Return to Vermillion Sands.

[reddragdiva]

• "It's not a detail I think should be part of my identity," neither he nor she said. MAJOR WIN.

• Catholics! YOUR DONATIONS AT WORK. You paid for this, you share responsibility.

• Remember the kangaroo beer sign from The Last Continent? The original.

• Ubuntu tries really hard to screw the pooch for 10.04. The visual design team apparently have a bit of a habit of checking their stuff in just before freeze — you think they know people hate their idiot shit?

• Rocknerd: My heart bleeds. You can hear it, it’s that guffawing noise.

• NewsTechnica: Mark Owen of Take That gets drunk and laid a lot.

LiveJournal: I have been alerted that DreamWidth's OpenID login for LiveJournal users is crappy, annoying and frequently just doesn't fucking work. I'm seeking more info for a proper bug report. If you're an LJ user, please try to comment on the DW version of this post, and if it's a goddamn pain in the arse and/or doesn't work then comment anon with how. Feel free to be vituperative, just be detailed!

Basically, DW needs an option especially for LiveJournal users, as (a) the overwhelming majority of the OpenID commenters are coming from LJ, (b) "OpenID", "identity URL" and so on are technical jargon terms no-one should need to know just to comment and (c) this is actually breaking people's social networks for real. So far the OpenID system is a DW fail.

The thing about the LiveJournal engine is it's ridiculously easy to use. People who can't work computers can participate with huge success, and geeks don't get annoyed. The OpenID requirement is a Linux 1998 solution: tell the user to hand-dig a latrine, then hand them a toilet seat to prop on top, and honestly think you've done something user-friendly.

The obvious provider-neutral solution: if someone is automatically crossposting to another site, people will be coming from there — so include said sites as express options for commenting. A box something like "LiveJournal™ user: [_______] LiveJournal will confirm your identity." Accept a username, a username with hyphens, a URL, anything unambiguous. IT HAS TO BE RIDICULOUSLY EASY.

Can any of the DW developers reading this see any problems with this idea? Because the problem is real and it's breaking my network, and I'm really unhappy about that. Inadvertent lockin is just as damaging as deliberate lockin.

Perth: Plane ticket booked through Expedia, £789 return. (cheapflights.co.uk is a nightmare of bullshit and their £480 fares are all £850 when you try to actually buy one. Buggre thatte.) I am arriving in Perth at 1:15am Wednesday and staying at my sister's in Buttfuck, Nowhere. (Jandakot, to be precise.) THEY ONLY HAVE DIALUP! I'll post a phone number locked when I have it.

Just in time to visit, I've discovered The Worst Of Perth. It is 100% accurate and aesthetically perfect in its subtle horror. As Midnight Oil so eloquently put it: "Too much of sunshine too much of sky, but just enough to make you want to cry." I can hardly believe J. G. Ballard never actually visited the place.

Work: I spent the last two days on CruiseControl again. (It's a continuous-build system — every time a developer checks something in, it does a complete build. Resource-intensive, but oh so convenient.) The process of moving from one build server to another is like building a 1:1 scale duplicate of a full-size Titanic built from toothpicks and spit, using toothpicks and spit. And moving the build for apps that date back to "hmm, how do we build an app on this thing? Let's try this really bad idea" and have not changed because they're really popular and quite lucrative. And not only finding where the bodies are buried but producing a full audit report before reinterring them.

Builds are only slightly faster on the T5120 than on the old V210 (CPUs are about the same speed, 8GB memory instead of 2GB), but 32 THREADS NO WAITING makes everything ridiculously more convenient. It's also fun starting all the builds at once and watching the load average go through the roof while actual CPU load is about 20%. The developers are also enormously happy about the possibility of parallelising unit tests, which means the most heavily test-suited builds (the ones that are also most important because the apps make us a ton o' cash) might take less than fifteen minutes to turn around.

So us sysadmins are looking like stars to everyone and boss's boss is happy with having spent £10k on the box in question, and that's what really counts.

Party! I am sitting here with dye on my hair. Tonight I am going to Reptile. See me there before I go away for two weeks! Not that I've been out in, uh, four months. Pose for the camera, darlings!

Comments

OpenID test response

[sharplittlteeth.livejournal.com]

Right. This is my test post from OpenID.

Seems straight-forward enough so far, but I guess I won't really know until I hit Post Comment...