Friday, March 31, 2000
Bitch session
Mark called, needing some help with sendmail. He's working on a project for John the paper millionaire of a dotcom and needs to get it to do something rather silly actually. But Mark does not care for TCP/IP programming or Internet programming at all.
“I don't understand what I'm doing,” he does. “What do I get from sendmail?”
“You get the header section in RFC822 format, then a blank line, then the body of the message, on standard input to the program,” I said.
“Why do I have to concern myself with this crap?” he asked. Seems he's
too used to having library code handle any lower level protocol stuff. Yes,
SMTP is low level to him in this project. Parsing this crap is too
much for him to handle. I can relate—databases are alien to me, what with
all that SQL crap and what not.
“Sorry, no one has really bothered with making libraries for this. Something about it being too easy or something.”
He continued one bitching about the SMTP protocol and having to actually know anything about it. He's happier working with telephony protocols, which to him, work better since they have error detection and recovery, while nothing in the TCP/IP world does. At least, not to his satisfaction.
Then again, Mark will do anything for money.
Investment in the future
Investment class. Gruelling but well worth the time and the money. Had to be there at 8:30 am. I made it, but I don't know how.
Afterwards I hung out with friends till about 2:00 am, only to have to get up the next morning to meet the next class at 8:30 am. Ick.
