Ode to joy.

[reddragdiva]

• You know how stupid baraminology is? QuantumMAN could actually be stupider.

• I concur wholeheartedly with this Register piece on netbooks, my favourite computer form factor ever.

I spent most of the week thinking about RationalWiki's social media strategy, and I am slightly horrified to use that phrase as if it means something. The blog is ticking along at about 150 hits/day, which is not terrible for something completely new. There's some really good posts on the blog, and of course they disappear in time almost immediately; if you like a post, please spread the link around lots. There's a lotta stupid out there in the world to clean up. I also have the keys to the @rationalwiki Twitter.

If you ever need to grep -r a whole codebase (or other huge directory tree of text), just use ag instead. It's really nice and ridiculously faster. Not in the distros yet, but there are developer-endorsed debs and RPMs.

Started using RT at work. It really is just completely a bucket of cocks. Still a better love story than Remedy, though.

Comments

[rbarclay]

Started using RT at work.

You poor, poor boy. Does it receive mail from outside, eg. spam? In which case you're just gonna love that it'll auto-create a user for every new mail-address it sees, making lookups - with its oh-so-glorious ideas about what to use a relational DB for, and how to use it - ever so fast.

It really is just completely a bucket of cocks. Still a better love story than Remedy, though.

Oh, that. Yes. Though you're really comparing the output of gastrointestinal flu with the leftovers from lepra victims. When what you want is cake. Lovely cake.

[reddragdiva]

It doesn't yet receive email from outside. I am supposed to get that bit working, but now I may not bother.

[rbarclay]

Do it with procmail! Yes, really. You'll need its features later on.
Don't bother with SSL for local connections, it'll just make debugging more difficult (blocking plain-text connections from the outside shouldn't be worth mentioning).
Get aquainted with RT::Shredder really, really early on. Don't bother preserving corner-case tickets, just throw stuff away. It's the only way to keep a positive balance of SAN points.
Be generous with table indexes. Really generous. It might just postpone the point of buying better hardware for no effect whatsoever.
The web-interface is quite unlike a MUA, even though it has deceptively similar-named buttons. This is probably intentional, just for the lulz ("reply" will send to the "requestor" of the ticket, not to whomever has sent the mail, err "comment", you're replying to). This way lies madness.
"Scrips" work. 97% of the time. Liberal use of Data::Dumper to find out what's available is strongly suggested.

[khrister]

Ah, so it's the opposite of our homegrown system, where "Reply" always is to the one who wrote the thing you reply to, making it fun to reply to phoned in tickets instead.

You just can't win either way, here...

I haven't used RT in the last decade, so I can't really say anything useful about it.

[reddragdiva]

It feels like a journey back to 1998, so I expect all the rants to be the same.

[rbarclay]

Well, RT makes it extra fun as it doesn't deign to show who the "requestor" is on many of the "reply" pages, so you get to open Yet Another browser tab just to check.

OTRS, IIRC, did everything right in this regard, but my memory is becoming hazy.

[reddragdiva]

Oh fuck. Wikimedia uses OTRS for volunteers (including me) to handle the incoming firehose of email. It is just unspeakable and would be worse than RT for this job.

[reddragdiva]

The cake is a ticketing system.

[tcpip]

RT isn't fancy, but it does what it needs to do. Plus, writing extensions is pretty easy, the Perl source is actually comprehensible, and it's not too bad at searching. Its permissions system does take a little getting used to, however.

[ideological_cuddle]

Well, except that there isn't a complete end to Atom-based machines. The Acer Iconia W510, for example, does the 12-hours-of-battery thing, though admittedly kind of slowly thanks to the Atom. Bit like a Transformer, except running Windows.

Arguably the netbook ruined the PC industry. They finally figured that out. So, not so many netbooks.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I agree about netbooks, I love my Samsung netbook. Even if all I'm doing is browsing web pages or watching video, I still like something that sits on my lap rather than having to be held in my hands. And touchscreen keyboards I find terrible for anything more than short comments.

There is the issue of what counts as a "netbook" - if it means an end to 1024x600 resolution 1GB machines, but ultra-portable laptops are still around, great. In some sense, Atom and ARM based laptop/tablet hybrids (ASUS Transformer style, as ideological_cuddle says) are a successor of netbooks (and some have even longer battery life, using the keyboard section for extra battery). Though it seems most are now 11" minimum rather than 10" or less. They're also more expensive - it's a shame if lower cost small laptops won't exist anymore.

Grep

[maxcelcat]

You're bagging Grep? Grep is the best thing ever! I found a windows port with a GUI and use it every day.

(Also it's 1.30AM here and I'm up keeping an eye on a baby. Yep, still a baby.)