The Fryhole

I offer this as a how-to for anyone out there that has to deal with vendors in their day-to-day job.  Specifically, vendors that you are a client of.  Hopefully ones that are not quite like the one in this howto!

1. Your boss asks you to implement something that depends on the vendor’s product (I should mention — the vendor’s product is something that we have bought-and-paid-for, and while we still have a support deal with them we are also allowed to make code-changes to the product ourselves).
2. You investigate the vendors’ product and find that it will be fairly easy to implement, given one small change in said vendor’s product.
3. Send an e-mail to the vendor, asking for the small change (as part of the support deal).
4. Receive a response from vendor, telling you why the change is not necessary and a work-around that makes it not necessary… a work-around that will take longer to implement, require more code, and has the added bonus that it will create an implementation that is half-as-fast (using two API calls in the place of where you currently use one).
5. Being thoroughly sick of this vendor, thoroughly unwilling to argue with them until they see the light, and on a very tight deadline to implement said feature that your boss asked for, respond with “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”
6. Do it yourself, create patch file (of the 10-line code change necessary to the vendor’s product), and send it to the vendor.

If your vendor is anything like my vendor they are ridiculously angry now and will spend the rest of the day building mountains out of molehills.  Before anyone starts pointing out that vendors have very good reasons for not changing their products, etc… just allow me to point out that the change was a stunningly trivial one that had no impact on the core functionality of the product and only modified one error message.

Specifically, the change split the error message “Either X does not exist or is not configured.” into the two distinct error messages “X does not exist.” and “X is not configured.”, so that it is possible to tell the case “does not exist” from the different case “exists, but is not configured”.

tadpoleofdeath: Why do so many math majors confuse Halloween and Christmas?
elfking: why?
tadpoleofdeath: Because Oct 31 is Dec 25.

Hello, my new sigline, courtesy of bash.org.

So… this Super Mario Bros game is… wow. Roger and I ran out and bought DS Lites and Super Mario Bros in a ‘package deal’ (they weren’t actually being sold together for less money so we had to buy them at the same time and use our imagination) this last week. Worth every penny — I’m playing it more addictively than I did Super Mariokart DS. Not sure what it is… I never particularly like the original Mario Bros games when they were on the ’standard consoles’; but this DS version is the shiznit.

It could be that you get to grow really, really giant (which to my knowledge you could never do in the originals), or it could be that I’m just giving it more of a chance than I ever did with the original console-based ones. Yesterday I actually got my Wolf into armor on a level 1 mission in EVE, because I was distracted hopping about trying to get that last giant golden coin for a level and I didn’t notice the 7-8 Serpentis that seemed to take exception to my presence. That would have been an expensive mistake, considering the Gistii Type-A I just put on it.
Anyway, back to Super Mario Bros. Nintendo always has the little touches, and they haven’t missed out here. When you close the DS (without ending the game), Mario says “Bye-bye!” and when you open it again he says “It’s a me! Marrrrio!” Silly and meaningless? Perhaps. One thing that it does do, however, is bring you right into the game. There’s no delay between opening up the DS and starting to play (unless you end/quit the game — I’m talking about using sleep mode, here). You are in-game, and Mario is alive and well and it’s time to find the princess and there’s no time to spare — all as soon as you open the DS.

Not sure if it works that way for others, but Mario’s speech on opening the DS really delimit game-play for me — both the start and the end of it. I’ve heard that it takes people a fair amount of time to switch between tasks, and I wonder if Mario’s speech actually helps this process along by focusing the mind on the task at hand (and releasing it again).
It’s the little details that really make a game, isn’t it? All the koopas base r belong to me.

It’s weird… when I heard about this movie, I initially had a small amount of hope.  I can hear the howls of “What?!?” already, so allow me to explain.  A year or two ago, I heard that they were making a live-action version of Initial D, and though I was somewhat (shall we say) non-plussed by some of the rumoured changes (i.e. character names, etc.) I was still pretty eager to see it… I rather like a large portion of Initial D… so when I saw the first preview for The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift I was sort of thinking that maybe this was it, or Initial D had been cancelled (as I haven’t heard about it since) and thus they had made this instead.

Just to be clear: this movie is nothing like Initial D, and what’s more, it’s what I had in mind when I named this category.  It’s a travesty.  There’s one line that is rather amusing (about three minutes into the movie), and it just goes downhill from there.  Went to it for free (had one of those pre-release passes), but even then it was too expensive, in terms of pure negative-enjoyment (sort of like negative-work) adding up — I think I am still “working off” having seen this movie by playing Super Mario Bros and EVE and just generally trying to have fun.