The Money article published today listing the Best Jobs in America resulted in the following exchange with one of our far-flung correspondents:

Telescope: you see that money magazine rated software developer the #1 job?
Heathen: yes. they were not thinking of the part where you fuck with ant.
Telescope: obviously they didn't consider "bait shop owner" either

Word.

In re: “fuck with ant:” Ant cannot be bothered to check for normal environment variables, since cell phones don’t have them (fuck cell phones; just sniff for the goddamn things and use ’em if they’re there, and fail back to a config file or command line args if not). Ergo, if you need to do your http lookups through a proxy, just setting the http_proxy environment variable gets you precisely nowhere.

Ant has a setproxy task you can use, but it apparently isn’t honored by some things, like javadoc and saxon. Nor are -D parameters sent on the ant command line honored by said miscreants, nor are .build.properties settings followed. To get the javadoc/saxon standard to use the cocksucking proxy, you have to actually insert the parameters in the target stanza.

Not, of course, that this is documented anywhere. Fucking cargo-cult Java bullshit.