maybe I'm too white or something

I just watched Dave Chappelle: Killin' Them Softly and, well, for a HBO comedy hour I didn't find it hugely amusing. There were a few funny bits, sure, but I was expecting far more actual laughs than I got. Dave is strong on racism, which I guess is intended to make a li'l sheltered white boy feel uncomfortable, but, you know, Lenny Henry did racist humour and made it funny, without losing his sense of outrage about racism - so you got your laughs while you got your thinks. Chappelle just plain didn't work for me, I guess.

Man. Do you know how hard it is to make a comment like this without using the phrase, "I'm not racist, but..."?

getting sidetracked

I started off a few weeks ago with the notion that I could hack up some sort of IrDA sync between my phone and my laptop. I'm not running Windows, so this immediately becomes non-trivial. The phone spits out vCards if correctly abused, so I thought I'd have a look at the vCards it produced and see how I'd go about parsing them. The primary addressbook on the laptop is BBDB, which is written in Emacs Lisp and is really (at this point) a godawful piece of code that I'd throw away if I wasn't so dependant on the damn thing. In particular, BBDB is absolutely terrible at dealing with anyone else's software. Various people have tried to fix this, including jwz - who wrote the original BBDB - and all the efforts have foundered, usually on a flaw in the thing being interfaced with, because BBDB is pretty damned flexible. So that led me to consider vCards in Emacs Lisp, which Noah Friedman has written the canonical code for, and Chris Beggy wrote some code for a previous release of BBDB to import vCards, and I looked at that and scrapped it and started writing my own. So I've got this chunk of lisp that reads in a directory full of vCards and attempts to match by phone number - the most unique identifier in /my/ phone's addressbook - against the contents of the BBDB. Then I thought I should get my Palm V in on the act, too. I sync that up using another incompatible piece of software which can optionally produce vCards, but they're awful vCards that miss out on some crucial information. So I started beaming vCards from the Palm to a program that'd dump out the raw vCards the Palm sends, and only then do I start reading the vCard spec because lo and behold the Palm actually sends a vCard version as part of its data. And then I start fixing up the incompatible piece of software to do proper Palm-shaped vCards, but also retaining the ability to handle the old junk in case I get this finished and want to submit it back to the masses. Then I get distracted by an intermittent timeout bug in the code and, well, it's now 1am, several weeks later, and STILL none of this stuff syncs.

And this is why I have so many unfinished scriptlets on my website.

really, I've gone to bed. the computer's posting this by itself

You know, if you're going to post about your day in the office, it might not be a bad idea to LOCK IT. Especialy if you use phrases like "testing is delayed because developers can't deliver a working product on time". Being one of the developers in question I can't help but say, "Fuck you, you shitty little asshole, if you'd actually try testing things instead of using the slightest excuse to give up and claim it's all broken, we might get out of the current bout of stupidity wherein we have to babyproof the code in order to get a complete test report out of you. Product misconfiguration on your behalf is NOT a showstopping development issue, and should NOT require me to spend half a day trying to make sure you can't misconfigure it instead of, say, working on the card reader for which the test cards have to be returned to the manufacturer tomorrow. Comma, you dickhead."

gah. cat, bag, exeunt

Grr. One of my cow orkers couldn't follow the simple suggestion that we leave the unnamed livejournalista post away about work without commenting - and worse than that posted a comment that can only have come from within the development group. I was hoping to leave the guy post away all manner of crap, and now it's more likely that he'll either not post or post locked entries - like he should have done in the first place, but anyway.