9 ms·
SQLite developer must have received a lot of phone calls
- mandeepj 12y agoThis is epic. It deserves a video meme, something like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZ8ek-6ccc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZ8ek-6ccc
- agumonkey 12y ago"Life, finds a way.." http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/2013/02/life.gif http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/2013/02/life.gif
- pricechild 12y agoI wager 2 would be enough.
- emilburzo 12y agoUnbelievable. Looks like it's worth it to just have a different phone # for anything that isn't personal.
- teach 12y agoThis is why I only post my Google voice number. And I never pick up if the number isn't already in my contacts.
- edward 12y ago"Question: What are etilqs files?" http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/what-are-etilqs-files/fbab1341-acf2-4013-8394-324f2679aa89 http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-f...
- raverbashing 12y agoQuestion: what kind of crappy AV software can't identify sqlite files?
- jlebrech 12y agoit's not identifying the files, it's using the db engine. It's probably using it as a quarantine, so then the virus scanner picks up virus data from it's own temp files.
- raverbashing 12y agoDoes it have an binary header (.exe/.dll)? Or better, does it match a sqlite signature? "The header string: "SQLite format 3\000" for example http://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html http://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html
- chris_wot 12y agoI wonder if the issue I found sometime ago that segfaulted Firefox fixed stability problems for McAfee? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581946 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581946
- pests 12y agoI don't think it was mentioned anywhere that using SQLite was causing problems for the AV. Just that it was used internally and users were finding temp files.
- warfangle 12y agoWhat kind of crappy AV software leaves the default file prefix in place? ;)
- hobarrera 12y agoI'm amazed at the variety of clearly ignorant responses that the user is getting. He's actually better off than those who are answering giberish - at least he knows he's ignorant on the subject (which is actually a good thing, compared to being misinformed).
- alextingle 12y agoThe proper solution would have been to switch to a premium rate line, and profit from it!
- wongarsu 12y agoI would not give up my uninterrupted sleep for a few dollars on the side. I don't think I would even want to be interrupted for the small profit of premium lines. I have better things to do than personal support for this type of customer, and I imagine the SQLite devs think similarly.
- DrJokepu 12y agoBut you could pay someone else to answer these calls for you, couldn't you?
- Uberphallus 12y agoOr just give the callers a canned reply telling them to wait, then never route the call anywhere.
- reitanqild 12y agoGiven the message above that would constitute fraud I guess.
- Lawtonfogle 12y agoAutomated response that looks at your schedule and tells them how long til the next scheduled time for taking calls. Maybe lets them know their position in the queue as well. Would it be fraud if you answered during the scheduled time?
- pbowyer 12y agoIf one wanted to be very mean, and using a premium rate UK number as an example: At £1.50/minute, you can put them into a holding queue with "All developers are currently occupied, please wait and your call will be answered shortly" played every 45 seconds. If the developer wakes up they can choose to answer, otherwise most people will hang up after a few minutes. Assuming the average person kept on the line for 3-4 minutes, and 100 calls a month, that's £450/month revenue...
- sspiff 12y agoWhy does Microsoft still store temporary files on disk? (as opposed to a RAM-backed temporary file system as used in most other operating systems) Is there a reason for this? It just seems like it would cause clutter and garbage to pile up for eternity.
- B-Con 12y agoIf for no other reason: We would probably be surprised and saddened to see how much software abuses the longevity of "temporary" files and being able to persist them across reboots.
- CJefferson 12y agoI get annoyed for the opposite reason -- I wish it was easier to say to the OS "Take this directory away when this program finishes". You can get so far with atexit, or unlinking early (but that's no good if you want to pass the files on to other programs).
- icebraining 12y agoUbuntu doesn't use tmpfs for /tmp either. The reason is simple: some applications write huge temporary files, and lots of people don't have much free memory to spare. And you can solve the pileup by simply cleaning it up regularly using a scheduled task.
- contingencies 12y agoThis is why we need better application profiling yesterday. Not "I need write to x location" but "I am highly sensitive to read latency in x location, and highly sensitive to available space (append only) in y location." cgroups is the beginning. Eventually, a much-evolved container notion will solve this. I expect embedded and mobile distributions/OSs to follow suit.
- raverbashing 12y agoIt's good until someone abuses this
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- negus 12y agoIf John McAfee can see this himself http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKgf5PaBzyg
- chatman 12y agoThey should sue the AV company.
- apetresc 12y ago... for what?
- mpeg 12y agoThe solution reminds me of the story of why Facebook calls their advertising tags "muffin" tags (up to this day) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SinsSahmjl4&t=870 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SinsSahmjl4&t=870
- ryannevius 12y agoThis is amazing. The source, indeed, still contains `muffin` tags.
- danielweber 12y agoI wonder if this is related to the old MUFFIN program for the Apple II, to migrate disks from DOS 3.2 to DOS 3.3.
- steipete 12y agoSomebody didn't give credit here when posting on HN. https://twitter.com/mplappert/status/575957042466320384 https://twitter.com/mplappert/status/575957042466320384
- michaelmior 12y agoOr somebody actually managed to find this on their own.
- davidw 12y agoIt's been doing the rounds on twitter for several days.
- dtech 12y agoTwo people independently finding this while browsing SQLite source code, one a day after the other? Simplest explanation is usually the right one.
- tjbiddle 12y agoThe commit was made in September - that tweet, yesterday. Chances that they both got recognition within 24 hours of each other: pretty slim. Personally, I saw this on /r/programmerhumor yesterday.
- compbio 12y agoHN does not allow to give hat-tips or other Twitter-like credits. Where should they even put that? In the title? It is: first come-first serve and I don't think you can even mention the OP of this post without scrolling back and looking it up. It doesn't matter much to you and me.
- Rexxar 12y agoAre you telling us there should be a form of copyright for the first person to publish a link on a social media ? And then everybody should thanks this person and forget about the author of the original work ?
- suyash 12y ago
- Kiro 12y agoWho is doing this kind of stuff? I can't imagine a single one of the people I know do it. It's just unimaginable and I would really love to know what's going on inside their head.
- gvurrdon 12y agoI am also rather perplexed by it. Once, I had a similar call from a member of the public, an irate rant along the lines of "your software broke my computer and what are you going to do about it?" However, it wasn't software I had developed or was responsible for maintaining - their Google searching had led them to me, a sysadmin dealing with the backend of a related project.
- jasonkester 12y agoPeople just find the first google result and don't think to question it. Google put it up top, so it must be the correct number to call. Back in the day, I titled a blog post "baggage.lufthansa.com". Here's what happened: http://www.blogabond.com/CommentView.aspx?CommentID=24 http://www.blogabond.com/CommentView.aspx?CommentID=24
- larrywright 12y agoA completely different scale, but it reminds me of the time that a ReadWriteWeb article became the top Google search result for "Facebook login". They had hundreds, if not thousands, of angry comments from people thought it was the Facebook site and who were angry that they couldn't log in. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/11/facebook-readwriteweb http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/11/faceb...
- larrywright 12y agoIt probably happens more than you think. Doug Bowman, who was head of Design at Twitter, and designed the themes for Blogger before that, once had someone call his house to ask for help with a Blogger template. https://twitter.com/stop/status/5656372649 https://twitter.com/stop/status/5656372649
- 12y ago
- peterjmag 12y agoFor those that don't already know, GitHub has a cool little feature that allows you to link directly to line ranges, i.e. https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d4018042c70a4db733dd38f96896cd825f/src/os.h#L52-L66 https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d4018042c70a4db... See the awesome GitHub Cheat Sheet for details: https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet#line-highlighting-in-repositories https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet#line-highlig... (Forgive the tangent—I only discovered this recently myself, and I figure I'm not the only one.)
- evilotto 12y agoSo does fossil, the canonical repository for sqlite: https://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact/3e57a24e2794a94d?ln=52,66 https://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact/3e57a24e2794a94d?ln=52,6...
- castell 12y agoPlease add "(2006)" to the headline. I remember there was also a related mailing list post about that issue. Edit: What's the reason for the downvotes?
- Navarr 12y agoThe commit: https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/commit/70b2e37d42971a61cc221742445d5740a0eb03c7 https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/commit/70b2e37d42971a61cc2...
- chrisdotcode 12y agoDoes anybody else have any stories similar to this they could share? I always find this sort of thing fascinating. Here's one[0] about when Facebook changed something about their login, and someone wrote a blog post about it. The blog post ended up being top Google result for "facebook login". A lot of people, it seems, were getting to facebook not by the address bar, but by typing "facebook login" into Google, and clicking whatever the first result was. Hence, they found the site, then proceeded to leave tons of comments, complaining that they couldn't log in to FB. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120201181225/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php https://web.archive.org/web/20120201181225/http://www.readwr... EDIT: This was similar to what happened to rapgenius a bit back. Google blacklisted their site, and people thought the site was deleted, and were complaining to rapgenius on twitter. It blows my mind that there are a lot of people that don't know how to use an address bar properly.
- thaumaturgy 12y ago> A lot of people, it seems, were getting to facebook not by the address bar, but by typing "facebook login" into Google Pretty much all computer novices I've worked with do this, and not just for Google. They also type "gmail" into google to sign in to their gmail, "yahoo" into google, "email", etc. Every once in a while we have to do a support phone call and point someone to the address bar in their browser, and usually that's the first time they've noticed it's even there.
- Someone1234 12y agoI definitely don't consider myself a "computer novice" and I myself also do this. Since Chrome merged the address bar and search bar, when I type in e.g. gmail, I can hit enter and click once, or I can type in gmail.com, however while the typing and clicking may take the same period of time, the clicking is more efficient for other sites where the login isn't on the root page, or if I typo. I think somewhat ironically Hacker News is a great example of where this pattern is a time saver. Typing in "news.ycombinator.com" is first off a mountful (typeful?) and secondly easy to typo. As strange as this sounds, I also consider searching a "security feature." If you typo near popular sites, you'll find a lot of phishing sites with identical layouts which could be mistaken for the original sites (you did think you typed in "gmail" after all, not "mgail" or something). Search engines save you from this.
- morganvachon 12y agoI met the SQLite architect's parents a few years ago. My wife was a member of their church many years ago, and they had invited us to a function at their house right before we married. I didn't know who they were at the time, but in a conversation over dinner the father was asked what his son did for a living, and he said something like "You know that cellphone you carry? My son wrote an important program that manages the databases it runs on." I asked if he was talking about SQLite and he said that yes, that was the program. Turned out there were a few other people there who knew about SQLite so we had a bit of a geek out for the rest of the night, discussing FOSS, SQL, mobile development, and so on.
- johnx123-up 12y agoOT: Which church? Just curious.
- morganvachon 12y agoTo be honest, I don't remember. She had gone there many years before we met, and had since moved on to another church, maintaining friendships from there through Facebook (which is how we got the invitation). I know it was in Gwinnett County, Georgia, near Stone Mountain.
- shubhamjain 12y agoJust curious, why did SQLite developer publicly listed his telephone number. Was it common around that time?
- teach 12y agoYes, it was. Most vanity websites had a "contact" page with mailing address and phone number. In fact, my blog* still has a phone number because I keep forgetting to take it down. * My site isn't really a blog, just a personal web page. And since I've had the page since 1994 and the term "blog" wasn't coined until 1999....
- aabdocker 12y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=etilqs https://www.google.com/search?q=etilqs