March 2008 Archives

Solaris ain't Linux, as a lot of developers seem to forget, and adding gcc doesn't make it so either. One thing I run into often enough to be annoying, but not often enough to actually remember the incantations, is runtime library dependencies. Linuxmafia has one of the better writeups going, but for my own reference, you can work around this by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which is usually sick, wrong, and evil. Instead, when building, make use of the -L and -R flags:

gcc foo.c -o foo -L/software/bar/lib -R/software/bar/lib

Yeah, pretty easy to forget "R for Runtime", shut up. Maybe the act of writing this down will fix it in my memory, finally. I also know that same page talks about crle, but I can't do this for various reasons.

While all may appear quiet here with respect to hockey, I've watched every Oilers game this calendar year. I've been getting out a lot of my need for hockey discussion with my wife, who has decided now that the NHL doesn't suck. She'd said about a month ago that she was going to try to watch more games with me, and indeed has. I knew she'd crossed the Rubicon when we were watching a game and she said indignantly, "Hey, wasn't Penner tripped there? Why wasn't that a penalty?" as opposed to simply reacting to my own yelp of annoyance. Also, she now knows the Oilers' voices at least as well as I do (due to an overindulgence in podcast listening and video watching), and knows most of their faces and numbers.

Her Oilers-sweeties are Penner and Moreau, and she thinks Cogliano is "good looking, in a swarthy way." Also, she's just as disgusted as I am with the constant reminders that "Gagner's only 18, he's the youngest player in the NHL!" Another Rubicon: "Doesn't this Hughson guy think that we know that already?"

Yes, another one sucked in to the cult. Now I just need to train her to fetch beer on game days and we'll be all set. Hope she never reads this. If you are, sweetie, just kidding about the beer thing - what would you prefer?

Conversions stories aside, I do have a few "serious-type" things brewing. I have an old half-written post on Penner's picks that's becoming rapidly obsolete. I have some thoughts regarding Pronger's attempted hack job and justice theory (as applied to the NHL), and a few more on Kurtis Foster and no-touch icing.

I've also got a several-years-in-the-making post on what makes a team successful (or not). I keep pulling it out and looking at it, then putting it away and thinking, "I really need to finish that some time, but it's too hard right now." Lately I've been toying with a sort of points system, although how to scale it and what deserves points is the difficult part. For now, go and read Lowetide's Pennants post.

I realized a couple of months ago that I never did finish off my Reasons to Hate series; some of the comments I might have made are long-since obsolete because of league positioning and what have you. Maybe I'll have to get an early start on next season's, maybe I'll finish this one off during the playoffs. Call it typical blawgger lack of follow through. I'd apologize, but it wouldn't be sincere since I do have good reasons, and I'm not that egotistical anyway.

Finally, I'm still fairly sure that the Oilers won't be making the post-season dance, but I'm pretty happy that Burke won't be nearly as smirky as he would have been had Edmonton gone on another apocalyptic slide. Naturally, he'll find a way to be snide about it - jerks and asses always do - but a lot of the sting will be taken out of it, playoffs or no. That's another post idea, along Winterian lines.

A co-worker said today, after giving me some information that should probably remain private, "And I don't want to see this on your weblog!"

Apparently the last couple of work-related googles he'd done had their first hits as rants here.

Maybe I don't get many comments, but at least my GOOG ratings are good.

Seth Godin wants to market HR.

He's not wrong, although he's thinking of things as a marketer. He wants to change the corporate mindset. So do I, but for different reasons. His idea is as good as any, but mostly I just want the name "Human Resources" gone. I find it absolutely fucking offensive. I'm not a piece of coal, I'm not some oil that somebody dug up, I'm not even some fabulous talent that somebody discovered. I work where I do because I wanted to work here and put my name in to the HR department, then somebody else hired me.

The name Human Resources is wrong because they and (by extension) administration / upper management may really see us staff as interchangeable cogs in a wheel. If you want to retain people, that's not the way to go about it. "If everybody's interchangeable, why am I still here again?" At my place of employment, as at many, we have yearly performance reviews that send quite the opposite message. Some people get bigger raises than others based on what they've accomplished relative to everybody else.

If we're not interchangeable cogs, why are we Resources?

While I'm not entirely comfortable with government deciding who gets funding based on 'moral' grounds, I'm unsure about how pulling funding equates to censorship. The government would not be saying "you can't make that film", it would be saying, "we're not going to give you money to make that film." David Cronenburg isn't being escorted to jail here. A violation of Charter Rights? No, I really don't think so. The government doesn't fund my blawg, but that doesn't mean it's violating my right to free speech.

Assuming that the quote from the lawyer in the Hollywood Reporter story are accurate, it is disturbing that funding could be retroactively pulled. We don't need another MPAA.

It's quite annoying that none of the stories seem to feel it necessary to link to the actual text of the bill, just what everybody else says it says. So, I think this is it, although I see nothing in there about films or tax credits for film makers. If anybody knows where the exact and full text under question is, I'd appreciate a link.

Incidentally, I'm glad that Parliament has done some historical detective work about the history of the finance minister wearing new shoes on budget day. I can now sleep at night. I found that while I was looking for the actual text in question.