Slashdot Mirror

What I Hate About Your Programming Language, by Chromatic

Programming, it seems, is just one big suckfest. The names change, but the dance is the same.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rail s.html
Hard to find a Rails developer who hasn't made The Cookbook.

Also, for test deployment - HostingRails.com is giving away free Rails hosting at the moment. But for large apps I'd recommend DreamHost (w/ promo code X50) or Site5 if apache/mysql is your gig, or TextDrive if you're down with LightTpd/PostgreSQL.

I don't like blinking/moving stuff while browsing webpages.

Yea, that's a bug, in my opinion.

Wow... how much performance did you get?

kernel.debug is inside /usr/obj and debugging is enabled by default.

Developers confirm that. FreeBSD is full of binary blobs.

Does the first question on this page (a recent OnLamp OpenBSD interview) touch on your question?

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2006/04/27/openbsd -3_9.html?page=3

Nikolay Sturm and Bob Beck talked about apmd and how it chooses how much and how often change the CPU frequency...

Jonathan Gray said some interesting things about their contacts with nVIDIA...

They said that OpenBSD 4.0 will support Intel based Macs too...

Federico Biancuzzi interviewed OpenBSD's team of Blob-Busters and discussed new features of OpenBSD 3.9 along with freedom (and quality!) threats.

You should look into FreeBSD's systrace functionality. It looks a little easier to set up than a chroot jail, but is more fine-grained, and concerns more than just file access. As far as I know, Linux doesn't have anything like it though. (I wish it did!)

Maybe people are deciding you're just too much of a douche to put up with.

When pissing off the pentagon he was a hero to the folks here on slashdot. His traits of being honest and unpolitic were lauded as virtues, his not letting the Pentagon money keep him silent was considered exemplary.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/04/18/darp a.html

I guess he should have remained silent and kept the pentagon money. The slashdot crowd is certainly not going to put their money where their mouths are.

LAMP. This term was popular in Germany, they said, to define how MySQL was used in conjunction with Linux, Apache, and either Perl, Python, or PHP.

The acronym LAMP (or L.A.M.P.) refers to a set of free software programs...Linux...Apache...MySQL...Perl, PHP, and/or Python

I have yet to see a major web host that offers Python Server Pages support which just so happens to be a standard feature of mod_python. The single biggest reason why PHP is so popular is that it is a free alternative to ASP with a modestly lower learning curve. Not to troll, but I'd like to make a bet here. If web hosts made inline Python, Ruby and Perl modules like mod_python availible to their users, few people would choose PHP over those three. The hardcore would choose Perl Server Pages, the uber-geeks would choose Ruby Server Pages and the rest would, rationally, choose Python Server Pages.

"If the "Or later clause" is present, then the embedded developers are SOL, because their own fork must also include the "Or later" clause"

No. You're missing the point of multiple licenses. If you distribute software to me that says GPL2 or later, it means that I can redistribute with any of GPL2, GPL3, or any future version. What I can't do is add "or later" to software that was licensed strictly GPL2.

It's the same as if you distributed software to me with a BSD or GPL clause. I can redistribute the software in something with a BSD license that is not GPLed.

Stallman talked about this at the bottom of http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/09/22/gpl3 .html

I hope Forbes will let Richard Stallman explain his reasons for including anti-DRM provisions in GPLv3.

Otherwise, it seems that Forbes is biased and acting in the interests of the Intel, Sony, Tivo and other business interests that want to hijack the hard work of open source developers in order to hancuff users and consumers with draconian treatcherous computing.

But then again, writing stories that are merely disguised propaganda for the business cartels is nothing new for Forbes.

I've always thought it VERY odd to think about "Open Source" as a thing.

It'd be like saying: We studied the quality of software compiled with the Watcom 10.0 C++ compiler. "Open source" cuts across so many levels of skill and projects. You can pretty find projects that support (or destroy) whatever thesis you'd like to put forward

Even more, somebody pays for the development of the software, one way or another.

This artlice (from ONLamp) http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/07/21/soft ware_pricing.html really puts into better perspective. Basically, it says ALL software can be deconstructed to being about the service (at least so long as the technology curve continues, in practice, to limit its lifespan).

--
graphicallyspeaking

I hope they've told this guy about this new article.

There's more to embedded operating systems than just Linux. QNX and BSD come to mind first. There are actually very many including Symbian, Virtuoso, VxWorks, Tron and dozens of others. Even MS tries to make one, called WinCE, though unlike the others it's only used only rarely and even then only for the humor value.

Stig Brautaset recently wrote about Testing C with Libtap.

I'd say that because they're one of the very few RAID companies actually working with OpenBSD. What, you never heard of OpenBSD's complaint re: hardware RAID?

OpenBSD Doesn't Like 3Ware

Notice the quote: "3Ware has lied to us and our users so many times they make politicians look saintly."

Or, a more detailed account is here:

ONLamp Interview w/ OpenBSD Devs

"Is there any vendor that chose to contribute with hardware or specifications?

Marco Peereboom: LSI has been very nice in providing hardware, certain pieces of documentation, and engineering help. In the end, to make all this happen, there was quite a bit of reverse engineering done as well."

Looks like a rip off of an OnLamp article from a few months ago, and not a very good one at that! At least the OnLamp article explained how to tweak a few more OS's and the math was correct. And just to add insult to injury the article on OnLamp was written by one of those Berkeley guys ;-)

Looks like a rip off of an OnLamp article from a few months ago, and not a very good one at that! At least the OnLamp article explained how to tweak a few more OS's and the math was correct. And just to add insult to injury the article on OnLamp was written by one of those Berkeley guys ;-)

The GPL is made for the Free Software community, not the Open Source one. The OSS community may already think they don't need the GPL anymore.

I hope FSF spokesperson Peter Brown is right in saying that we have a great opportunity to explain the benefits of freedom to the public over the coming year. I also sympathize with his claim that one must use the term "freedom" instead of focusing on "open source."
But opponents of the "open source" terminology always caricature the term and its supporters. Those who pushed for open source have promoted its ethics and community benefits just as free software proponents have. The virtue of "openness" as a general principle is powerful, and has brought people out on the streets in many countries.
I admit that the words "open source" do not slam the ethical challenge down on the table the way the word "freedom" does. But "open source" has helped free software spread to far more places in business and public organization. Now many more people have something to defend when the free software proponents warn them they're in danger of losing it.

I hope that the number of highly-modded responses which have had the chance to clarify what code generation is in Rails, and what its purposes are within the development cycle, will allay some of the FUD. When I began learning Rails I was under no impression that code would be generated beyond the scaffold, and that the scaffold was only there to get some meaningful database interaction happening right away. This tutorial which I began learning Rails from explained it clearly:

Of course, these actions and views are very plain--not the sort of thing you'd want users to see (unless they are total geeks). The good news is that we can leave the scaffolding in place and slowly, one at a time, provide our own versions of the actions and views. Each time you create one of the actions or views it will override the scaffold's version. When you're done, simply remove the scaffold statement from the controller.

The way I imagine the misinformation formed is from certain people hearing the sentiment of "faster development in Rails" and jumping to the conclusion that there must be some sort of cheat involved. Watching the video demos probably fueled this, as the demos are showing Rails off, and the scaffolding is a selling point.

I came to RoR with the same questions, having used Smarty for everything I did in the past. It took a couple of online tutorials before I came to the conclusion that Smarty-like templating isn't really necessary, or even helpful, with RoR.

I realized that the views themselves are the templates, and that I could get the same Smarty functionality, without having to learn new syntax, because you can use Ruby as the templating language as well. If I'm not mistaken there's a templating system for PHP (fasttemplate rings a bell) that does the same thing.

It's not too difficult to adapt to, unless you're a little slow like me... :)

Take a look at http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rail s.html and http://rails.homelinux.org/

I've also really enjoyed http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

wiki.slashdot.org : WikiSlashdot
Add a Wiki plugin to slashode and host it on slashdot. This it will attract the trolls away from Wikipedia and introduce a persistant layer to the debate that takes place on slashdot.

Individual changes could be moderated just like on slashdot and the user could elect to ignore changes with a low score.

I may be mistaken but since macos X is a BSD you should be able to just add

accounted true
daytime time

to /etc/login.conf

where accounted turns accounting on and where time is the time in seconds but can prefixed in the unix way i.e. 2h is 2 hours.

daytime limits the total wall clock time allowed per day. You can also set per session limits (sessiontime) and total times per week (weektime) as well, if you would like as well.
use the command warntime to set the end of time warning, but it may send this to the login tty rather than to X (or whatever the mac graphics are).

For the exact format take a look at:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2001/01/17/FreeBSD _Basics.html

here's one place to start that i found useful

another method is to go to the rails website, linked in the slashdot article, and click the very large 'get better' link.

</holds hand>

It's been around at least since 2000.
LAMP: The Open Source Web Platform

A web application framework, like Ruby on Rails, can isolate you from most of the JS. Here is a introduction to Rails and Ajax.

To wit, I'd like to hear how any of this application level firewalls are protecting against Ajax? (Well, perhaps an XML firewall like the recently-bought-out Datapower) Or how to teach an application firewall that 1) the cookies may change as a result of client-side javascript, 2) hidden form values may change as a result of client-side javascript, or 3) completely new forms may be created and submitted as a result of client-side javascript.

Application firewalls will continue to be a niche player - or deployed en masse as a stop gap measure to satisfy regulatory compliance requirements.

What needs first and foremost is to integrate security into the SDLC. Until that happens, we will simply continue to change the type, model, and price of fancy bandaids.

Here's a similar story of using old hardware with NetBSD:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/05/05/hardwar e_rescue.html

Yes cgi access gives them a virtual shell, you can control how it functions.
You should be using mod_security.
http://understudy.net/tutorials.php?name=wget comes back failed You can run limited ablity shell accounts such as scponlyc (chrooted version of scponly)

And the servers I run on are all FreeBSD based.

Mod security can be found here:
http://modsecurity.org/
http://www.gotroot.com/tiki-index.php?page=mod_sec urity+rules
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/apache/2003/11/26/mod_ security.html

Alright, can't you google for your own info?

http://www.freesbie.org/ - Latest release is based on FreeBSD 5.3.

It's harder to find LiveCDs of Open/NetBSD, but you can create your own -

http://ezunix.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sect ions&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=88&page=1

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/07/14/openbsd _live.html

Gee golly, and all of that was on the first results page after searching for "Open/Net/FreeBSD LiveCD".. Whooda thunkit?

The proposed change would thwart removal of a button to download software that an author put in, not make a download button manditory. This interesting and mild idea is being considered carefully to avoid problems it might cause if abused by contributors.

There's more, but it's not worth the trouble to detail. That last Slashdot story was just more BS from another Wintel rag.

If you have a real objection to a real proposed change, let's hear it.

OpenBSD is really cool. The latest release brings some great new features. It's now possible to have a *fully* redundant firewall/vpn box. (support for keeping filter, nat, queue, ipsec states sync'd on all nodes, support for takeover of failed device, support for interface trunking for layer2 redundancy...) It works very well and it's a snap to setup since everything is in the default install. Mark Uemura is giving a talk about this at PacSec this november in Tokyo. Here are slides from an older one he did.

From http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/02/03/trig gers.html

"REMINDER: MySQL functions have severe limitations. For example, they can't SELECT from a table. Trigger activations are like function calls and are subject to the same limitations."

Is this still true?

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

The best way to understand the ROR approach is to do what I did, spend an hour or two working through the tutorial. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rail s.html

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.

The O'Reilly interview that this article references was covered here before and all that this new article and submission do is introduce a little confusion. Not that the proposed provision isn't worth talking about, it is.

The addition would offer protection for developers who choose to include a particular feature in their code whereby that feature would have to be retained in future versions. That feature being the ability of users to download the source. It is completely optional for the original developer.

Some companies, such as Google, use code covered by GPL to offer their services through the Web. Do you plan to extend GPL 3 copyleft to request code publication in this case too, considering this behavior like a product distribution?

Running a program in a public server is not distribution; it is public use. We're looking at an approach where programs used in this way will have to include a command for the user to download the source for the version that is running.

But this will not apply to all GPL-covered programs, only to programs that already contain such a command. Thus, this change would have no effect on existing software, but developers could activate it in the future.

This is only a tentative plan, because we have not finished studying the matter to be sure it will work.

How would it work?

If you release a program that implements such a command, GPL 3 will require others to keep the command working in their modified versions of the program.

The zdnet article is just a rehash of the onlamp interview with Stallman that has recently been on /.:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/09/22/gpl3 .html
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 9/24/1325214&tid=117&tid=156

Needless to say that you should read the actual interview, as things are a bit more complex than what the /. blurb to this story or the zdnet article want to make you believe.

Well done /.

OpenBSD has systrace, which is easier to understand than SELinux.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=systr ace&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&ar ch=i386&format=html
Here is a tutorial:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/01/30/Big_Sca ry_Daemons.html

It is not so much the technology as the economic might of the one of the biggest developers of AJAX: Google. They are giving a wall to wall 24x7 demo of AJAX technique and its effectiveness to anyone who pays attention. The fact that middleweight clients that can support a bit of asynchronous update traffic in what , to the user, is the "background", is not so much technically amazing as perceptably practical and a better web experiance. I was looking for better doc on AJAX, having first got the impression it had to be JavaScript [which, frankly, is a crappy tool for designing ambitious software]. This article is a good addition to a topic that doesn't have much presence in the bookstores yet. There are other sources on line. Its not just for XML and its not just a J language either... Ruby will do.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

I have nothing against Universities teaching people a curriculum that broadens there minds. However, with the cost of college tuition these days, I think college students would be much happier to see a return on investment right out of college. I'm a senior software architect/programmer for a medium sized company. We interview a lot of people fresh from college. I have no doubt that they are all intelligent people with an abundance of knowledge that helps them to be a well-rounded person. However, when we are looking for programmers we look for criteria that is similar to what was listed in the original article that spawned this Slashdot article in the first place. I've provided the link to the article below as well as the criteria mentioned in the article. http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/7757 If you are a student going to college make sure that you are getting the following curriculum from your expensive, well-rounded education: * The basics of Programming (variables, data types, references, pointers, scope, error handling, iteration, core algorithms - searching, sorting, etc.) * Basic mathematics, basic statistics * Patterns and Anti-Patterns (With real world examples, not just theory) * Real world Databases (Normalisation and De-normalisation, SQL, Indexing) * Basics of good code architecture: Loose Coupling, etc. * OO Design, Interfaces, etc. * The importance and tools of Planning: Spec'ing,, UML etc. * Architectures: client/server, SOA, P2P, etc. * A 'Big' language or two (Java, C#, C/C++) * A scripting/'agile' language or two (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby) * XML (DOM/SAX, XSLT/XPath, etc.) * Economics, Business Studies, Costing Projects, Commercial pressures * Copyright, Privacy, Data Protection * Project/Time Management * Internationalisation, Localisation, Encoding, Unicode * Grammar, punctuation, concise and clear writing * Interface Design, Usability, Accessibility, HCI * Security * Code Reading * Common Protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, FTP) * Testing, Debugging, Performance, Re-factoring * Problem analysis * Source control, change management * The typical Software lifecycle * Metadata, Information Architecture, etc. * The basics of GIS * Touch typing * Health and safety (nutrition?)

Choose major

Plough thru piles of papers and exams

Land job in large software company, only to be told everything learnt in college is El-Krapo

Undergo training within company Since this happens anyway, IMO it's a Good Thing (tm) that more core papers are tought in colleges. If the large cos. are going to run you through a training program in any case, it makes good sense to do stuff in college that actually ensure your fundamentals are solid. And, like in the comments from TFA, college is *NOT* trade school. In fact, quite contrary to what Zambonini (does that name make anybody else hungry?) says, the vocational papers should be made optional. Hey, I'm pretty sure, if you can grok compiler design, finite automata, AI et al., you could easily wade into XML/SAX/DOM/"other industry stuff"