Present Perfect

We had a problem with one of the encoders producing artifacts under certain conditions. It was hard to reproduce, but it usually happened on cartoons, so some of the web developers helped the core team out to see where they were triggered and spent half an hour watching anime cartoons looking for artifacts.

The boss walked past when one of them was watching the cartoon. A week later, he informed the development manager that his guys were watching cartoons on the job. It wasn't his business, of course, but the boss thought he should know.

So the development manager, in his next sitdown with the developer, said: "Don't get upset, but I wanted to let you know that the boss has caught you watching anime at work..."

Needless to say the developer was rightfully upset, wondering how the boss could possibly think he was stupid enough to be watching cartoons for fun in plain sight at work...

We had a problem with one of the encoders producing artifacts under certain conditions. It was hard to reproduce, but it usually happened on cartoons, so some of the web...

Our company has a history of working with interns, thanks to our marketing manager. One day, our Operational Manager got an intern. He's easy-going and gets along with everyone in the company. The intern came for her first day, and joined him in a bunch of meetings as he took the time to explain what sort of things the Operations department actually does.

At the end of the day, he spoke the now-famous words "Espero verte mañana" - I hope to see you tomorrow!

He didn't. She never came back!

Our company has a history of working with interns, thanks to our marketing manager. One day, our Operational Manager got an intern. He's easy-going and gets along with everyone in...

Last week one of our developers said goodbye to another developer, including the following advice:

Make sure you self.setMood(moods.happy) and enjoy Paris as your virt_base and errrm it improves your self.uiState of mind.

See, I find that amusing.

Last week one of our developers said goodbye to another developer, including the following advice: Make sure you self.setMood(moods.happy) and enjoy Paris as your virt_base and errrm it improves your...

After ripping over a 1000 CD's perfectly, and having problems on a few (bad discs, weird audio, a few small niggles to fix), I ran into a fun failure.

Apparently, the file name in u'morituri/Sufjan Stevens - Illinois/02. Sufjan Stevens - The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You\'re Going to Have to Leave Now, or, "I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!".flac' is too long for my NAS.

Thank you Mister Sufjan. In your honour, I added a function to morituri to shrink the filename to a power of two minus one, below either the given length or 128 characters, whichever is less. For now the algorithm splits on spaces and changed the file name to morituri/Sufjan Stevens - Illinois/02. Sufjan Stevens - The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself.flac

That is good enough for me... I was worried I had to teach this one tiny function about keeping quoted pieces together, or how comma's work, or how 'or, ' works, and so on, just to satisfy my crazy sense of aesthetics.

After ripping over a 1000 CD's perfectly, and having problems on a few (bad discs, weird audio, a few small niggles to fix), I ran into a fun failure. Apparently,...

One day we got a call from one of our customers across the globe who stream a wildlife channel. They told us that, instead of a broadcast of their channel, which was embedded on their home page, there was now an adult channel in its place. A very different kind of wildlife channel... Could we fix it as soon as possible?

I was pretty worried, because if it were our mistake that would be pretty embarassing. So I asked Zaheer, our resident DVB expert at the time, to investigate.

After a lot of debugging and head scratching he told me that there was nothing wrong on our side - the channel that was configured to capture was in fact an adult channel. In the end, we looked up the satellite channel names again, and then we noticed that our customer's channel was not in the place where it used to be. Apparently it had changed PID.

When we told them what happened, they told us, 'Oh yes, you are right. We got a notice from our satellite provider a few months ago that the number would change but we forgot all about it...' They didn't think to warn us.

I was just happy it wasn't our fault after all!

One day we got a call from one of our customers across the globe who stream a wildlife channel. They told us that, instead of a broadcast of their channel,...