Blistering Blogs

Allergic To Stupidity

So the new thing now at $Job is "We don't want any more hacky scripts to control starting and stopping the application. InstallAnywhere will give us a nice web based solution to all our control requirements because it's 'web based' and 'GUI'". What in the hell do people think does the heavy lifting behind those nice web GUIs?? Scripts, damnit, SCRIPTS!!

The f***ing app runs under Linux, you idiots!! Making sysadmins control the thing totally through a GUI windows based web thing is like trying to teach a mean boar hog to dance: It won't work, and will piss the hell out of the hog!

If I'm an admin running thirty or more machines, at 5 or six locations, I'm going to be real unhappy if the only way I can control, update, maintain and patch the machines is through a hacked installer GUI, separately for every f***ing one. I'd be agitating to find another vendor, fast - one that makes things easy for me to maintain.

Furthermore, the homegrown installer that you are so pissed off about is clunky mostly because it's .... {drum roll}... *A Web Based GUI Installer* written in perl, php, and html. Changing languages to Java and Visual Basic won't help it work any better, especially when dealing with Linux. You'll just piss off your customer admins (and your in-house TSEs, too.)

So no, InstallAnywhere is *not* the miracle magic bullet to your installer and application control woes. It will make a nice installer, but it is not a control app. That's what scripts are for, with or without a web front end.

Also, having the company trouble ticketing system only able to work in Windows is dippy too. It's not that hard to write it to work cross platform, is it? If you can write VB script, you can write Javascript, or PHP, or perl. Why in the f**k should I have to lug a windows craptop around (and whack up my back) and pollute my home network with XP just because you're to lazy to learn how to write cross platform web apps, and too lazy to make the Linux VPN work???

Another thing: Why can't you set up a terminal server to let me connect to Linux servers in anything but Windows? Are you stupid?? Lazy?? Incompetent?? Or do you think that this will make me like Windows more, when I am very much starting to see it as an flaming hoop that I must jump through just to do my job??

I realize that Windows admins are cheaper that Unix/Linux sysadmins. But does that mean that we all must be reduced to crawling tediously through your windows hoops to get anything done?? If you don't want to learn linux, that's fine, but don't shackle me to your cheapness, laziness and/or stupidity in every little thing.

Finally, Why in the f**k do you have such a mushroom culture at a supposed startup?? The whole lot of you need to get sent to communication seminars, I swear. Several of you need to be slapped, hard, until you pull your heads out and quit using your navel as a viewport.

Posted by ljl at April 24, 2003 12:47 AM