I first posted over two months ago about the fact that I’d been digging around in Rails forum software and discovered that beast.caboo.se was loaded with spam. I notified both of them via email, while I recieved a reply from Josh, over 2 months later and still nothing has been done about the spam. Beast has now been replaced by ’Altered Beast’ as the forum to use (since Beast is pre rails 2.0). Never the less the official beast forum still shows up high in the search rankings on google.

Whatever respect I had for Josh Grobel and Rick Olsen aka Technoweenie is now gone. Josh argued that the forum isn’t used anymore. My response to that would be to delete the spam and lock the forums so you don’t have to deal with it anymore. I know everyone is on limited time, but it clearly reflects badly on them when sex sites are advertised on their forums and yet they do nothing about it.

Why don’t they care? 15 minutes of one of their time and the problem would be gone.

Over the weekend I went to melbourne for a couple of christmas parties, the work one and the extended family one. I’m into my last week at work before the chrismas break and I must say that I am dying to put up my feet and enjoy the a nice sunny and warm christmas. I know there are people that think christmas should be all white and cold, more power to them, but I’m not one of those people. I like the fact that we can have our social occasions outside at the beach or in the sun.

One of the things that has to happen this week is for me to make sure that the system is in the best possible condition. Create documentation about how to keep the system running for the on call person that will be responsible for dealing with any issues that arise and provide as much knowledge based material as possible. Not to much mind since I don’t want my job to disappear over the christmas break, but enough that when I come back on the 5th of january I don’t walk into a disaster zone.

I’m secretly working on a tool that can be used to monitor each of the Documentum components and send me information when one or more of them breaks. It won’t be mature by christmas but it’ll be good if it notifies me of any irritating problems. I also need to finish up as many of the outstanding tasks as possible. All this should make for a hectic week.

I’m sick of raising support cases for things that should just work. I’m frustrated that a product as buggy and unstable as Documentum 6.0 SP1 can be proposed as a solution (by EMC). There are a lot of good things about Documentum, but there is a lot of bloat as well. This will be a growing list of stupid problems that I’ve found, I’ll start with one item and go from there.

• Clicking on ‘Save As’ on a permission set with a name over a certain length causes it to bomb out. Why? because it tries to give the permission set a temporary name that is longer than the allowed 32 characters. No chance to override this name, no graceful handling, just a fat error message and the chance to reload DA and try again.
• When using LDAPSync (which you probably need to get hotfixed anyway what with it having so many bugs fixed) ‘Groups and their member users’ does not update the content of mapped attributes even if they change (for instance during a rename).
• My favorite of the last 2 weeks: BOCS and DTS are not supported in the same solution. This problem is related to DTS going looking for content that is still parked on the BOCS server. It’s been fixed in 6.5…the problem is that it was EMC that built the solution that we’re now using. There is some instability in the DTS services, which is something I have to follow up, but EMC/Documentum had better be hoping that the two are not related.

I think part of the problem is that Documentum like a lot of old world enterprise applications has a very tenous hold on some of the techniques that allow for more error free development. I mean was the code even unit tested…

Prasad on his blog (you can find the link on the right), has a really really useful collection of dql that can be used for various admin tasks. I’m going to slowly build up my own list of DQL for much the same purposes. A note on convention: This is standard convention but as a refresher (or for those not aware of that convention) anything within < > is to be filled in at runtime. Remove the < > brackets and replace with appropriate value.

1. Updates the ACL on all content in a given folder…be aware it won’t allow you to replace the ACL on a locked piece of content, so you’ll either need to skip it like I have below or make sure that all the content is unlocked before trying to do this query, otherwise the error message is VERY VERY vague.
   

   update dm_sysobject object set acl_name = ‘<acl_name>’, set acl_domain = ‘<acl_owner>’ where folder (‘/<folder>’, DESCEND) and r_lock_owner = ”

2. Replaces the ACL on all content in a given folder – this is an important change because it only overwrites a specific ACL rather than changing all the content to be under the new ACL, which could potentially be a security problem if the content has been locked down further. It’s really only a simple change to the previous query.
   

   update dm_sysobject object set acl_name = ‘<new_acl_name>’, set acl_domain = ‘<acl_owner>’ where folder (‘/<folder>’, DESCEND) and r_lock_owner = ” and acl_name = ‘<old_acl_name>’

For those that are interested I’ve decided to release the work I did on accessing information from etsy’s backend. I have two copies one that is a ruby gem and based on a custom hacked rubyamf implementation (since it doesn’t support being a client) and one written in PHP that relies on SabreAMF (the copy that I gave to juln and that runs the heartomatic), and put that up as well. The url you want for my new code is:

http://www.github.com/vertis/etsy_api

And the one for my old (possibly broken) php code is:

http://www.github.com/vertis/etsy_api-php

If people are interested in collaborating on these projects let me know (sign up for github) and I’ll see about adding you.

I’ve been fuming about the internet filtering that the Rudd government is trying to impose on us since I found out about it a couple of months ago. Its frustrating because I *KNOW* its not practical. I had high hopes for Kevin Rudd’s government, I mean its not exactly the revolution that we’re seeing with the new president that the US has picked, but he was certainly a breath of fresh air after 12 long years of Howard government. But this half cocked internet filtering effort has shattered my belief in him.

I’ve seriously considered just pulling up stake and moving elsewhere in the world, there is always room for one more technical person in most countries. This is not to say that I can’t get around the filter, anyone with half a clue can download Tor, and the rest of us with more technical knowledge can go a lot further than this; tunnelling over SSH or creating a VPN to my dedicated server in the US (not that a virtual server wouldn’t work equally as well). But the fact remains that its another step down the road of losing personal choice, I say another and I mean it, this is not the first time that the government has stepped in and stopped something with a heavy hand that should fall under the responsibility of parents (what their children watch).

I’ve been shocked to discover that Australia is a lot more prudish about a lot of things than you might believe. Christians would say that our society has not had its moral fabric erroded as much as say the US (even there the christians exert the same kinds of pressure). The problem is that fundamentally Christians believe that they have a right to shove their beliefs and concerns down everyone elses throat. Enough about that though, this isn’t supposed to be an anti christian rant (and I’m not anti christian in general). It just frustrates me that people feel they have a right to destroy somebody elses right to choose.

The last thing that really gets me with this issue is the lies. To steal something from the abortion debate; “Don’t they know that you can be pro choice and still be against abortion”. They equate not wanting the filter with siding with child pornography, and it’s just patently false, I have no interest in EVER supporting child pornography (lock them up and throw away the key). That doesn’t mean that I agree that you should punish(remove the rights of) all Australians to decide what they look at, across a broad range of content, and claim that its all about the children. Hire more technically competent police to deal with cybercrime (an area I’d love to work in), and get a decent technology advisor.

You can sign a petition at http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet/442