-Mart. Then on the weekends I have to completely rape my sleep schedule in order to do anything, whch makes me almost useless on my Monday (Sunday truly) at work. Hence, I rarely convert my sleep schedule on the weekends, and end up just keeping it “normal” for the sake of sanity. The downfall of all this is that while Kristie and I mathematically see each other just as much as we did when I was on a normal shift, we never spend quality time together. We used to go to the zoo, catch movies, go to the mall, and get out of the house just in general. Now if we do anything, we watch X-Files or Seinfeld on DVD at home before I go to sleep (right as she’s waking up). It’s not really fair to her, and it’s taking it’s toll on me as well. I guess this is another case of me diving into something, without thinking about the consequences. I didn’t really see that I’d be sacrificing much, if anything, being on thirds.

(yes I know the politics, I’m getting there aight?)

So there are a couple positions opening up at Contegix, and initially I was just excited about the possibility of moving up in the company. As time had gone on, the idea of getting off of thirds and joining the ranks of the daywalkers increased the level of excitment/anticipation I had for a potential new position at Contegix. Initially I was pretty excited about the Operations Coordinator position that’s up for grabs at work, but birdies in my ear tell me it won’t be nearly as exciting as I had originally thought it might be. I knew stuff like inventory and billing would be side effects of the new position, but rumors would have me believe that would be a large chunk of the position. Given some of the new positions that have been filled that are above Ops Coord, that rumor from the birdies seems to hold a significant amount of water. We’re a great big sewing circle, us engineers that is, so who the hell knows. Information tends to come out like urine from an old man… sudden gushes of unexpected information right in your pants, followed by long droughts with times that it feels like urine will gush again but never does, until that sudden explosion reoccurs. Hence, things are often left to us to theorize, guess, and craft hairbrain ideas out. So anyways, a ‘bug’ was planted in my ear about some exciting new positions that would be right up my alley…. next year. Early next year, but next year. My problem is two-fold with this: 1, it takes the excitement about returning to be a daywalker, and seeing my wife more and 2, a LOT can happen by early next year. These supposed new, exciting positions may fizzle out, or perhaps someone more qualified than I comes along, then they get snatched up by someone else. I dunno, apparently I’m supposed to feel flattered that next year at some point in the fiscal 2009 year I might be considered for a promotion. I suppose I’m taking it more as ‘the positions currently available won’t be going to you, but here’s a different carrot’, rather than the good way it’s intended. Of course, I haven’t been told these current new positions are unattainable for me, but planting a bug such as this seems awfully odd if you’re really thinking about promoting someone. That, and the timeframe that was given to me for the interviews has past, making me think that perhaps the interview process is null.

Ah well, just lots to think about now I suppose. I love my job, and I know there’s nothing like this out there. Maybe just being a normal, run of the mill engineer ain’t so bad.

Funny T-Shirts: FSG Ad Spot from Jonny Cakes on Vimeo.

This whole clusterfuck of a spore situation really has me annoyed at this point. It’d be one thing if I could even read Reddit, but I can’t even do that. Everywhere I turn, someone is whining about Spore’s DRM, laughing about how it has a 1-star rating on Amazon, and talking about how hiliarious it is that it’s quickly working it’s way to the number 1 most pirated game of all time. People are openly commenting about how the DRM is so ridiculous that they opted to pirate the game instead of purchasing it. The whole idea of pirating, and how people feel they have the right to something that which they refuse to pay for, to just be a bit criminally insane. Have I pirated music, movies, etc in the past? Do I still do it on the rare occassion, yeah probably. However, I’m not insane enough to say that it’s right, that it’s not stealing, or that it doesn’t hurt the respective industries that I pirate upon.

That’s a whole different topic however. The case of Spore is mind blowing, faith in human destorying, non-sense to a new degree I didn’t know was even possible. Here we have people saying they’re pirating the game, due to the insanely restrictive digital rights management (Copy protection), to show EA they mean business. What kinda of bizarre protest is this? You want to take a commendable, tried, true, and well honored route of protesting by not giving your money to a corporation who is raking customers over the coals. That makes sense. Then you totally rape all the moral cause from your protest by pirating the game, and performing an illegal act. In case you’re wonder who is right, and who is wrong in this case, it’s you, not EA. They’re working within the law to protect their investmest. Is it a shitty method that invasive, inconvenient, and tramples on consumer rights? Sure is, but it’s legal. McDonald’s makes shitty food too, but I’m not protesting that by stealing their burgers.

For those of you unaware of the situation, EA’s limiting users to 3 installs of Spore. To make matters worse you can also only have 1 account per boxed copy of the game as well. This means you can’t sell the game off to your friend, because he’ll have to use your account. Also, if you think 3 installs are plenty, you’re wrong. I’ve installed various Quake games over 10-15 times a piece without a doubt. Hell, in the past 10+ years the Quake series has been around I’ve easily gone through 4-5 computers, which means I couldn’t go back and relive the game anymore, because I’ve used up all my installs. No doubt I’d be pissed if I picked up a new PC, and couldn’t play a few of my old games because of some insanely crappy DRM. Hence, I don’t own Spore at the moment, because I’ve haven’t decided it’s worth my time given the copy protection. I’m not going to go download it via some torrent, just because I feel I have some right to play Spore without EA benefiting from it.

Face it people, you can play Spore by purchasing it, or you can act like fucking adults and protest properly. All you’re doing by jacking the game off a torrent is perpetuating the idea that the PC games industry is a lost cause due to piracy. Publishers and developers have the right to protect their investment, and this particular method is terrible. We can all agree on that. Protesting isn’t protesting when you make a sacrifice in the process. All that’s really been accomplished so far is the following:

“Everyone’s pissed about the DRM, but everyone’s stealing EA’s new game Spore.”

“Spore from EA is on it’s way to being the most pirated game of all time”

“EA’s Spore is causing a major ruckus due to a massive amount of piracy”

Your whole fucking cause has been lost because you went about it all wrong. The whole DRM situation you’re all pissed about has been completely overshadowed by the DRM that plagues the industry. All you’ve accomplished is the guarentee that EA’s next gam will have even more invasive DRM to hopefully prevent this from occurring again. I hope you’re all happy.

We deal a lot with various forms of centralized user management at Contegix. Even with DarkStar Games, as the main “web guy”/server admin, I’ve found myself lusting for the joy that is centralized user management. We only have a total of 3 people really involved, but still the annoyance of having to manually add users anytime we deploy a new site is something that can be done away with. For instance, when we moved from Mediawiki to xWiki, I had to manually create each of our users, put them in to certain groups, and grant them permissions. I had to do it for Subversion, our main site, our SVN viewer, and our issue tracker. The first thing I had setup was mail, which (sort of) can even be ldapified.

You might be thinking then, why this post? Perhaps I should just go setup OpenLDAP/Fedora-DS/Active Directory/Crowd! Well, I’ve considered doing so, but I keep commonly coming back to reality. Don’t get me wrong, I understand, and even appreciate that which is centralized user management. What I fail to come to grips with however is the pain and torment we put ourselves through just to benefit from the glory that is centralized user management. For instance, here’s a couple of use cases that make me want to repeatedly stab myself in the face….

OpenLDAP, the free, command line based defacto standard of LDAP systems. It uses the glorious (disastrous) Berekely database to store all of the user information that you could possibly desire. The best part is just how easy to use it is! For instance look at this joy of a command:

ldapadd -x -W -D"cn=Manager,dc=darkstar-games,dc=com" -f peter.ldif

With that simple command, we can import the user peter (no idea who/what that is)! Obviously, the -x stands for… well.. XTREME! Then there’s the -W which stands for “will you please not destroy my database”. Then the blatant -D for “Database destroying mode”. This is followed by which user you’ll be importing the content as, which makes some sense, except there’s really only one valid answer (unless you have multiple dc’s). Finally, -f for “file”, which is relatively sensible. Then in that file you have an absolute disgusting to look at mess for your user’s information that you’ll be importing into the LDAP database. Now, things get super interesting when you run this command. If your LDIF file is slightly off, OpenLDAP will reject the import. The fun part? It won’t tell you why! Sure, you’ll get some cryptic command, but it will be almost completely useless to you. Let’s assume that the syntax is correct in your LDIF file though, because this could be the orgasm of the experience. You could completely hose your LDAP store, thus resulting in a need to perform a DB recovery from the transaction logs. To add insult to injury, OpenLDAP allows you to set configuration options that can leave these logs in a state where they’re unusable for recovery. My personal worst moment was when I performed a slapcat (dumps all information from the LDAP store to standard out) output to a text file. The reasoning was that I wanted to back up the LDAP store before I modified my user’s password, to ensure I didn’t do any accidental damage. Unknown to me at the time this is just as deadly! This (somehow) corrupted the LDAP store database, and forced me to perform a recovery of the DB. Long story short we have a customer that’s performing hourly LDAP dumps due to the sheer terror of going any longer than that without a backup, due to their LDAP instance being under a constant barrage from thousands of users.

So quite frankly, I hate OpenLDAP, and greatly prefer Fedora DS. The only downfall is that it’s arguably slower than OpenLDAP. I don’t care though, because it’s super easy to setup, use, and replicate (in comparison). Maintaing a Fedora DS instance seems like it’d be easier, since you have a nice fancy GUI to interact with your user manaement system. For the most part it truly is, since adding users to groups requires just a few clicks, and adding them to groups is just as easy. Then comes a day when you unfortunately have to fire an employee. You think, “Oh hey, I’ll just delete the user from Fedora DS, and we’ll be safe from a potentially disgruntled employee”. Well, you’d be half right, because that user would be locked out. Then later you realize when you’re looking at your user list in Confluence, that the person you deleted is still taking up space as a user, which is counting against your user count for your license (you’re restricted to a number of users based on which license you have in Confluence). This is all because you did remove the user from Fedora DS, but you didn’t remove them from every group they were in! Silly you, what on Earth were you thinking? Just because you nuked the user, doesn’t mean that they were removed from the groups, duh! *bangs head against wall*.

To make matters more interesting with that particular bug is the myriad of bugs that can cause with other applications. For instance, in Confluence it can orphan the user, since Confluence says the user exists in LDAP, and LDAP says he doesn’t. Looks like you might be digging out VI or mucking around in a database. For added enjoyment if you have Crowd in the mix, it’ll make the group with the ghost user completely unusable by Crowd (as of version 1.4.4, not sure if 1.5 found a way around this). This means you just deleted a user who happens to be in your Confluence Users group, and now everyone else in that group can’t login to Confluence, because Crowd can’t read the group! What a win that centralized user management is turning out to be for you.

Lastly, there’s another problem that drives me crazy. That’s the fact that as your LDAP based user management system grows it becomes this crazy house of cards. My experience seems to show that searching a large LDAP group can be nothing but annoyingly slow. This isn’t bad with a couple hundred, or even a couple of thousand users. What happens when you get up to 10k users though? It seems to become almost completely usable by most applications as the searches get so freakishly expensive. There really just HAS to be a better way.

Sorry, no witty titles here, they seem to have escaped me. I know it’s been awhile since I’ve wrote, which seems to be how I start off nearly all my blog posts. Maybe if I posted more, I could start the posts differently. Unfortunately, then I’d have to think of how to kick off my blog posts. Perhaps that’s more effort than actually blogging in the first place. At least this way I always have an “in” right? Good.

I know it’s a sad excuse, but I’ve been pretty busy lately. I’ve been working of course, and generally enjoying (mostly) life at the land of Contegix. I’ve also been hanging out with friends more on weekends lately, which is nice. It’s rather comforting to have friends again, and to actually have time to hang out with them now that I’m not drowning in work + school. Then there’s the work I’ve been doing with some friends that I graduated with. We formed a team called Darkstar Games,which as a whole is working on a damn fun project right now. We’re building what is starting off as a 2D engine, that will eventually grow out to be 3D. It’s been fun working on an actual long term project. The engine is incredibly well modularized so far, so that you can pop parts out, and pop new ones in. The whole plan is that if the sound engine needs to be tweaked, or rewritten, we can rewrite it without thrashing the whole engine to pieces. Thankfully we’ve planned for such occasions, because I’m actually rewriting the sound engine right now. Turns out SDL Mixer is a bit of garbage, and leaks memory like a dead hooker with stab wounds. The sad part is that at first I was blaming MY code, thinking that I surely screwed something up. Turns out, simply initializing SDL, and then running the proper cleanup on exit will leave threads open until you track them down to nuke them. It’s pretty sad, because the sound engine WAS functional.

Oh well, now we’re switching to OpenAL as the backend for our sound, which was inevitable anyways. If we stuck with SDL Mixer, our 3D sound would have to have been faked since it is a 2D sound API truly. OpenAL thankfully allows for full 3D sound, and it can even properly handle 5.1 surround sound. I suppose I should get back to working on though.

The last post I made, along with the comments I received made me do a bit more thinking on the art of customer service. Maybe I’ve been thinking about it all wrong, and that consumers really don’t want customer service that badly. I don’t really believe that, though. However, the natural order of capitalism and economics pretty much dictates that I’m obviously at least partially wrong. What sells in America? Whatever people will buy into. If people are willing to pay for bad customer service, then companies are willing to sell them bad customer service. Like all the people who complain about Comcast because of terrible customer service for instance, they keep PAYING Comcast. In the customer’s defense, they often feel they “don’t have a choice”, as all that’s available to them for a variety of reasons is cable. Tag along with that the fact that cable companies often own a monopoly in their area, and you have a trapped customer. Ironically, last time I checked cable was not necessary to life, but it is a luxury most Americans partake in. The problematic part is that by continuing to buy into customer service that you don’t particularly care for is that you water down customer service.

Look at it this way, pretend corporations are basically animals running on instinct. If you give your dog a treat every time he destroys a pillow, guess what? That dog will keep destroying pillows in an effort to get more treats. Ironically, this is not far off from human behavior, as much as we pretend we’re far above the animal kingdom we’re really not. We work on a risk/reward system in a lot of ways. We do something (risk), and if it turns out great (reward) then we’ll repeat the cycle until the reward begins to diminish in contrast to the risk. Therefore, continuing on with this theory we can assume that businesses will follow this same logic. If you continue to pay them for bad service, where is the incentive to provide any better service to you, especially if providing better service diminishes their reward ($$$). Then we have situations like a Wal-Mart, McDonalds, or Great Clips.

These establishments are giving you bad customer service because you voted for it with your dollar. Seems silly, especially since you probably didn’t realize you were even voting in these situations, but you did. You effectively told the three companies previously mentioned that you want service, you want it quickly, and you want it as cheap as possible. This has resulted in Wal-Mart lacking in customer service, and pushing stock to the shelves as fast as they can. Now Great Clips keep dropping how fast their stylist must cut your hair, because the majority of their customers want faster hair cuts, to get in and get out quickly. Meanwhile McDonalds continues to dominate with fast service, and cheap prices, despite quality and health going out the window. The dollars dumped into collective wallets of these companies dictated these business practices. It’s not like they chose to serve you in a sub-par manner on a whim, not at all. This is what statistics, market trends, sales figures, and surveys told them to do, which is all you have to follow from a business standpoint I assume.

My problem is this though: If you have the ability to treat each customer as an individual, shouldn’t you do as such? As a customer, I do want good service when I need it, even if it is someplace such as Great Clips or Wal-Mart. I don’t want to be rushed away, I’d greatly prefer to be treated like an actual human being. Unfortunately, with large companies that ability is largely lost in the fast paced shuffle of the nonsensical craziness that ensues with large corporations. However, when you have repeat customers on a smaller scale, I believe you’ll get more from that customer by treating them as an individual. I feel you should get to know your customer, adjust your style to their needs, and serve them in the manner that they wanted to be served. It’s often said that the best advertising is word of mouth, mainly because people take advice from those they trust much easier than opposed to a billboard. Severely disgruntled customers and extremely happy customers will be the most likely to discuss your company via word of mouth. I envision that your mildly happy or annoyed customers will likely be to apathetic to blog about your company one way or the other though.

I often wonder what it is about business that I apparently just don’t get. I watch companies mishandle customers, drop the ball, or downright abuse customers for apparently no reason some times. Often it seems like just handling the customer with care, and as fucking human being, would generally be the best approach. A happy customer will spread the good word about you, and likely spend more money on you if they can. An unhappy customer will just jump ship the second they get a decent opportunity. I’m apparently missing something though, and I’d love to understand it with some companies. In some cases, like Great Clips, they could probably give stylists a bit more time to cut hair, improve the morale of the stylists as a result which would hopefully lead to better hair cuts. Instead it seems like the general response is ‘morale’s fucked, nothing we can do about that. Let’s at least please the customer in the time department while everything else is screwed’. The logic annoys me. Apparently I’ve become just some liberal hippy that believes in the dead art of customer service.