At this point a parenthetical rant is needed: I don’t think the administrator of an SCM system should have to do such things. User management should be an IT issue, and the project owner should be in charge of who can access their repositories. The SCM administrator should just be in charge of making sure the system is set up such that that is the case.

Since this Perforce server it at its licensed user limit, I have to first delete a user to make room. That should be a trivial operation, right?

$ p4 user -f -d jdoe
User jdoe has file(s) open on 1 client(s) and can't be deleted.

Huh? I don’t care about open files! Clearly the word “force” (the -f option) is being used in some strange way. Since there isn’t a “really force this damn deletion” option, I have find the open file. First look for the users “client”:

$ p4 clients -u jdoe
$

There are none? Obviously we have “client” sharing going on (I’ll leave that for another rant). Logically, I should be able to get a list of files this person has opened, but expecting logical behavior is, apparently, unrealistic:

$ p4 opened -u jdoe
Usage: opened [ -a -c changelist# -C client -m max ] [ files... ]
Invalid option: -u.

That’s fine, I can use grep, even though it could be imprecise.  For example, imagine that we had a person named James Ava, greping for “java” could yield countless false positives.  Nevertheless, forging ahead:

$ p4 opened -a | grep jdoe
//depot/projects/releases/Something/3.14/src/ugh.c#5 - edit default change (xtext) by jdoe@goose

Sure enough, the client “goose” is owned by a different person who is active, so I can’t just delete it. Fortunately, I found another technote saying how to do this, so I do what it says:

$ p4 login jdoe
User jdoe logged in.
$ p4 -u jdoe -c goose -H goose.example.com revert -k //depot/projects/releases/Something/3.14/src/ugh.c
You don't have permission for this operation.

What?! I am the administrator. Super user. I have permission to do anything!  So here we get to my usual pet peeve: lousy error messages. Even if we took the error message at face value, it is unhelpful since it doesn’t say what permission I need (besides “super”, that is). But the error message is undoubtedly incorrect, it is more likely that the server is refusing for some unrelated reason, but, due to poor programming, that generic error message is displayed.

Of course, even if that latter command worked it begs the question, why do I have to do all this menial work?  This should all be rolled into a single command.  It could be rolled into a script if the “revert” command, above, worked correctly.

I want those two hours of my life back.  I could have used them more profitably working on the Perforce to SVN converter, and using it to get people off Perforce.

http://picasaweb.google.com/trent.a.fisher/Errors#5538109356589386498

The hex number is a nice touch: provide the illusion of being specific and helpful while not actually doing so. The suggestion to contact a system administrator is a good one, as misery loves company.

System kernel was failed to build properly and as a result MVFS was not loaded.

The bad grammar and missing punctuation are just a little extra insult to the injury of not being told HOW the kernel build failed, or, perhaps better yet, what to do about it.

So, a big thank you to Daniel for these seeds!  I’m looking forward to getting these started… I’ve got two new hanging tomato planters that I got last fall (on clearance) and now I know what I’m putting in them.

If we widen the sentiment out to all animals, dogs, human or otherwise, that is better.  Then replace “beaten” with “harmed in any way”.  That sounds much better to me.  But, I doubt that cause will get 1.3 million members, as it would require them to look at what is on their plate and realize they have to do something more than click the “join” button.

Recently I have read a number of articles which remind me that veganism can fall prey to this 90% rule.  There are a number of reasons why one may become vegan:  health, environment, animal welfare and animal rights (I exclude the “imitating a celebrity” reasons that PETA works towards, as that’s never a good reason for doing anything). The problem is that all but one of those reasons can only get you to 90%.

When I first became vegan it was for health reasons.  So when a friend of mine told me that “a little steak now and then won’t kill you,”  I had no good answer to this.  He was right.  I could eat a steak right now, and the impact on my long term health would be negligible.  In other words, there was little difference between being 100% or 90% vegan, when looking at the health arguments.  See How the Health Argument Fails Veganism for more about this.

Being vegan for environmental reasons suffers the same problem, as the mis-titled  article Veggieworld: Why eating greens won’t save the Planet shows.  If your concern is the environment, being 90% vegan is a pretty clear win.  But arguing for that last 10% can be very hard.  So “a little steak now and then won’t kill the planet.”

As the recent decades have shown us, the animal welfare arguments also suffer from this problem.  Someone who is vegan because of how animals are treated, when presented with the flesh of an animal who was free-range, fed organic feed, and was gently asphyxiated with a gold-lined silk scarf at the moment of orgasm, they would have a hard time refusing.  Thus we see the parade of now-ex-vegans marching into Whole Foods to buy their “happy meat” with a clear conscience.  Or so they think.

So, finally we arrive at the animal rights position.  Gary Francione presents the clearest, most consistent and most concise presentation of this position: “We have no moral justification for using nonhumans for our purposes.”  Here we have the 100% solution we’ve been looking for.  This is where we all need to start when we tell people why we are vegan.  And why they should be vegan.  And why you should be vegan.

However, there is a passage in this article which begs the question “why are you vegan?”

Raise the beef, cut it up… sell it. Fine by me. I have no problem with what you’re doing, I simply choose not to partake.

I might have said the same thing years ago, largely because I became vegan, initially, for health reasons, which makes such a decision a personal one.   Thankfully within a few years I heard an interview with Gary Francione, which provided a simple and compelling reason for being vegan.

So if I were in the same situation as the author of the above passage, my thought process would go like this: “I can’t stop you from raising the cow, killing it, cutting it up and selling it.  I consider this immoral behavior, and I have a big problem with it.”  But saying that out loud won’t gain any friends, let alone converts, so such situations must be handled with delicacy.

But the more interesting passage was amongst the comments, by the same author:

I mean, can you imagine if meat-eaters evangelized about their diets? Vegans would have an absolute fit – sprouts and farrow flying willy-nilly out of their re-usable Whole Foods bags! Yipes!

Setting aside the dismissive, stereotyping imagery, the fact is that meat-eaters are evangelizing all the time. We are bombarded by it on every billboard, in every aisle of the grocery store, on every restaurant menu, &c. (see the Suicide Food blog displays some of the more egregious cases).  I have had many conversations with meat-eaters who were clearly bothered by my veganism and were determined to find an inconsistency in hopes that they could justify their behavior and, hopefully, bring me back into the fold. In short, evangelizing.  The evangelizing is such a constant part of the background noise of life, that many, like the author above, are not even aware of it.

http://picasaweb.google.com/trent.a.fisher/Errors#5538109210405397970

Cute icon!  Funny phrase!  I guess those are supposed to distract us from the total uselessness of the error message.

As an exercise for learning Jquery, I wrote a javascript enabled version which picks random statements from a long list including ones from the versions above and some of my own. I started to add answers to some of the statements in popups. You can even place chips on the squares (by clicking), but the “bingo” is entirely anti-climactic.  I actually started writing this months ago, but I just worked out a couple of annoying bugs. Feel free to send me any suggestions for additional statements and/or answers.