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 9th 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?