Monthly Archives: March 2008

Wordpress, the software I use for this blog is great and has a wonderful plugin system that allows people to add functionality that is not originally included in wordpress. Unfortunately many of the available plugins are not so wonderful and often do not work as expected (advertised). I have created this blog about a month ago and used some plugins which screwed me around mightily to the point that I deleted the whole lot and started from scratch. Being the total optimist I also upgraded to the new and supposedly improved version 2.5. From 20 years of experience with software I know that installing something a day after its release is  really  a spectacularly bad idea. The whole lot will probably implode on me again. Here are some other systems I recently worked with that displayed serious suckage:

• Windows Vista: Run away as fast as you can.
• Openldap: The system with zero documentation. Unfortunately it is pretty much the only ldap server available if you use an “open source” system. Try upgrade this sorry excuse for a database system, and find yourself without useful data very soon.
• Opensuse 10.3: Is there any reason for the online update system to be as slow as trying to run through molten tar?  
• Exchange 2003: Somewhat useful office memo system that people buy to run e-mail. Mere mortals like me simply cannot get this beast to be standards compliant, so you end up installing a “gateway” e-mail server ( postfix, sendmail or exim)  to handle mail to and from internet. 

And why do people that write authentication systems make it so complicated that no one can work out how to configure them. It seems that there is always some really obscure and arcane tweak that you need to get these things to work. All too often it seems that drawing runes on the server room walls and sacrificing chickens is the only way to get a working configuration that allows your users to log in and do their work.     more....