The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, January 30, 2001

“There's a sucker born every minute.”

John, the paper millionaire of a dot com called again. Asked me what I was doing.

“Still sorting through my bills and writing checks,” I said.

Can that wait? I have to talk to you about my next project! Mark is headed over here as well,” he said.

“Uh … ” I looked at the pile of junk mail and the few bills I had. “Sure. I'll be there in half an hour.”

So I headed on over there and heard his idea.

Can't say much about what it is, but I've heard of stupider ideas that made tons of money, so what can I say?

As P. T. Barnum used to say …


Parenthetical, a bug

bind 8.3 apparently parses differently, much to the annoyance of Mark and I.

Mark woke me up this morning, well, afternoon, with a problem. He upgraded to bind 8.2.3 in the wake of the recent advisory and it was failing to load his zone files. “It's dying in the parser,” he said. “It doesn't like the comments!”

We hashed it out for a few minutes when it hit me. “Mark, for your SOA records, do you have the opening parenthesis on its own line?”

“Yes,” Mark said.

“Yea, I thought so.” I do the same thing. “Just humor me. Put it at the end of the line.” I won't repeat the litany of swearing he did when that worked. Mark then signed off, having to upgrade his zone files.

Gee, such a nice gratuitous change there guys.


Easier and cleaner, therefore it's wrong

You see, both Mark and I put opening parenthesis on their own line in our zone files:

@       IN      SOA     ns1.molab.org.  spc.conman.org.
(
                        2000120101      ; Serial
                        43200           ; Refresh       (12h)
                        14400           ; Retry         ( 4h)
                        604800          ; Expire        ( 1w)
                        86400           ; Minimum TTL   ( 1d)
)

Instead of the way nearly everyone else does it:

@       IN      SOA     ns1.molab.org.  spc.conman.org. (
                        2000120101      ; Serial
                        43200           ; Refresh       (12h)
                        14400           ; Retry         ( 4h)
                        604800          ; Expire        ( 1w)
                        86400)          ; Minimum TTL   ( 1d)

It's cleaner and easier to read.

Of course that makes it wrong!

Sigh.


Schemes, Scams, Frauds.

I wonder if this has anything to do with my recent business proposal?

I wonder …


Evolution in action

Jason Lind was severely burned Friday night when he and a friend poured gasoline on his feet and legs and set him ablaze while imitating a stunt on MTV's high-rated show “Jackass,” police said. The fire grew out of control and burned the boy's legs and hands before it was extinguished, officials said.

Connecticut teen burned while imitating MTV stunt

Evolution in action, people! Evolution in action!

Why is that so wrong?

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