[humorix] Ask Humorix: What's It Like To Work On Linux Full-Time?

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

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Warning:  humorous content ahead.
To prevent overdosage for the sensitive readers, please
take your discussions to humorix-l@nl.linux.org...
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Ask Humorix: What's It Like To Work On Linux Full-Time?
Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, bero@redhat.de
September 29, 2001

Since a couple of people (both our regular readers) have
asked me what a job at Red Hat is like, I've decided to
leak my diary to a member of the Humorix Vast Spy
Network(tm) -- that'll probably be sufficient to make sure
everyone will get the answer.

11:00   I wake up. After opening my eyes and forgetting
        about that Beowulf cluster of Athlon 3GHZs I
        dreamed of, I notice I'm still in the office. Good,
        no need to waste time on the road...

11:01   I notice the plant in the office badly needs water.
        Since I'm way too lazy to stand up this early in
        the morning, I open Bugzilla. Since there's no
        "Office" component, I report the "Plant needs
        water" issue (Priority: high, Severity: high) in
        the "KOffice" component, and hope nobody will mind
        the K.

11:03   While there, I check for new bugs I should handle.
        10 new bug reports... Once more, I miss the
        "Closed: FIXITYOURSELF", "Closed: IDONTCARE" and
        "Closed: YOUARESTUPID" buttons.

11:04   Read new bug #1, a kdebase bug... "I have
        downloaded kdebase-2.2.tar.bz2 from your ftp
        server. It doesn't install. Windows keeps asking me
        which program it shall use to open .bz2 files."

        I REALLY want that "Closed: GOBUYABRAIN" button in
        Bugzilla... But since we don't have it, I simply
        decide that the problem is obviously that this guy
        is using the wrong kernel -- I reassign the bug to
        the kernel developers.

11:06   I decide to check my mail next - maybe the message
        stating Microsoft has been shut down and Bill Gates
        will spend the rest of his life in prison will
        finally arrive today?

11:07   12000 new messages! Mostly from mailing lists,
        except for a couple of messages telling me how to
        make money fast, save on long distance calls, and
        how to waste the savings generated by the previous
        two offers by looking at someone's "hot pix", and
        reminding me I've signed up to receive these
        announcements from somewebsiteiveneverheardabout
        aboutsomethingimnotatallinterestedin.com and, of
        course, that if I've changed my mind, I'll be
        removed from the list at no cost to me by sending a
        message to all-lists-request@spammers.com with
        "subscribe" in the subject.

11:08   I check Netcraft's records on that spammer's site
        -- great, they're running Red Hat Linux...

        I drop a message to its owner stating we've
        discovered a security bug in the Red Hat Linux
        release he's using, ask him to send the contents of
        a file called /etc/shadow to redhat-list@redhat.com
        (that public mailing list should look official
        enough) so we can verify whether or not his system
        is affected, and to run rpm -ivh
        http://www.scriptkiddie.org/rootkit-1.0-1.i386.rpm
        to make sure the problem doesn't get exploited in
        the mean time.

11:10   Time to get on to real work. I start hacking on my
        favorite applications.

01:50   Done! The other routing work (mostly minor, but
        important changes, such as adding "Obsoletes:
        emacs" to the vim spec file) aside, I've extended
        the package "foo" by adding complete networking
        support, a KDE frontend, and while at it, rewriting
        large parts of the codebase. Since we're in a
        feature freeze, I translate the related changelog
        entries to my favorite locale, en_CL (English,
        Changelog variant): "- Fix a vital bug" and push
        the package to the build servers.

02:00   I'm starting to get tired... time to take a look at slashdot...
        Not many surprises here -- right below the pgp.com ad banner,
        there's a report about Bush outlawing all encryption, using
        rot13 (or even rot26) is now a federal crime in the US, and OSes
        supporting any type of encryption are banned.

        Community reactions range from "First post" to
        links to goatse.cx, as usual. The link for further
        information (www.microsoft.gov) is, as usual,
        down.  Since there's nothing I can do about it, I'm
        simply glad that I live in the free world and
        decide to go home.

02:40   I finally arrive. My apartmentmate greets me with a
        friendly "[root@locutus /root]# "

        (Ok, I admit it's a strange hostname... It's there
        for a pretty good reason: I hoped this box (a
        Pentium II) would assimilate the various 486es
        under the bed and in the bathroom. Unfortunately,
        this has yet to happen.)

        I can't resist a friendly greeting like that (now
        who said geeks are socially inept???), so I sit
        down and feed it with the latest updates and a
        couple of new hacks I've come up with on the way
        home.

10:00   I finally get to bed...

11:00   Start over, with only minor differences...

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