Tag: badness

PyCon, day 3


Daylight Saving Time is a gimmick and a crock and flipping stupid and I hate it. Personality cults are odd. At a conference, I see this most often in the backchannels. Like on Twitter. If Fred tweets XYZ, it probably won't be RT'd; and if it is, it'll be RT'd at most twice. But if a community … Continue reading PyCon, day 3 →

Rackspace changed Ubuntu bits without telling users


tl;dr Rackspace changed their Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty) server image without telling their customers. Our installation scripts unexpectedly broke. In the cloud, the rug can be pulled out from underneath you without warning, even in a very simple setup. The Story My employer is a small shop, and we use Rackspace Cloud Servers for our QA and Production systems. … Continue reading Rackspace changed Ubuntu bits without telling users →

WordPress’ iPhone app was written by 5-year olds


How badly can you build and QA an application? If you're WordPress, you can do a bang-up horrible job with your crap iPhone app. It changes titles, inserts and removes newlines, and applies other wonderful transforms to your blog's posts at will. It's a pity Apple doesn't allow negative stars in a review. The WordPress … Continue reading WordPress’ iPhone app was written by 5-year olds →

Celery uses spin-loops. Gah!


Here's another cautionary performance tale. If you use Celery subtasks to manage parallel work, know going in that it uses spin-loops to monitor subtask progress. Specifically, if you get a TaskSetResult from a TaskSet and then use iterate() or join(), the underlying code will eat your CPU alive. Here's the code in celery.result.TaskSetResult: The symptom … Continue reading Celery uses spin-loops. Gah! →

Document your FOSS project!


It's sad when an otherwise attractive FOSS project has zero documentation. I'm loathe to use code without documentation, no matter how simple it seems to be is. By documentation, I mean installation instructions, reference usage examples, and complete (OK, I'll take nearly complete) information about any turnable knob. Today's Undocumented Project Hall of Shame Exhibit … Continue reading Document your FOSS project! →

World’s most stupid home page redirect


Seattle's Portage Bay Cafe has the URL http://www.portagebaycafe.com/. This URL redirects you to http://www.portagebaycafe.com/Portage_Bay_Cafe/Seattle_Breakfast,_Brunch,_Lunch_%26_Catering__Portage_Bay_Cafe.html. SEO "expert" madness! Can I get paid good money to give companies shitty advice?

I won’t read blogs with disabled commenting


From now on, I won't read blogs that have commenting disabled. There will be only one exception to this rule — Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish gets a pass. I decided this after reacting to a post about Amtrak on plope. The author, Chris McDonough, felt that Amtrak's cost was too high, and its predictability too low, … Continue reading I won’t read blogs with disabled commenting →

Zipcar.com embeds messages in query strings


I visited Zipcar to see what car makes and models were available in my neighborhood. Alas, I couldn't log in, because I couldn't remember my password. It, apparently, wasn't one of my standard web passwords, nor was it in 1Password. (I haven't logged in to the site in over a year.) So, I clicked their password-reset … Continue reading Zipcar.com embeds messages in query strings →