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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I hold a grudge against the translucent plastic fad.

    Once upon a time the Linux workstation at my desk at $CHIP_COMPANY was built into a noname transparent teal ATX case. For that reason I gave it the hostname “fugly”.

    We had excessive field failures with some of our chips, and I was tasked with coming up with a way to identify those bad parts at customer sites. My solution was a bootable Linux CD that would run a test and tell the customer if they need to contact us for a recall. The test relied on a modified Linux kernel, so it couldn’t be distributed as an application. I used “fugly” to develop and build the test, patched kernel, and CD image.

    The test was deployed, the first few customers were pleased, and I got a wood plaque and bonus for my efforts.

    A few weeks later, my manager called me into her office looking uncharacteristically pissed off. She asked why I put a message saying “fugly” into the CD. A customer complained about it, saying they saw “fugly” on the screen when the test was running, and while it did it’s job it was unprofessional. A split second of confusion before I realized what happened: at boot time the Linux kernel prints the name of the machine it was compiled on, in this case fugly.team.company.com . It scrolls past quickly on boot, so neither I nor my collaborators ever noticed. Somehow the customer latched onto it.

    I ended up with a slap on the wrist, being put on PIP for 6 months and having to change the hostname because higher-ups needed their pound of flesh.

    Coincidentally, a week after this incident, Toyota posted a billboard at a major intersection near our office advertising the Scion xB that read “Funky? Or Fugly?”.