I wish I could do a 2 meg down 1 meg up. I'd pay $80 a month for that RIGHT NOW.
Yeah, I bet most people would pay 1/6 as much as they should for goods and services if they could. Hell, I'd like a new 4WD Toyota Tundra, and I'd pay 5 grand for it THIS VERY SECOND. I'd have enough cash left over from my savings that I could easily pay for five years in advance of a 2 meg down 1 meg up Net connection. And while we're off in a never-never land where everyone gets what they want, I'd like a pony, too. And world peace. And for all the children of the world to be happy and healthy.
Why don't you just get a T1? It's only US$674 a month. Or SDSL? It's only about US$400 per month if you're close enough to a CO. Oh, wait... I remember. You wanted something for nothing. I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon, bro.
In this article, I will be using my years of experience in the b2c and b2b e-commerce sphere to cast some light on a subject which has been causing controversy for years:
In this article, I will be comparing pearl to python to find out which one is best...
The point is to get away from the trolls (and not the kind that live under bridges which is about all we get on slashdot, when they aren't just plain old crapflooders and/or bots). That article above wasn't even remotely clever (which a troll -- by definition and at minimum -- should be). Not even close. Nice try, though.
I think I'll just keep browsing at +2 and reading K5. Hell, even Fark is better than some of the childish nonsense that comes through here...
Why trust the mods? At the risk of losing out on your future gems of wisdom, it's easier to add your nick to those of other FP lusers who automatically get -4. Then I'll never have to see anything from you ever again, regardless of what the mods do or don't do, how much karma you have, whatever.
A version of Slashdot only for grown-ups. Now for that I'd pay a subscription fee.
I don't want to give up my server platform of choice (FreeBSD), but would certainly like to still be able to allow SOAP clients from the Java,.NET, Perl, etc. worlds access my services.
I do not mean to troll you (look at my posting history), but I want to ask: What services do you mean? I don't ask for application specifics, company names, etc, I just hear a lot about web "services" and see very little except planning and idle banter. What would require.NET as long as you have server-side applications which meet the protocols in question? Isn't the point of SOAP that any client can get "services" from a server/app so-equipped? I think I'm missing something.
I don't know if this is an Easter Egg, but I built a version of Eudora (it was like the tenth daily build and really late at night on a weekend when I had plans or something -- in other words, typical Qualcomm) which displayed my resume instead of the readme. Heh. Never told anyone that. Nobody reads the release notes anyway.
Oh yeah, when Eudora moved to adware mode and went public beta, me and a guy from tech support put in some ads of our own (accessible only to a small range of IPs, though). We had a Russian brides one, some personal lube ads, Gary Coleman, the usual. We used most of them for testing during the private beta, but one we did add was a picture of a former VP who played a large part in causing the ruination of the Eudora group. It wasn't a flattering ad, and predictably it didn't rotate for very long, but it got seen.
Ahh, the memories...
-B
This is a pretty good book
on
Perl & XML
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I bought this book not too long ago. I was getting really tired of looking all over the Net for information on XML perl modules. Predictably, there are about 5 ways to get anything done with Perl and XML, so just examining all of your options is a hard enough task. Do you use XML::Simple or XML::Writer to make that XML schedule document? You can look online for a week straight or grab this book, which essentially condenses all the Perl XML docs into one place.
The book is a little sparse, though. It's about the same thickness as Using csh and tcsh, so don't expect more than an overview of anything. In fact, it might be a little small for US$35.00 (although Bookpool has it for US$21.50). Another small gripe was that it covered parsing XML in far greater detail than generating XML (which was my task at the time I bought the book). Admittedly, parsing XML is typically what most people tend to do and is far more difficult that creating new XML, but I thought a little more coverage was warranted.
If you are faced with doing something involving XML and you're not sure what software bits are up to the task, then this is a good place to find out where to start. You could wind up looking elsewhere if you need lots of nitty-gritty details, but getting off on the right foot is a hard enough task and might be worth the price of the book.
I think I'll give to the KDE guys. I can't really stomach giving money to de Icaza -- he's just a little to MS-friendly and Mono is a nasty, horrible, misguided thing I could never actually pay for. KDE works just fine regardless and doesn't have any leanings (aspirations?) towards the Pacific Northwest.
Although if I could give some cash to the Blackbox guys I'd certainly do that. I've gotten quite a bit of use out of their software in the last few years...
Remind me not to laugh anymore about JPGs bearing virii.
Are you sure it wasn't a few errant trojii? Maybe it was gaggle of wormii. They're the worst -- they get into your system with tentacles like octopii and barbs as sharp as cactii. You need to step way back and get statii on all your system when you get infected with those. Or you could take a one or more hiatii from online computing altogether and minimize your chances of getting infected.
perl/mod_perl was fine back in the early slash days. that was about the best there was. now there's a j2ee environment that provides flexability and feature rich components.
I definitely agree that mod_perl's time has gone (unless you need to get access to Apcahe's internals -- something most people forget mod_perl can do). And anything based on Mason runs a 95% chance of becoming an unholy nightmare. Perl's time has not yet gone. It's too useful for smaller, everyday things like banging out a quick filter/parser or some such. It's even good for the occasional small CGI script, and I've used it for cross-platform scripting with great success. However, I don't think "porting" Slash to anything Java based is the right way to go.
If King Slashdot was asking for votes, I'd vote for PHP. The syntax is very similar to Perl's. This means the developers and maintainers have a greatly reduced learning curve. You could almost literally port Perl code function by function to PHP. At the end, you'd wind up with something that looked very similar to the original Perl, but without all the baggage. PHP is at least as fast as mod_perl, and possibly fater than servlets (it has been in at least two cases I've seen). You wouldn't lose speed if you moved from mod_perl to PHP. The development model is very close to Perl's. If you're used to working with mod_perl stuff under Apache, then you'll immediately take to writing PHP apps. If you've administered mod_perl and Apache, then you already know how to administer PHP. With J2EE you get a whole new set of things to look at.
Anyway, that's my opinion. I've always felt that people should use the right tool for the job, and a part of the "right tool" definition is using what people already know as much as possible (unless it's a learning experience they're after). This is why it's good to know a lot of different technologies: you can apply the right tool at will (shell scripts instead of Perl, Java over Tk, whatever). If the Slash developers don't already know either PHP or Java, then they can most quickly get started with PHP, partially satisfying that "what you know" bit. The curve would be much more steep with Java.
However, the bottom line is that Perl seems to work fine for Slashdot, so likely there's no reason to fix it.
Golf might be cool, I guess, but I want armor! No rust, strong, light weight, easily castable. Sounds like a great way to make armor plating, like in a Stormtrooper suit for real life or something. That Colonial Marine armor was cool too. I got to see a set at a Planet Hollywood once. I always wanted a set of that, for no real good reason at all. But I digress...
Is it really that usefull to leave your station on 24/7?
Yes, it is. And at very least I demand the option to do just that in my OS.
Here's an example: I have a SOHO fileserver I built that is up 24/7 (77 days, 18-something hours as I write this). It's like those Snap NAS devices you see in Fry's, but mine didn't cost $1600 and it's based on Red Hat 7.3. It has 80GB of RAID1 disk space, acts as a printing daemon, runs Apache and ssh for remote access, X in case I want to remote display an aplication, VNC in case I want a remote desktop from my wife's Windows box, Samba for sharing to her machine anmd NFS for remote mounts to my other Linux boxes. It has MP3 ripping and encoding software, and a MySQL database that has everything from a list of ID3 tags for those MP3s to my personal finances to the household event calendar for the year. It has Java, C, Perl and PHP on it for when I write/test software. Long story short: I rely on that machine for a lot of things, and it's very inconvenient when it's down (as it was when I upgraded to RH7.3 and added the RAID pair). In fact, one could argue that the very nature of the machine requires that it be up 24/7. So it fits your definition of a server (and I also use it as my remote access machine, so it often functions as a "workstation").
However, I used the same CDs to install my desktop OS as I did for the fileserver's "server" OS. This came naturally to me and I didn't give it a second thought until now. The line between workstation and server is -- to me and in my situation -- almost completely blurred. As a consequence of using my server OS on my desktop, my desktop machine stays up as long as I need it to. And I sometimes want it to be up for a long time. I often have remote consoles to a bunch of different work machines open, an editor going with files everywhere, half-baked GIMP projects on my fourth desktop, etc. I do personal side projects at night, "regular" work in the day. By keeping all my apps/files open to where I had them the night before, I can come home, sit down, power on my monitor and pick up instantly where I left off. It's very handy and provides a sense of continuity. I couldn't live without that "feature", probably, to say nothing of the supreme inconvenience of having your workstation decide all on its own to force you to reboot it...
Rebooting is for when you add hardware and upgrade a kernel, nothing more. I admit that I might be slightly unusual as far as PC users go, but why wouldn't I demand the option to have any machine be up as long as I need it to be up?
But if you have coworkers get together some place generally not associated with work (a park), people put the usual corporate structure aside
I agree. It really helps to be somewhere besides the meeting room. Spontaneity helps too. Insane working conditions/hours (hence the need to blow off steam) also help. Of course, none of that was really necessary for people like me (and 7/8s of tech support), who never had much in the way of structure to begin with.
Congrats to Colleen! I'll have to check out the duckpond every once in a while and see what's happening.
I still have some Guiness in a bottle hanging around if you ever find yourself up north...:-)
a nice summer afternoon, some grass, a few frisbees
Uh, that came out kinda wrong. I meant the kind of grass you sit on and the kind of frisbees you throw. I'm surprised I didn't mention patchouli and a hackysack. Jeez. At any rate, I wasn't advocating getting the whole company stoned. Although it probably would have helped in our case...
When you and a co-worker discuss an
idea in a conference room, that pretty much limits the communication
potential to just you two; when you discuss it over a game of pool,
soon half the company has wandered by and had the opportunity to
comment.
We had a pool table at Eudora, when we were in Building I (the one by the cemetary, ironically enough). It got used a lot, although there was very little work talk that went on around it. Some, but not much. Mostly it was guys from tech support on break. More discussion took place when they had beer busts out on the lawn, or when they brought in food late at night for all us guys lucky enough to be working late during pre-GM release crunches. In fact, they wound up taking the pool table away because it was causing "productivity" to slip.
The beer busts worked particluarly well (and not just because I a) like beer or b) would wait until they were over and then would stuff the leftovers into the fridge in my office). It was like 3 hours of sitting around in the grass, engineers talking to sales, marketing talking to project mgmt, everyone talking to everyone else, VPs and admin clerks mingling. We couldn't all get together without talking about work stuff at a bar during happy hour, much less on a Friday at 2 in the afternoon on the front lawn of our building. The freebie dinners wer egood, but only engineers got to eat, so the group was more limited. We didn't get the cross-polination that the beer busts had.
If had to recommend a "dotcom-ish" group activity, I'd say a nice summer afternoon, some grass, a few frisbees, t-shirts for the employees-of-the-month, and a big tub of beer, wine, and soda. Very informal, just come and hang out. That's a really good way for a department head to get feedback, and way better than "all hands" meetings. I remember one day we had an all-hands, and not one person asked a question. A couple days later at a beer bust you couldn't get a word in edge-wise with the VP he was so busy talking with people.
If you're a heavy PGPDisk user, then you might like BestCrypt. Does pretty much the same things, except it has both Linux and Win32 "clients". So you can tote encrypted loopback files around, just like with PGPDisk, except you can tote them between a good and a marginal-at-best OS. Works with Win2K and XP, too. And it has some pretty good crpyto algorithm support (even GOST). On the Linux side of things, you can even do funny stuff like have encrypted home directories, encrypted samba shares, etc. The Linux GUI leaves a little to be desired, but the Windows one is pretty good. It's free-as-in-beer for personal use.
So what other advantages does MySQL have over PostgreSQL?
Wel, I like your two (especially, the one about the monitor being nicer -- I hate PostgreSQL's CLI). There are more advantages:
Code might be more mature. Early versions of psql suffered a bit. MySQL has been looked at a lot, has a large install base, etc., so it's got more kinks worked out. Probably. YMMV.
Access control is more fine grained. I'm very used to MySQL's grant tables. You can get nearly the same thing in psql though.
Windows support. You need Cygwin for psql on Windows. This isn't a biggie for me, but might be important to some...
I can back up MySQL's DB files really easily, without the DB running if need be (did this once as an emergency backup and it saved my bacon).
Lots of books, lots of code already written for MySQL. Although I suspect that psql will close that gap. But 8 times out of ten you see something from freshmeat written for MySQL.
I'm personally more familiar with it...:-)
Anyway, there's a whole list of pros as well as cons over at MySQL's site. However, that list let out the most important thing to consider when choosing any technology: Is it the right tool for the job? Most of the time MySQL has been just fine for my needs.
If MySQL goes the way of PostgreSQL, there won't be any point to MySQL.
I know this might seem shocking, but I agree with you completely.:-) Very well said. I use MySQL at home for small stuff: calendars, MP3 data, that sort of thing. My hosting provider, like many others, has it installed as well, so that's a handy "feature" for me. I write an app for home use which can move to the outside world if I want it to. I also use it at work since it's ubiquitous there as well. Again, using it at home makes writing apps which can move around much easier. (Although I use DBI and ADOdb, so portability isn't much of an issue except for my own spinal macros.) I've also used PostgreSQL as well. We needed its features, so that's what we used. But for lightweight stuff, MySQL works fine. Anyway, like you say, use the right tool for the job.
I can hear it now: "MySQL sucks", "It doesn't have triggers|rollbacks|stored procedures|nested selects", "It isn't PostgreSQL|Sybase|Oracle", "It's not a real RDBMS", "It uses a bastardized version of SQL", "It stole my woman", "It owes me money", "It called the Pope bad names", blah blah blah. Guess what? It doesn't have those "features" for a reason! MySQL was meant to be fast and small, that's it. It was meant to fill in the gaps left by mSQL and to drive web sites (quickly). It's a feature-rich, glorified flat file, ok? And it fills its intended role quite well.
You can't even mention MySQL without the know-it-alls coming out of the woodwork. You'd think the mere mention of MySQL offends their sense of personal or national pride or something. If MySQL isn't your taste, doesn't meet your needs, isn't robust enough, whatever, then don't use it. Use PostreSQL or another RDBMS. Why people continue to begrudge other's use of MySQL is beyond me...
It's not inexplicable at all why Buffy hasn't been nominated. The reason is very clear: Buffy just isn't that good. It's a silly show with a silly premise. The movie was passable, the show not so much. It (and its fans) takes itself much too seriously. I know it's all a matter of taste, but Buffy is definitely no Greg the Bunny when it comes to "witty and intelligent". And how come my favorite show wasn't nominated?
Anyway, I'm sure this is going to be modded as a troll or flamebait. Whatever. I just fail to see why one person's pet show (which has abysmal ratings, btw) not getting a nomination for an award makes front-page news.
Not to notice how dull your fine point is, but, I've spent the 12 years since I've been a software engineer doing kernel programming learning how to be a PM.
And you assume that all PMs share your sense of dedication? Interesting persepective...
I still maintain that many PMs believe that their role is not to manage but to put out fires. Reaction, not proaction. Remedial instead of prophylactic management. It takes very little actual talent or foresight to jump into the fray as a stubborn blowhard and expect the problems at hand to bend to your will. I'd personally rather work with your style of intelligent planning and not the sheer mule-headed brute force I've seen so often.
I can't tell you who many times I've seen a nepotistically hired PM try to buffalo their way into a working group. My reaction now is "I wonder how many days until we get to see Golf Dude throw us under the bus so he can CYA..." I'd love to see the numbers for projects that have been mis-managed into the ground because of former frat buddies hiring one another.
BTW, I agree completely with your post. And while my original point may not have been as sharp as I'd have liked (it certainly may have been a bit too barbed), I can tell you from personal experience that it was not bullshit. I was not describing a perfect world, just the one I live in. In that world, PMs like you are a rarity and the bad PMs almost invariably hang around far longer than the bad programmers.
Winamp 3 will be available on linux, so you might see more cross platform plugins (even your favourite trippy visualisations).
The alpha release of Winamp for Linux is available for download from Nullsoft's site. A fairly lightweight 1.5MB download (XMMS was around 2MB last time I grabbed it). The press release for version 3 has this to say about Linux and us maybe seeing other cross-platform code:
Every component of the Winamp player can be removed or replaced, enabling developers to create exactly what they want and integrate it quickly into Winamp. The "Wasabi" coding platform enables instant cross- platform functionality for supported platforms that will include Windows and Linux at launch. The Winamp player is the first full-featured application for this groundbreaking new coding platform.
That bodes well. Maybe the Wasabi "platform" will allow more visual stuff, hoepfully for more than just an mp3 player. The license, I'm sure, won't be GPL or LGPL.
I downloaded the alpha. It's a tarball all right, but it's a tourist in the Linux world and definitely not a native speaker. First off, the archive has hardcoded paths starting from/. It expects you (as root, I assume) to extract it from/, and it makes a/usr/local/Winamp directory for its files and then places a shell script in/usr/local/bin which runs/usr/local/Winamp/Winamp.exe (with an input file arg and STDIN/STDERR to/dev/null). This is very weird. I now have a binary file with a.exe extension at $HOME/download/win32/winamp/usr/local/Winamp and a shell script which points elsewhere.
I tried to run it manually, but forgot one other thing about the shell script: it adds/usr/local/Winamp/libs to my LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. I didn't do this, so it wouldn't run. I added it, and Winamp.exe did in fact execute. But it didn't run long.
It looks like this is a debug build, which is unsurprising since it's an alpha. It ran and displayed various profiler messages and such (the app loaded completely in 3422ms, in case you were interested). Most of the output wasn't especially interesting or unusual, although it did have a few of what looked to be function names that simply said "Write me!". I happened to notice that among these unwritten items, both Systray::addIcon and Systray::setTip told me to write them. Again, in case you didn't know it was a work-in-progress, here you go. Except seeing as how I don't have a system tray to which an icon and its associated tooltip might be added, I wonder if this might not be a work based on Win32 version which is in progress...
When the.exe ran it tried to create what looked like 3 new windows. I assume that they were the main window, the EQ and the playlist window. I couldn't say for sure since the allocated screen real estate was simply black. These new windows were up for about 1 second then went away. On the console, I saw this final message before the app died:
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 72 (X_PutImage)
Serial number of failed request: 5012
Current serial number in output stream: 5013
I'm no X programmer, but that looks to me that the app is trying to draw something in a window -- a border or background image or some such -- and can't because some X API function call was expecting different args. I don't know. I'm using XF86 that comes with Red Hat 7.3, version 4.2.0. Maybe this Winamp alpha was built under a different version? Version 3.something maybe? At any rate, I can see why they redirect STDIN and STDERR from the shell script. This build spits out a lot of info.
So there it is. I ran it with strace and watched all the "seek into my zipped-up skins files" hoo-ha fly by. I'm tired and it's late and I'm no longer all that curious as to what "Linamp" might be like, so I didn't go through it all of it very much. I did scan through it, though. Toward the end, I saw bunch of open() calls that failed because the files weren't found. I also saw some libpng warnings about incomplete streams. Offhand, I'd say that this alpha build actually does expect to be installed in a certain location. Although I can't imagine hard-coding paths, even in an alpha. More likely, I've got it all wrong and my theories are bunk. I didn't install it where it wanted to be, though. I like a little unsolved mystery sometimes.
Anyway, it'll be nice to have some choice once they get it working. When I switched from Windows to Linux, one of the things I really missed was Winamp's minibrowser. XMMS could use that feature.
This is an obvious troll, but I'll have a go regardless.
You can't really compare engineering to PM. They are two completely, vastly different things. One takes years of hard work and dedication and learning in widely disparate areas, while the other takes -- from what I can tell -- good hair, at least a passing knowledge of golf, a subscription to Details magazine, and the ability to "network" without resorting to using CAT5, fibre, or 802.11b.
Can you hire a PM with no preivous PM experience and expect products/projects to get managed? Maybe, even probably. In fact, the submitter is trying to bail water out of that particular boat so we know it not only happens, but is common. Can you hire a software engineer with no previous experience and expect any software to get written? Not even the slimmest chance in hell.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but most people could do PM if forced and very few can be programmers. So the converse of the submitter's problem doesn't even begin to hold water. "I'm a senior admin clerk in an aerospace firm where the engineers have no experience making copies and restocking the supply room..."
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I bet most people would pay 1/6 as much as they should for goods and services if they could. Hell, I'd like a new 4WD Toyota Tundra, and I'd pay 5 grand for it THIS VERY SECOND. I'd have enough cash left over from my savings that I could easily pay for five years in advance of a 2 meg down 1 meg up Net connection. And while we're off in a never-never land where everyone gets what they want, I'd like a pony, too. And world peace. And for all the children of the world to be happy and healthy.
Why don't you just get a T1? It's only US$674 a month. Or SDSL? It's only about US$400 per month if you're close enough to a CO. Oh, wait... I remember. You wanted something for nothing. I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon, bro.
-B
Have fun.
-B
I don't think so:
The point is to get away from the trolls (and not the kind that live under bridges which is about all we get on slashdot, when they aren't just plain old crapflooders and/or bots). That article above wasn't even remotely clever (which a troll -- by definition and at minimum -- should be). Not even close. Nice try, though.
I think I'll just keep browsing at +2 and reading K5. Hell, even Fark is better than some of the childish nonsense that comes through here...
-B
A version of Slashdot only for grown-ups. Now for that I'd pay a subscription fee.
-B
Ahhhh, I get you now. Thanks for the info.
-B
I do not mean to troll you (look at my posting history), but I want to ask: What services do you mean? I don't ask for application specifics, company names, etc, I just hear a lot about web "services" and see very little except planning and idle banter. What would require .NET as long as you have server-side applications which meet the protocols in question? Isn't the point of SOAP that any client can get "services" from a server/app so-equipped? I think I'm missing something.
Would you mind sharing a bit? TIA...
-B
Oh yeah, when Eudora moved to adware mode and went public beta, me and a guy from tech support put in some ads of our own (accessible only to a small range of IPs, though). We had a Russian brides one, some personal lube ads, Gary Coleman, the usual. We used most of them for testing during the private beta, but one we did add was a picture of a former VP who played a large part in causing the ruination of the Eudora group. It wasn't a flattering ad, and predictably it didn't rotate for very long, but it got seen.
Ahh, the memories...
-B
The book is a little sparse, though. It's about the same thickness as Using csh and tcsh, so don't expect more than an overview of anything. In fact, it might be a little small for US$35.00 (although Bookpool has it for US$21.50). Another small gripe was that it covered parsing XML in far greater detail than generating XML (which was my task at the time I bought the book). Admittedly, parsing XML is typically what most people tend to do and is far more difficult that creating new XML, but I thought a little more coverage was warranted.
If you are faced with doing something involving XML and you're not sure what software bits are up to the task, then this is a good place to find out where to start. You could wind up looking elsewhere if you need lots of nitty-gritty details, but getting off on the right foot is a hard enough task and might be worth the price of the book.
-B
Although if I could give some cash to the Blackbox guys I'd certainly do that. I've gotten quite a bit of use out of their software in the last few years...
-B
Are you sure it wasn't a few errant trojii? Maybe it was gaggle of wormii. They're the worst -- they get into your system with tentacles like octopii and barbs as sharp as cactii. You need to step way back and get statii on all your system when you get infected with those. Or you could take a one or more hiatii from online computing altogether and minimize your chances of getting infected.
I hate viruses.
-B
I definitely agree that mod_perl's time has gone (unless you need to get access to Apcahe's internals -- something most people forget mod_perl can do). And anything based on Mason runs a 95% chance of becoming an unholy nightmare. Perl's time has not yet gone. It's too useful for smaller, everyday things like banging out a quick filter/parser or some such. It's even good for the occasional small CGI script, and I've used it for cross-platform scripting with great success. However, I don't think "porting" Slash to anything Java based is the right way to go.
If King Slashdot was asking for votes, I'd vote for PHP. The syntax is very similar to Perl's. This means the developers and maintainers have a greatly reduced learning curve. You could almost literally port Perl code function by function to PHP. At the end, you'd wind up with something that looked very similar to the original Perl, but without all the baggage. PHP is at least as fast as mod_perl, and possibly fater than servlets (it has been in at least two cases I've seen). You wouldn't lose speed if you moved from mod_perl to PHP. The development model is very close to Perl's. If you're used to working with mod_perl stuff under Apache, then you'll immediately take to writing PHP apps. If you've administered mod_perl and Apache, then you already know how to administer PHP. With J2EE you get a whole new set of things to look at.
Anyway, that's my opinion. I've always felt that people should use the right tool for the job, and a part of the "right tool" definition is using what people already know as much as possible (unless it's a learning experience they're after). This is why it's good to know a lot of different technologies: you can apply the right tool at will (shell scripts instead of Perl, Java over Tk, whatever). If the Slash developers don't already know either PHP or Java, then they can most quickly get started with PHP, partially satisfying that "what you know" bit. The curve would be much more steep with Java.
However, the bottom line is that Perl seems to work fine for Slashdot, so likely there's no reason to fix it.
-B
-B
Yes, it is. And at very least I demand the option to do just that in my OS.
Here's an example: I have a SOHO fileserver I built that is up 24/7 (77 days, 18-something hours as I write this). It's like those Snap NAS devices you see in Fry's, but mine didn't cost $1600 and it's based on Red Hat 7.3. It has 80GB of RAID1 disk space, acts as a printing daemon, runs Apache and ssh for remote access, X in case I want to remote display an aplication, VNC in case I want a remote desktop from my wife's Windows box, Samba for sharing to her machine anmd NFS for remote mounts to my other Linux boxes. It has MP3 ripping and encoding software, and a MySQL database that has everything from a list of ID3 tags for those MP3s to my personal finances to the household event calendar for the year. It has Java, C, Perl and PHP on it for when I write/test software. Long story short: I rely on that machine for a lot of things, and it's very inconvenient when it's down (as it was when I upgraded to RH7.3 and added the RAID pair). In fact, one could argue that the very nature of the machine requires that it be up 24/7. So it fits your definition of a server (and I also use it as my remote access machine, so it often functions as a "workstation").
However, I used the same CDs to install my desktop OS as I did for the fileserver's "server" OS. This came naturally to me and I didn't give it a second thought until now. The line between workstation and server is -- to me and in my situation -- almost completely blurred. As a consequence of using my server OS on my desktop, my desktop machine stays up as long as I need it to. And I sometimes want it to be up for a long time. I often have remote consoles to a bunch of different work machines open, an editor going with files everywhere, half-baked GIMP projects on my fourth desktop, etc. I do personal side projects at night, "regular" work in the day. By keeping all my apps/files open to where I had them the night before, I can come home, sit down, power on my monitor and pick up instantly where I left off. It's very handy and provides a sense of continuity. I couldn't live without that "feature", probably, to say nothing of the supreme inconvenience of having your workstation decide all on its own to force you to reboot it...
Rebooting is for when you add hardware and upgrade a kernel, nothing more. I admit that I might be slightly unusual as far as PC users go, but why wouldn't I demand the option to have any machine be up as long as I need it to be up?
-B
I agree. It really helps to be somewhere besides the meeting room. Spontaneity helps too. Insane working conditions/hours (hence the need to blow off steam) also help. Of course, none of that was really necessary for people like me (and 7/8s of tech support), who never had much in the way of structure to begin with.
Congrats to Colleen! I'll have to check out the duckpond every once in a while and see what's happening.
I still have some Guiness in a bottle hanging around if you ever find yourself up north... :-)
-B
Uh, that came out kinda wrong. I meant the kind of grass you sit on and the kind of frisbees you throw. I'm surprised I didn't mention patchouli and a hackysack. Jeez. At any rate, I wasn't advocating getting the whole company stoned. Although it probably would have helped in our case...
-B
We had a pool table at Eudora, when we were in Building I (the one by the cemetary, ironically enough). It got used a lot, although there was very little work talk that went on around it. Some, but not much. Mostly it was guys from tech support on break. More discussion took place when they had beer busts out on the lawn, or when they brought in food late at night for all us guys lucky enough to be working late during pre-GM release crunches. In fact, they wound up taking the pool table away because it was causing "productivity" to slip.
The beer busts worked particluarly well (and not just because I a) like beer or b) would wait until they were over and then would stuff the leftovers into the fridge in my office). It was like 3 hours of sitting around in the grass, engineers talking to sales, marketing talking to project mgmt, everyone talking to everyone else, VPs and admin clerks mingling. We couldn't all get together without talking about work stuff at a bar during happy hour, much less on a Friday at 2 in the afternoon on the front lawn of our building. The freebie dinners wer egood, but only engineers got to eat, so the group was more limited. We didn't get the cross-polination that the beer busts had.
If had to recommend a "dotcom-ish" group activity, I'd say a nice summer afternoon, some grass, a few frisbees, t-shirts for the employees-of-the-month, and a big tub of beer, wine, and soda. Very informal, just come and hang out. That's a really good way for a department head to get feedback, and way better than "all hands" meetings. I remember one day we had an all-hands, and not one person asked a question. A couple days later at a beer bust you couldn't get a word in edge-wise with the VP he was so busy talking with people.
Anyway, gone are the salad days...
-B
Anyway, I highly recommend it.
-B
Wel, I like your two (especially, the one about the monitor being nicer -- I hate PostgreSQL's CLI). There are more advantages:
Anyway, there's a whole list of pros as well as cons over at MySQL's site. However, that list let out the most important thing to consider when choosing any technology: Is it the right tool for the job? Most of the time MySQL has been just fine for my needs.
-B
I know this might seem shocking, but I agree with you completely. :-) Very well said. I use MySQL at home for small stuff: calendars, MP3 data, that sort of thing. My hosting provider, like many others, has it installed as well, so that's a handy "feature" for me. I write an app for home use which can move to the outside world if I want it to. I also use it at work since it's ubiquitous there as well. Again, using it at home makes writing apps which can move around much easier. (Although I use DBI and ADOdb, so portability isn't much of an issue except for my own spinal macros.) I've also used PostgreSQL as well. We needed its features, so that's what we used. But for lightweight stuff, MySQL works fine. Anyway, like you say, use the right tool for the job.
BTW, I found a good comparision of open source databases that some people here might be interested in.
-B
You can't even mention MySQL without the know-it-alls coming out of the woodwork. You'd think the mere mention of MySQL offends their sense of personal or national pride or something. If MySQL isn't your taste, doesn't meet your needs, isn't robust enough, whatever, then don't use it. Use PostreSQL or another RDBMS. Why people continue to begrudge other's use of MySQL is beyond me...
-B
Anyway, I'm sure this is going to be modded as a troll or flamebait. Whatever. I just fail to see why one person's pet show (which has abysmal ratings, btw) not getting a nomination for an award makes front-page news.
-B
Then we'd charge $200 an ounce for the solvent.
Hey, it's better than some fast food ideas I've come across...
-B
And you assume that all PMs share your sense of dedication? Interesting persepective...
I still maintain that many PMs believe that their role is not to manage but to put out fires. Reaction, not proaction. Remedial instead of prophylactic management. It takes very little actual talent or foresight to jump into the fray as a stubborn blowhard and expect the problems at hand to bend to your will. I'd personally rather work with your style of intelligent planning and not the sheer mule-headed brute force I've seen so often.
I can't tell you who many times I've seen a nepotistically hired PM try to buffalo their way into a working group. My reaction now is "I wonder how many days until we get to see Golf Dude throw us under the bus so he can CYA..." I'd love to see the numbers for projects that have been mis-managed into the ground because of former frat buddies hiring one another.
BTW, I agree completely with your post. And while my original point may not have been as sharp as I'd have liked (it certainly may have been a bit too barbed), I can tell you from personal experience that it was not bullshit. I was not describing a perfect world, just the one I live in. In that world, PMs like you are a rarity and the bad PMs almost invariably hang around far longer than the bad programmers.
-B
The alpha release of Winamp for Linux is available for download from Nullsoft's site. A fairly lightweight 1.5MB download (XMMS was around 2MB last time I grabbed it). The press release for version 3 has this to say about Linux and us maybe seeing other cross-platform code:
That bodes well. Maybe the Wasabi "platform" will allow more visual stuff, hoepfully for more than just an mp3 player. The license, I'm sure, won't be GPL or LGPL.I downloaded the alpha. It's a tarball all right, but it's a tourist in the Linux world and definitely not a native speaker. First off, the archive has hardcoded paths starting from /. It expects you (as root, I assume) to extract it from /, and it makes a /usr/local/Winamp directory for its files and then places a shell script in /usr/local/bin which runs /usr/local/Winamp/Winamp.exe (with an input file arg and STDIN/STDERR to /dev/null). This is very weird. I now have a binary file with a .exe extension at $HOME/download/win32/winamp/usr/local/Winamp and a shell script which points elsewhere.
I tried to run it manually, but forgot one other thing about the shell script: it adds /usr/local/Winamp/libs to my LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. I didn't do this, so it wouldn't run. I added it, and Winamp.exe did in fact execute. But it didn't run long.
It looks like this is a debug build, which is unsurprising since it's an alpha. It ran and displayed various profiler messages and such (the app loaded completely in 3422ms, in case you were interested). Most of the output wasn't especially interesting or unusual, although it did have a few of what looked to be function names that simply said "Write me!". I happened to notice that among these unwritten items, both Systray::addIcon and Systray::setTip told me to write them. Again, in case you didn't know it was a work-in-progress, here you go. Except seeing as how I don't have a system tray to which an icon and its associated tooltip might be added, I wonder if this might not be a work based on Win32 version which is in progress...
When the .exe ran it tried to create what looked like 3 new windows. I assume that they were the main window, the EQ and the playlist window. I couldn't say for sure since the allocated screen real estate was simply black. These new windows were up for about 1 second then went away. On the console, I saw this final message before the app died:
I'm no X programmer, but that looks to me that the app is trying to draw something in a window -- a border or background image or some such -- and can't because some X API function call was expecting different args. I don't know. I'm using XF86 that comes with Red Hat 7.3, version 4.2.0. Maybe this Winamp alpha was built under a different version? Version 3.something maybe? At any rate, I can see why they redirect STDIN and STDERR from the shell script. This build spits out a lot of info.So there it is. I ran it with strace and watched all the "seek into my zipped-up skins files" hoo-ha fly by. I'm tired and it's late and I'm no longer all that curious as to what "Linamp" might be like, so I didn't go through it all of it very much. I did scan through it, though. Toward the end, I saw bunch of open() calls that failed because the files weren't found. I also saw some libpng warnings about incomplete streams. Offhand, I'd say that this alpha build actually does expect to be installed in a certain location. Although I can't imagine hard-coding paths, even in an alpha. More likely, I've got it all wrong and my theories are bunk. I didn't install it where it wanted to be, though. I like a little unsolved mystery sometimes.
Anyway, it'll be nice to have some choice once they get it working. When I switched from Windows to Linux, one of the things I really missed was Winamp's minibrowser. XMMS could use that feature.
-B
You can't really compare engineering to PM. They are two completely, vastly different things. One takes years of hard work and dedication and learning in widely disparate areas, while the other takes -- from what I can tell -- good hair, at least a passing knowledge of golf, a subscription to Details magazine, and the ability to "network" without resorting to using CAT5, fibre, or 802.11b.
Can you hire a PM with no preivous PM experience and expect products/projects to get managed? Maybe, even probably. In fact, the submitter is trying to bail water out of that particular boat so we know it not only happens, but is common. Can you hire a software engineer with no previous experience and expect any software to get written? Not even the slimmest chance in hell.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but most people could do PM if forced and very few can be programmers. So the converse of the submitter's problem doesn't even begin to hold water. "I'm a senior admin clerk in an aerospace firm where the engineers have no experience making copies and restocking the supply room..."
It just doesn't work, man.
-B