Weekend in Philly

Spending the weekend in Philly with Vikki. At Last Drop working on MythTV.

Just received a ticket update on my Perl core patch. It's been committed to their repository!

http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=41560

Still trying to get MythTV to compile on OSX cleanly. I'm seeing some interesting differences in the behavior of ln (create symlink) on UFS versus HFS Plus.

For example, on UFS creating a symlink to an empty file does the following:

devin-heitmuellers-computer-2:~/mythtv4/.osx-packager devinheitmueller$ ln -s "" foo
devin-heitmuellers-computer-2:~/mythtv4/.osx-packager devinheitmueller$ ls -l
total 8
drwxr-xr-x    9 devinhei  devinhei  1024 Feb 20 00:51 build
lrwxr-xr-x    1 devinhei  devinhei     0 Feb 25 11:53 foo -> 
drwxr-xr-x   10 devinhei  devinhei  1024 Feb 20 00:54 src
drwxr-xr-x    2 devinhei  devinhei  2048 Feb 25 11:31 tmp

However, do the same thing on HFS+ and you get the following:

devin-heitmuellers-computer-2:~/mythtv4 devinheitmueller$ ln -s "" foo
ln: foo: Invalid argument

While it's pretty clear from looking at the Makefile output that there are no attempts to do an ln -s "", the nature of the problem I am having has to do with symlinks pointing to nothing, so this could certainly be related behavior.

At least it's something new to look at, which is good since I've been debugging this for three weekends now.

Life is good

Meeting with Co-op board scheduled. Product Demo went great. Fixed the intermittent crash that has been bugging me for a few days.

Met up with Carter last night. We watched The Prestige, which I would recommend to others.

How not to check if a hash key exists in Perl

Just had a job candidate in here. This is how she checked if a hash key existed:

foreach my $val (sort keys %foo) {
    if ($val eq $searchstring) {
        print "Found!\n";
    }
}

We decided not to hire her.

Day off

Have Presidents' Day off today. Spending it at the coffee shop in Philadelphia with Vikki.

Stumbled across this on CNN:

'Bullet magnet' fears for Harry
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/02/19/harry.iraq/index.html

So the third in line for the British throne is off to serve in Iraq. Makes me think back to that Michael Moore movie where he found that of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, only a handful of them had a child in the military.

Fixed the last of my Perl bugs on Friday (finally). Was going to see if I can get the debugger working now.

Borat in 30 seconds as performed by bunnies

For those of you at work who attended our last company function:

http://www.starz.com/features/bunnyclub/borat/index.html

FTD: Do not do business with FTD Florists

Yesterday morning I ordered flowers for Vikki. The FTD website indicated explicitly that it was not too late to have them delivered on Valentine's Day.

They never showed up. I put in a status request, and they said they would not be delivered on Valentine's day due to excessive volume. I put in a cancel order through their website, and got back the following email:

Thank you for contacting FTD.COM. We are always happy to hear from
our customers and enjoy assisting you.

We received your recent request to cancel your order. Unfortunately, your order was already in the process of
being delivered. We are so sorry that we were unable to accommodate your request.

Thank you for shopping with FTD.COM

Bullshit. I called them to cancel the order via phone, pushed "3" to speak to a customer support representative and was told that due to high call volume they would not be able to take my call. **CLICK**. Yeah, the machine hung up on me.

So I called back, and pressed "2" to "check order status". Same message. **CLICK**

So I called again, and pressed "1" to order flowers. Put on hold. No hangup. So they have representatives to take my orders but not to cancel them. Nice. The hold time was set to be over an hour though, so I hung up and figured I would call back once I got to the office.

Called when I got back to the office, same process except this time I can't even talk to a representative to "take my order".

Next stop - credit card company for chargeback...

To add insult to injury, the website now has a banner that says "Forgot to Order for Valentine's Day? Better Late than Never", where they are willing to deliver the same flowers today for 50% off of yesterday's price. Wow.

Done is good

Finally finished all the crap for doing my Co-op application. What a pain. At least it's good to know that if my career as a software developer falls through, I can always fall back on the stuff I learned in Practical Business Skills in the ninth grade. They don't teach kids nowadays how to use a real typewriter -- how to unlock the margins or horizontal align form fields -- how to fill out a form and not have it look like crap.

So now I have a 3/4" stack of paper and a handful of checks to various parties. Just need to get one more item from the bank relating to the financing and everything will be good to go.