Fundamentalist Wicca Seeks hot-babe for Wireless Action, Document Management Web App

The week before last (before my job started) I spent the whole week on a quest for reli­gious knowl­edge, start­ing from a post syn­di­cated to Indyblogs (the Indymedia site) about Wicca, describ­ing the “debate” between those who choose that reli­gion after see­ing The Craft or Charmed reruns on TBS, and those who actu­ally research the stuff. The most hilar­i­ous was Why Wiccans Suck, which reminded me of some old comic strip­page on s*p [insert secret-identity con­spir­acy the­ory here]. The bent of the pages on that site seems to be that most peo­ple who claim to be witches aren’t really witches, they’re just doing it to piss off Significant Others^TM and/or other Authority Figures^TM, don’t know much about the reli­gion itself, it’s his­tory, tra­di­tions, and most impor­tantly, it’s Rules^TM.

Of course, I’ve heard all this before, from fundamentalist/conservative Christian preach­ers and radio/televangelists, talk­ing about the modernist/liberal groups (Methodists, Unitarians, the Jesus Seminar). My main prob­lem with Christianity is that the whole reli­gion seems to be over­run with fun­da­men­tal­ist wackos like an army of Taliban enforcers, albeit cloaked in suits and part-on-the-left Aryan master(bater) blonde hair. Thus, it’s hil­iar­i­ous to me that some Pagans believe their reli­gion isn’t fun­da­men­tal­ist enough, and is over­run by those who don’t take it seri­ously. To be fair to the WWS site, I don’t think that blend­ing reli­gion and pol­i­tics is ever a good idea, no mat­ter what the reli­gion and/or pol­i­tics is, and it does irri­tate me that peo­ple whom I would oth­er­wise respect say things and use ter­mi­nol­ogy they don’t under­stand or haven’t fully thought through, par­tic­u­larly terms that I hap­pen to have an affin­ity for (like “Freedom” and “Anarchy”).

Nevertheless, “There aren’t enough peo­ple who take it seri­ously” is about as close to a ring­ing endorse­ment of a reli­gion as I’ve ever found.

Then last week, it was on to the new job. I spent the first day help­ing my boss pid­dling around with a bro­ken wire­less setup out on a farm, ulti­mately deter­min­ing that the prob­lem was an embed­ded Linux/wireless thing — some­how the box man­aged to delete it’s firmware. Ugh. When the start of the day came around, I thought it would be a quick, unevent­ful trip to watch the stuff in action, fol­lowed by some faint web design/PHP back at work. Silly rab­bit, it’s a 6-hour (includ­ing the drive) wran­gle with a net­work in the mid­dle of nowhere strung together by a third party, who shall hense­forth be know as the Mad Tin-Foil Hatter. I mean, come on, what’s the point of lock­ing down the AP with a MAC-address list when:

1. It is already using WEP.
2. You’re in the mid­dle of Farm Country, USA, and the clos­est thing to “civ­i­liza­tion” is a small state-college (town) a dozen miles away.
3. The net­work isn’t com­plete (like every other net­work, ever).
4. You aren’t going to doc­u­ment that fact in your notes.

Anyhow, after try­ing to fig­ure out why the Windows lap­top wouldn’t con­nect for about an hour, I got mine (in OS X, because “Broadcom built a soft­ware radio rather than just a wire­less card. FCC reg­u­la­tions stop them releas­ing the source in case peo­ple use it as a soft­ware radio” — which is the dumb­est shit I’ve ever heard), which actu­ally gives use­ful error mes­sages (e.g. “This wire­less access point has an ACL, which you aren’t on”) instead of the utterly use­less crap Windows spews — for the NetworkManager crowd, please do make the wire­less error mes­sages mean­ing­ful. Aaanyways, after adding a sec­ond AP to see if it was sim­ply some screwy com­pat­i­bil­ity prob­lem with the AP, it turns out that the wire­less stuff we had Just Wasn’t Working^TM.

The rest of the week was spent on designing/implementing a PHP web-app for access­ing a whole slew of PDF-format doc­u­men­ta­tion. Previously, if some­one from the com­pany went out to a site they needed to bring the docs for every­thing they needed to work on, often stuff that my employer didn’t sell them or install. If there was some­thing there that wasn’t noti­fied, it required a cell-phone call to the office where some­one would go slough­ing through a huge phys­i­cal 3-ring binder to find the appro­pri­ate doc­u­ment. The end goal is to have it acces­si­ble via a web­site or an XML-RPC inter­face from the PDAs the on-site peo­ple slog around with them.

The main goal was to get it (barely) func­tional so I could worry about the design (and teach myself how to actu­ally do a web-app stuff in the mean­time). The major hur­dle in doing a web app is rec­og­niz­ing that it is not a native app, and can­not ever totally be a native app. A web app (from the server side) is effec­tively an appli­ca­tion which must do every­thing in one pro­ce­dural shot, and then must start over from scratch for the next page. About the only ray of sun­shine is that the lan­guages for web-apps (ASP, PHP, Perl) elim­i­nate much of the bull­shit (read: man­ual mem­ory man­age­ment) for lan­guages typ­i­cally used for native apps (C/C++).

Anyways, this com­ing week I get to rework that thingie to not be a hack, and work on a SQL-to-PDF thing for the ISO-9000 wankers, who are demand­ing that the same doc­u­ment (con­tent) printed years from now must look the same as though it were printed today, regard­less of the fact that there is no “doc­u­ment” per-se, just a bunch of fields in a data­base that get col­lated into an HTML page, which makes print­outs sub­ject to the whims of the browser coders. That insan­ity requires PDFs, and since it’s pos­si­ble for peo­ple to want to print out and/or upload hun­dreds of these “doc­u­ments” at once, gen­er­a­tion on-the-fly (either at INSERT or SELECT time) is imprac­ti­cal, requir­ing a cron job to peri­od­i­cally poll the data­base for new entries and start generating/caching PDFs for them in the background.

You may remem­ber ISO-9000 from the late-night “Bureaucrats Gone Wild” video series.

Lastly, while tak­ing the Debian Quiz (scored a 48%, though Question #24, on the num­ber of times Braden “Cup of Shut the Fuck Up” Robinson ran for DPL is actu­ally scored incor­rectly — he ran five times, and lost four of the five, but they make “4” the right answer), I found hot-babe. Why was I not informed that a pixie-ish naked blonde hot­tie could show up on my desk­top when some­thing is eat­ing it’s young/infinite looping/frying my CPU? Where are all the demands for account­abil­ity? Why is there no inves­ti­ga­tion as to why I was not informed of this purple-bra-clad activ­ity monitor?