The Fool’s Only Teacher 3

Sometimes life works. Other times it doesn’t. Hopefully you get to the point where you can spot the “doesn’t” parts in advance…

1. If you’re lucky enough to get a tech­ni­cal per­son call­ing you in for the inter­view, remem­ber to ask about a dress-code range. It’s uncom­fort­able to be pimp­ing a suit when the guy who wants to hire some­one is wear­ing a T-shirt and jeans.
2. Remember how you aren’t sup­posed to lean back in the chair (if it leans back) dur­ing an inter­view, so you don’t appear overly relaxed or arro­gant? That applies dou­bly if you’re wildly over­dressed. Lock the seat-back if need be.
3. Sitewide QuickBooks upgrades go smoothly, pro­vided that:
   1. You aren’t using roam­ing pro­files for any­one who needs to use the silly thing.
   2. You wait about three months from the Major.0 release for all the suck­ers to find the land mines.
4. Related: Intuit tech sup­port has roughly the same reac­tion to the phrase “roam­ing pro­file” as your broad­band provider does to the word “Linux” — they only hear “null and void”, and then try to get you off the phone as quicky as politely fea­si­ble so their stats don’t suf­fer, even if you are just look­ing for enough infor­ma­tion to make it go on your own.
5. Microsoft’s “Certification Authority” com­po­nent is a pile of shit, like every­thing else PKI-related, ever. I am, for exam­ple, con­vinced the openssl com­mand line can be used to open the 9^th gate, if invoked properly.
6. Fedora Core 6 will pre­tend to install itself onto an XFS par­ti­tion (either within LVM or not) if you use “linux xfs”, and then promptly eat it’s young if you try to boot it.
7. Ubuntu 6.10 makes it much eas­ier to get Sun’s Java, MP3, Flash, fglrx and DVD play­back work­ing (sim­ply a mat­ter of check­ing the Restricted/Multiverse/Universe check­boxes in the GUI repo tool and reload­ing the apt cache).
8. FC6 (and Debian Etch) let you cre­ate and install onto an LVM group from the jump, whereas Ubuntu 6.10 requires you use the “alter­nate” ISO image.
9. FC6 + Xen + ATI’s fglrx bull­shit via Livna = b0rked. Though it’s a nice excuse to play with RPM packaging.
10. Apache on Mac OS X will pre­tend your 18GB tar­ball backup is 1.8G when you try to down­load it via HTTP. The FTP dae­mon on OS X works fine, though the fire­wall will block incom­ing PASV con­nec­tion attempts even if you’ve selected the FTP ser­vice excep­tion in the GUI.
11. The JRE (Sun 1.5.0_6) which comes with ZendStudio 5.5.0a will not ren­der win­dow con­tents when run­ning under AIGLX + com­piz on FC6, and the RE which ships with ZendStudio 5.2.0 is spotty under Xgl + beryl on Ubuntu. I’ve not tested with 1.6.0 or later revi­sions of 1.5.0.

Kinda sad how it devolved from use­ful infor­ma­tion into straightup whiny bug reports, isn’t it?