July 2007 Archives

Ugh. This is so depressing:

turbotaz ~ # df --si
Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md/1              628G   589G   7.6G  99% /
udev                   1.1G   312k   1.1G   1% /dev
shm                    1.1G      0   1.1G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/md/0              104M    11M    88M  12% /boot

Perfectionism is a vice I find myself facing from time to time, and it shows its ugliest head when I'm doing software development.

I consider myself lucky that I don't face perfectionism when I'm hacking a quick and dirty Perl script together (else, I'd be a very dysfunctional admin). As many admins, I have a large ad-hoc collection of Perl scripts doing various jobs for me (such as tweaking domain settings en masse on Joker), and though I tend to start at the very least with use strict;, my scripts still end up being an undocumented mess with dangling code and an arbitrary mixture of spaces and tabs (from when I use Konsole's copy-paste to go from vim on one terminal to another). These scripts require a little love to modify and maintain, but they do their short-term jobs very well.

When it comes to "real" software development, however, I hold myself to a very high standard, and hence it always makes me uncomfortable when I'm relying on someone else's code that might be good but lacking. I'm encountering a nice patch of that now.