Phasor Burn

What’s that smell?

Hello Team,

I would like to bring to your attention that [redacted] offers an employee referral program. If you refer a person and he/she passes the three month probationary period, a bonus of $500 will be paid to you.

In order to help you take advantage of this program, I have attached our current job postings for Web UI, Java, and QA persons to this email. You may also direct your friends to view the careers page on our website (found under About us) at http://www.[redacted].com.

Oh sure, a $500 gift horse shouldn’t be looked in the mouth.

However, if that piddly amount is all that motivates a recommendation, then the existing employee isn’t being paid enough.

I’d rather have cow-orkers recommend someone based on knowing they would be able to work with said person, and that the person is a gain, not a drain, for the company.

Maybe I’m just funny that way.

Aa referral program / plea for help smells more like desperation to me than anything else.

As I always tell the head hunters when they call me…

I’m busy.

No, I don’t know anyone else who could do it.

Everyone I know who is any good at all already has enough work. The rest, you don’t want to be associated with. Trust me.

Time for someone to come up with browser plugins to block ads on Facebook.

Besides being terribly off-target with their ad placement, it’s just annoying as hell. We want our Web 2.0 social graph sites free as in beer and no advertising gunk please. You can also go bankrupt anytime you like, thanks. There’ll be another sucker along in this area soon enough….

U.I. Design 101

And here I thought Wally from Dilbert was my hero? This guy’s bucking for the position now.

This is an example of a successful imap login as seen in the mailbox.log in Zimbra. (one single line, though it is appearing word-wrapped here)


2008-05-18 01:10:24,999 INFO [ImapSSLServer-2009] [name=sue@example.com;ip=1.2.3.4;] imap - user sue@example.com authenticated, mechanism=login


Compare what happens with a bad password (one nice log line followed by 20 lines of stack trace)


2008-05-18 01:10:25,109 WARN [ImapSSLServer-2010] [ip=1.2.3.4;] imap - login failed
com.zimbra.cs.account.AccountServiceException$AuthFailedServiceException: authentication failed for bob@example.com
Code:account.AUTH_FAILED
at com.zimbra.cs.account.AccountServiceException$AuthFailedServiceException.AUTH_FAILED(AccountServiceException.java:120)
at com.zimbra.cs.account.AccountServiceException$AuthFailedServiceException.AUTH_FAILED(AccountServiceException.java:116)
at com.zimbra.cs.account.ldap.AuthMechanism$ZimbraAuth.doAuth(AuthMechanism.java:112)
at com.zimbra.cs.account.ldap.LdapProvisioning.verifyPasswordInternal(LdapProvisioning.java:2795)
at com.zimbra.cs.account.ldap.LdapProvisioning.verifyPassword(LdapProvisioning.java:2768)
at com.zimbra.cs.account.ldap.LdapProvisioning.authAccount(LdapProvisioning.java:2647)
at com.zimbra.cs.account.ldap.LdapProvisioning.authAccount(LdapProvisioning.java:2626)
at com.zimbra.cs.security.sasl.AuthenticatorUtil.authenticate(AuthenticatorUtil.java:25)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.authenticate(ImapHandler.java:1012)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.login(ImapHandler.java:988)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.doLOGIN(ImapHandler.java:984)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.ImapHandler.executeRequest(ImapHandler.java:435)
at com.zimbra.cs.imap.TcpImapHandler.processCommand(TcpImapHandler.java:151)
at com.zimbra.cs.tcpserver.ProtocolHandler.processConnection(ProtocolHandler.java:160)
at com.zimbra.cs.tcpserver.ProtocolHandler.run(ProtocolHandler.java:128)
at EDU.oswego.cs.dl.util.concurrent.PooledExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)


WTF is the point with including all that java stack trace garbage in the log when it is a simple bad password?

Catch the bad password event, log it, and move on.

Do not dirty my logs with stupid stack traces that just fill up the disk and provide no value.

I see this in many other java products too, btw. Including where I am currently working. Gives me endless heartburn.

Lazy. Ass. Java. Propeller Heads. Learn to use Log4J or whatever and keep those stack traces for only really dire circumstances.