RTFL - Read the Fucking Logs

Read the fucking logs? Yes, it happened so many times, on so many guys. Something that I always try to avoid.

Say, you hit into a problem, you looked into the log file, you could see a bunch of error messages and stacktrace, you read the first line, you didn't bother to read the second and further.

You tried to change the configurations or something that you thought would make sense but the same (or new) error came out. You spent quite some time on it like an hour or a day.

You asked me / your supervisor to look into it and they found clear error messages or indications somewhere down the error log. You felt sorry, you found yourself stupid to waste so much time, you wished to be in the hall of shame for that day.

If this is a recurring habit of your, can you make "reading logs carefully" as a troubleshooting principle?

Sexy Web-Design Trick

Here is something I shared with my colleagues previously in company's internal blog. Something quite useful to a web- designer or developer.

var tables = document.getElementsByTagName("table");

for(var i = 0; i < tables.length; i++){ tables[i].style.border = "2px dotted #000000"; tables[i].style.padding = "4px"; };

var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div");

for(var i = 0; i < divs.length; i++){ divs[i].style.border = "1px dashed #dddddd"; divs[i].style.padding = "4px"; };

I'm using this as a Firefox bookmark, here's an example:



- yc, stoning