waaaaaah?

I was feeling good this morning. Ran the regression suite overnight through Purify, and it had found some problems. Uninitialized memory references. Who would have thought that hundreds of 5-50 field structs in a 300 kloc code base with no standard initialization routines would have this problem. Bizarre.

So far I've resisted the urge to go fix all the potential instances of the problems, and only fixed the problems exposed by the regression suite. Maybe for next month's release.

Then I spent about 4 hours in conference calls. At about the third hour in I realize the crick in my neck that I'd blamed on sleeping oddly was more in fact from the previous day's conference calls. Jeff helpfully points out over IM, "Yes, this meeting is a pain in the neck."

Then I finally get a response from technical support on 2 of my tickets, after they'd spent ~3 weeks in a black hole.
"Due to ... blahblahlbha... we cannot install open source applications on any servers."

The offending applications? Zip. Unzip. GNU Make.

I can't decide to laugh or cry. The HP-UX server in question already has the GCC toolchain, GNU tar, ant, CVS, CruiseControl and the list goes on. Not to mention widespread use of Hibernate, Spring, ehcache, and tons of Apache and Jakarta projects throughout our Java and .Net products. WTF?

I've learned my lesson. Attempts at following procedure will only be made as a last resort. I need anti-action-item-Wonder-Woman-bracelets to deflect IT-related action items onto my coworkers.

Speaking of playing dress up...

I have to keep reminding myself I have better things to do than spend $250 on t-shirts.