warning: incoherent and mind numbingly boring technology rant follows:

The comment form here at bitterpill.org is set up to send me an email when, in the rare occurrence, someone posts a comment. However, the email functionality has been broken for some time. Why? To be honest, I have been too lazy to figure it out, and frankly, this wasn't a bug high on my list of bugs to fix. Today I gathered up the gumption to sort it out. It turns out that the least likely of culprits was to blame. I imagine many a reader now pondering, "You mean it wasn't your crappie code or your even crappier system configuration that was causing your mail problems?" On most days this thought would be right on the money, but today my dear friends my incompetence was not to blame. It turns out it was was those Stanford brianiacs at google.

Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to bundle the java.mail API in their google API jar, and in the process broke my mailing code. The java.mail API doesn't take too kindly to having multiple instances of its self in the class path, it's selfish that way. It took me forever to figure out why it was failing, and only after Nick pushed me in the right direction by convincing me to look through all the java APIs in the bitter pill webapp to see if some dope had bundled the mail APIs in their code. Google was the culprit, those bastards!

For posterity, a quick glance at some saving grace bash scripting:

for file in `ls`; do
    echo $file; jar -tf $file | grep mail;
done