nuggets from the dumb monkey sack

We've got a new developer in the group. As he's installing all the supporting tools he'll need for the projects he'll be working on, he came to me when Ant stopped working. Odd messages about Ant core/tools version incompatibilities.

We fiddle and fiddle with JAVA_HOME, with ANT_HOME, with PATH... No luck. Same messages, despite the Ant we want being right there at the start of PATH and in ANT_HOME.

Like a revelation from heaven, I realize... wait... what's in CLASSPATH? Well, there's a Documentum Jar in there... but that wouldn't have stuff to do with Ant, right?

The documentum Jar in question turned out to not have any classes in it, but it did have a giant list of other Jars in the manifest's classpath. Including Ant. More specifically, a local install of Ant 1.2 beneath the Documentum installation.

As much as I'd like to blame Sun for not providing a non-insane standard for application startup, I think its more appropriate to vent at EMC/Documentum for creating an installer that modifies the system's classpath environment variable to add their kitchen-sink Jar. For as much money as they charge, you'd think they could write an installer that doesn't screw up your system.

I'm not sure why I was surprised. Nearly every other interaction I've had with Documentum has been an exercise in agony. They must have a burlap sack full of exceptionally dumb monkeys deciding how their software gets installed and configured. Other nuggets from the monkey sack:

• No desktop application needs to talk to more than content server, right? Well, if they do, they can manually edit this INI file in c:\windows.
  
• No desktop application needs to talk to more than one version of a content server right? Well... if they do, they can uninstall/re-install to do so.

I can excuse their crappy, obfuscated APIs. Still hate them, but I can understand inflicting them on software developers. But to screw things up for all the end-users, QA, and support that need to use their crappy desktop apps, seems mind-numbingly stupid.

blog comment spam

I had to enable moderation on the comments due to the spam getting added. Moderating seemed like a better solution than going in and deleting the comments after-the-fact.

The first thing that clued me in to their spaminess:

These articles are fantastic; the information you show us is interesting for everybody and is really good written. It’s just great!! [more sales pitch and spammy URLs here...]

Anyone who actually read my blog would know that it has never been, and never will be any of those things.

hardware problems are teh suck

Why does my home PC pick the worst time to decide to stop booting? I really didn't want to spend 4 hours tonight fiddling in the XP recovery console, the BIOS settings, and running disk tests.

At first, I thought it was the height of inconvenience that I'd packed up my Windows XP install disk, had to search the basement, unpack the box, re-pack the box. Then, unpack the box again after realizing I forgot to grab the floppy disk with the SATA drivers.

However, that turned out to be minor compared to having to reboot twice every time I changed something in the XP recovery console. Once to get out of the console, and again so that the XP install disk would release itself from the CD-ROM drive. Gah!

System Rescue CD and the XP recovery console both seemed happy to read the disks, no problem getting into the partitions and looking at files. Tried fixboot, tried fixmbr, ran DFT's tests on both hard disks. No love from the boot gods.

Finally, decided to start fiddling with the BIOS. Swapped the order in which the hard disks are booted (SATA then IDE), and it came up. Not sure why I didn't notice it before. Also not sure why the BIOS implies it'll check disk #1 then disk #2 when booting, but only actually try #1 and give up.

Also not sure what would have screwed it up. I re-installed Ad-Aware, and Spybot S&D over the weekend. We also had a couple power-bumps a couple days ago.

In less annoying news, System Rescue CD is 4-6x as awesome as it was the last time I tried it a few months ago.