Security Again!

Once again our university security admin team have delivered the high quality incompetence that I have come to expect. I've been locked out of my lab for three days now because the access rights of "a large number of postgraduate students" have been revoked somehow by accident.

We dutifully reported this to our local contact, who passed it on to security who continued to issue, "it'll be fixed tomorrow"s for the past few days, via our IT people.

This morning I phoned them (as they have totally failed to keep those people affected by the problem up to date with developments) to find out what was going on. The lady was very keen to tell me "it's nothing we've done", which is classic buck-passing and another total failure to take responsibility. Lets remember that they picked the system, spent a ridiculous sum of money replacing the perfectly good swipe card system we had, and now it has mysteriously failed, we are expected to buy "it's nothing we've done". Well actually it IS something that you've done. It's something that you do: fail to communicate, fail to consult and fail to provide an adequate service, you useless, miserable, evolutionary-dead-end.

Open Source C++ IDEs?

I want an open source C++ IDE.

For a couple of years I've been using the CDT project for Eclipse and struggling on. I even got to a point where I thought that it was acceptable.

The other day I helped someone using the microsoft C++ development environment.

Eclipse simply isn't acceptable. Its difficult to configure, gives cryptic error messages, and I've simply never really felt that it sits right with me.

Most of all, I'm sick of installing it on fresh machines and spending hours trying to remember which elements of its labyrinthine menu system allow me to say "for the love of god, cygwin is THERE!!! Just use it you useless bastard."

I'm going to carry on using it in the short term. After all its currently my C++/Java/LaTeX project manager of choice. But the time has come to phase it out. Recommendations welcome.

What might have been

This _should_ be a celebratory blog, full of the joys that I have actually managed to finish my conference paper on time. This _should_ be written whilst downing a well-earned glass of wine.

But it isn't.

The conference that I'm trying to submit to uses "Easychair" to manage submissions. IT. DOESN'T.WORK.

Myself and at least two other colleagues simply can't login. I checked to see if an over-zealous individual had set the deadline to be something ridiculous like 6pm, by trying to login to another conference that had definitely expired and the error message is different.

Basically you have to apply for a login, and the application system is knackered. Trouble is of course, that unless it unknackers before midnight, I'm screwed.

I will now make it my life's mission, at every conference and every meeting, to persuade as many people as possible that this system should never be employed for any conference. I have an entire career with which to carry out my campaign of victimisation. We'll see who goes bust first!

Bored

I'm currently being paid an hourly rate to help out with a training course at the university.

It's on Word.

Soooooo very bored.