A good friend of mine worked construction back when we were in our 20's. He talked about the task of setting up scaffolding:
* General Labourers had to carry the parts of the scaffolding from the truck to the side of the building;
* Pipefitters had to put the scaffolding together;
* Carpenters had to add the boards and level the structure;
* Electricians had to install any required extension cords; and
* there was a fifth union that had to do something else before the scaffolding was deemed complete -- I wish I could remember what it was.
Can you imagine the disaster that would follow if the same plan was followed in IT? SysAdmins wouldn't be able to write any scripts -- they'd have to wait for the Developers; web guys wouldn't be able to do any database work; and project leaders wouldn't be able to touch any running system.
At my current employer, we moved an office of close to 150 people over a weekend, and some of us volunteered to come in over the weekend to hook up the office networks -- connecting about six dozen switches (one for data, one for VoIP for each five person pod) and connect CPUs and flat screens at the various pods. About 95% of the systems were wired up and ready to be powered on the following Monday. I can't imagine what a union would have cost us in time and money for that project.
Finally, I sing in a men's chorus. A few years back we did our annual show (a matinee and evening show) at a union hall. We had to pay a fully licensed electrician $1000 for the day. His only job? To plug in a guitar amplifier for one of the performers when it was on stage. Insanity.
Make sure that the Java programmers (who sound like they're the same vintage as me -- 20+ years experience) understand that you're *not* the alpha male Java programmer. Instead, they should understand that you're the one going to all of those boring meetings and protecting them from the torrent of management E-Mails. They get to do the fun stuff, and deliver good quality, working, tested Java code.
I hear about new services and usually sign up fairly quickly to make sure that I get my ID. It doesn't matter that much, but it is handy to have the same handle across the Internet.
I did that with Twitter, signed up, then didn't use the account for a couple of months. Now I use it a couple of times a day. It's handy, but I still can't figure out what their business case is.
What happens during a production problem when a script you've written breaks, you have hundreds of irate customers calling you and you're losing ten thousand dollars a minute?
Having to code fizz buzz in ten minutes in front of a couple of people is nothin' compared to a real world situation.
Exactly. My marks at university were pretty bad, because exams were all 'closed book' and classmates with a photographic memory zoomed by me. I'm actually impressed I managed to pass.
About ten minutes ago I had to use the Perl 'splice' operator -- and I reached out for the Camel to make sure I was using the right syntax, for exactly the reasons you enumerated -- the time spent looking it up is vastly smaller than the time spent remembering it incorrectly and trying to debug the resulting mess.
I'm fortunate enough to work somewhere that is still very happy with Perl. Yes, there are reams of very old, very poor quality Perl code, as described by the Fine Article, but there are also a few nuggets of newer, shinier Perl, and we've added two really good Perl developers to staff recently.
It's amusing that the excuses not use Perl go from "There are no developers" to "It's old technology" -- Perl developers may be hard to find, but in this market (Toronto) it appears it's because they're valuable. And old technology doesn't mean 'out of date' -- to my mind, it means 'seasoned' or 'proven'.
Perl is still a viable development tool -- the community and the language are alive and healthy, whether or not the suits like it. And you can write bad, out-dated code in any language, including Perl. Sometimes the suits and the HR department don't get that.
The CPAN module Log::Log4perl is a great tool for logging -- it means you can stick in plenty of debug statements, and dial them up for debugging, then dial them down in Production.
This module uses several message levels; in descending order of importance they are FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG and TRACE. It's possible to log messages to files, a screen, or even to an E-Mail message.
The real strength of this method is that you don't need a 'debug' version of the code -- all configuration is done externally, which means you can turn logging on for a Production problem, run your test, and turn it off again, and look at the log files off-line.
Maybe the way you code, you never have a line that is so long that it needs to be broken. In most C code I've seen (and all C++ or Java code) a lot of lines exceed the 80-column width that is a common maximum for coding conventions. You then can't clearly distinguish between the start of a block and a wrapped line without clearly inspecting the indenting. This is even more true in Objective-C, where long methods are often written with one parameter on a line.
And exceeding the 80-column mark is plain WRONG. To have something hidden past the 80 column mark is dangerous. Don't do that.
Exactly. Follow the bottom brace up to the top will get you to a keyword: while, if, for. In vim, the % will bounce you between matching braces anyways. No idea what four fingered combination is the equivalent command in emacs.;)
And I'm quite fine with cuddled elses -- I'd rather see
} else {
on a single line than
}
else
{
over three lines. The more code you can read at once, the better. However, I do make a point to leave white space *after* an if condition. The code has to be readable -- that's number one.
I mean, really, think like a businessman. Instead of capping heavy users, how about (exploding heads everywhere) making *money* from this opportunity. And a 250G monthly cap sounds entirely reasonable.
Some people need to get outside more if this cap sounds too low. Go for a walk. Grab some coffee. Ride a bike. Go camping. Join a chorus or choir. Go out on a date. See a movie. Eat at a restaurant.
We wrote stupid number guessing games, blackjack and baccarat, but the best was playing a game of Star Trek that ran on an HP 3000, like the parent post. We would go from sector to sector, zapping Klingons, looking for Dilithium crystals and avoiding the Romulans. It was really quite insane how exciting the star ship Enterprise looked in ASCII: -.=
Well, I guess you really had to be there. I spent many happy afternoons in Mr Seddon's computer lab, with David Stewart-Patterson, Dominik Dlouhy, David Fudger, Mike Candy and sometimes a Grade 10 student looking on like Ian Turnbull or Neil Anderson. Yeah, Mac High!
I was in a meeting Thursday with a guy from Microsoft who defended the brilliance of Vista by telling us all that he got Vista on his new box, a quad core machine with 4G RAM, and said "It runs really smoothly -- the working set's only about one or one and half gigs or RAM." He then want on to say that hardware configuration is going to be really common pretty soon. It was all I could do to shake my head and keep my mouth shut.
It seems that Microsoft thinks that as soon as a new version of Windows comes out, all Windows users must immediately buy a brand new, maxed out system, install Vista and throw out whatever they had before. It's really just mind-bending how the hardware gets faster and faster, and Microsoft continues to come out with point zero versions of their operating system that demands new hardware.
If Microsoft were as smart as I thought they were, they'd happily continue to sell XP (instead of being forced into it by the marketplace), but focus new development on Vista, and work on getting the bugs out of Vista in the meantime. I am so tired of hearing MS fanatics expostulating that the latest Release Candidate is 'rock solid' for them. It was tiring when Windows 95 was in development, and it still tiring a dozen years later.
Then again, I must be in the minority -- I have Windows 98 on an old P-450, and Linux on two other systems, but I manage to get a lot done.
1. XP is fine -- a remarkable achievement, actually -- a Microsoft operating system that's finally releatively stable. Well, they've had a few years to get it right. And getting an OS right is really, really tough.
2. Vista requires top of the line hardware to run decently -- dual core processors and 2G RAM. We had the exact same discussion over ten years ago when Windows 95 came out -- Microsoft swore it would run fine in 4M memory, and it never did -- 8M was better, and 12M was decent.
3. Vista is still not stable -- it is, after all, a 1.0 release. Geeks consider anything 1.0 from Microsoft a bit dodgy.
4. All current applications run fine on Windows XP, but may or may not run under Vista. No surprise there.
5. A recent article said that XP was still outselling Vista three to one on new system installs. It's not a tough choice: do you want the stable option that runs more quickly and is more compatible, or would you prefer the unstable option that runs more slowly and is less compatible? Hmmm. But the new one has such pretty pictures! Shiny! Shiny!
Sorry. Got carried away for a moment there.
I think Microsoft's suits need to just suck it up and keep selling Vista quietly, and give the engineers time to get the code right. The hardware will catch up to Vista, and the engineers will get the bugs sorted out. In a couple of years XP will be old hat.
I just wish they'd been able to get more of the cool stuff like WinFS into the latest version of Windows. It seems that this version is just new wrinkles in the sheet metal, and nothing much else. Sigh.
Sound is essential to a great production. I can remember in more difficult times watching a rented movie on a fourteen inch TV, but with stereo sound going to a great set of speakers. (It was a phenomenal film called Delicatessan.) The presentation was terrific, and you completely forgot that the screen was tiny -- compared to the 32 inch screen I watch now.
The sound and the pictures are supposed to support each other -- if there's clearly a mismatch, it's painful to watch and listen. If there's a really good, it becomes hypnotizing -- think Koyanniqatski (mis-spelled, I'm sure).
And here it is, in their own word. SCOX is now trading at $.37, down from an open of $.65. Geez, and the whole thing seemed like such a good idea almost five years ago.
I have two monitors hooked up to my system. I run WondowMaker (http://www.windowmaker.info/) so that I can flip between 1. Mail (mutt for internal mail, GAIM for internal chat and GMail for external mail), 2. Monitoring (xterms to the servers I manage, a view of the SGE queue, a view of the incoming mail feeds, and a 'ps axf' view and a tail of the access log on my busiest server), leaving plenty left over for 3. Development (xterms into development system, browser window, gvim windows). I've had as many as six workspaces active at any time, and it allows me to leave one workspace, go do something on another workspace, then come back to the first workspace knowing that it's just as I left it.
I highly recommend it -- and if you're using an old screen, the bean-counters will probably tell you it's depreciated down to nothing already, so it's not costing the company anything anyway.
I kid, I kid. There was recent ruckus about whether or not 'Perl is dying' on Perlmonks. Both languages are quite viable. Let's not start that whole ugly discussion agin. Please. Take my wife.
John Dvorak was mildly amusing in the mid-80's when I first ran into his column. Back then he would italicize the important bits which was entertaining, but after a while it just became a bit too much. This is more of the same, only twenty years later.
John, CSS uses inheritance -- it's a pretty advanced idea that egghead nerds are fine with, so just deal with it. As an earlier post says, a much better use of your time would be to complain about why browsers don't display the same page the same way -- if you manage to say something nice about Firefox, all the better. I'd suggest a calm, thoughtful, witty approach to writing, but then you'd have to drop the italics as well -- and I don't think that's gonna happen. Oh well.
That is wicked good stuff. Whoever does their Marketing gets a gold star. Entertaining, informative, reassuring, clean, neat, clever, funny, and memorable. Very, very cool.
Yet another fascinating example of a piggyback strategy. As long as Google's star shines brightly, they are going to do very, very well.
I still have two systems in my house that run Win98 -- because of the applications I need to use. They'll probably disappear in the next two years, but if you look at web logs on a public site, you'll probably see 10% of the browsers are still coming from Win98.
Slashdot Mirror
A good friend of mine worked construction back when we were in our 20's. He talked about the task of setting up scaffolding:
* General Labourers had to carry the parts of the scaffolding from the truck to the side of the building;
* Pipefitters had to put the scaffolding together;
* Carpenters had to add the boards and level the structure;
* Electricians had to install any required extension cords; and
* there was a fifth union that had to do something else before the scaffolding was deemed complete -- I wish I could remember what it was.
Can you imagine the disaster that would follow if the same plan was followed in IT? SysAdmins wouldn't be able to write any scripts -- they'd have to wait for the Developers; web guys wouldn't be able to do any database work; and project leaders wouldn't be able to touch any running system.
At my current employer, we moved an office of close to 150 people over a weekend, and some of us volunteered to come in over the weekend to hook up the office networks -- connecting about six dozen switches (one for data, one for VoIP for each five person pod) and connect CPUs and flat screens at the various pods. About 95% of the systems were wired up and ready to be powered on the following Monday. I can't imagine what a union would have cost us in time and money for that project.
Finally, I sing in a men's chorus. A few years back we did our annual show (a matinee and evening show) at a union hall. We had to pay a fully licensed electrician $1000 for the day. His only job? To plug in a guitar amplifier for one of the performers when it was on stage. Insanity.
Make sure that the Java programmers (who sound like they're the same vintage as me -- 20+ years experience) understand that you're *not* the alpha male Java programmer. Instead, they should understand that you're the one going to all of those boring meetings and protecting them from the torrent of management E-Mails. They get to do the fun stuff, and deliver good quality, working, tested Java code.
I hear about new services and usually sign up fairly quickly to make sure that I get my ID. It doesn't matter that much, but it is handy to have the same handle across the Internet.
I did that with Twitter, signed up, then didn't use the account for a couple of months. Now I use it a couple of times a day. It's handy, but I still can't figure out what their business case is.
Oh well -- not my problem. ;)
FAIL.
What happens during a production problem when a script you've written breaks, you have hundreds of irate customers calling you and you're losing ten thousand dollars a minute?
Having to code fizz buzz in ten minutes in front of a couple of people is nothin' compared to a real world situation.
"Real work" I said "is an open-book test".
Exactly. My marks at university were pretty bad, because exams were all 'closed book' and classmates with a photographic memory zoomed by me. I'm actually impressed I managed to pass.
About ten minutes ago I had to use the Perl 'splice' operator -- and I reached out for the Camel to make sure I was using the right syntax, for exactly the reasons you enumerated -- the time spent looking it up is vastly smaller than the time spent remembering it incorrectly and trying to debug the resulting mess.
I'm fortunate enough to work somewhere that is still very happy with Perl. Yes, there are reams of very old, very poor quality Perl code, as described by the Fine Article, but there are also a few nuggets of newer, shinier Perl, and we've added two really good Perl developers to staff recently.
It's amusing that the excuses not use Perl go from "There are no developers" to "It's old technology" -- Perl developers may be hard to find, but in this market (Toronto) it appears it's because they're valuable. And old technology doesn't mean 'out of date' -- to my mind, it means 'seasoned' or 'proven'.
Perl is still a viable development tool -- the community and the language are alive and healthy, whether or not the suits like it. And you can write bad, out-dated code in any language, including Perl. Sometimes the suits and the HR department don't get that.
The demo looks fantastic .. the only problem I had was that there was some loss of definition around the eyes. Otherwise, wow. Double wow.
The CPAN module Log::Log4perl is a great tool for logging -- it means you can stick in plenty of debug statements, and dial them up for debugging, then dial them down in Production.
This module uses several message levels; in descending order of importance they are FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG and TRACE. It's possible to log messages to files, a screen, or even to an E-Mail message.
The real strength of this method is that you don't need a 'debug' version of the code -- all configuration is done externally, which means you can turn logging on for a Production problem, run your test, and turn it off again, and look at the log files off-line.
I would much rather see
if ( Something ) {
do something();
} else {
do something_else();
}
It's much clearer and easier to read.
Maybe the way you code, you never have a line that is so long that it needs to be broken. In most C code I've seen (and all C++ or Java code) a lot of lines exceed the 80-column width that is a common maximum for coding conventions. You then can't clearly distinguish between the start of a block and a wrapped line without clearly inspecting the indenting. This is even more true in Objective-C, where long methods are often written with one parameter on a line.
And exceeding the 80-column mark is plain WRONG. To have something hidden past the 80 column mark is dangerous. Don't do that.
Exactly. Follow the bottom brace up to the top will get you to a keyword: while, if, for. In vim, the % will bounce you between matching braces anyways. No idea what four fingered combination is the equivalent command in emacs. ;)
And I'm quite fine with cuddled elses -- I'd rather see
} else {
on a single line than
}
else
{
over three lines. The more code you can read at once, the better. However, I do make a point to leave white space *after* an if condition. The code has to be readable -- that's number one.
Finally, a sane suggestion.
I mean, really, think like a businessman. Instead of capping heavy users, how about (exploding heads everywhere) making *money* from this opportunity. And a 250G monthly cap sounds entirely reasonable.
Some people need to get outside more if this cap sounds too low. Go for a walk. Grab some coffee. Ride a bike. Go camping. Join a chorus or choir. Go out on a date. See a movie. Eat at a restaurant.
Jeepers.
We wrote stupid number guessing games, blackjack and baccarat, but the best was playing a game of Star Trek that ran on an HP 3000, like the parent post. We would go from sector to sector, zapping Klingons, looking for Dilithium crystals and avoiding the Romulans. It was really quite insane how exciting the star ship Enterprise looked in ASCII: -.=
Well, I guess you really had to be there. I spent many happy afternoons in Mr Seddon's computer lab, with David Stewart-Patterson, Dominik Dlouhy, David Fudger, Mike Candy and sometimes a Grade 10 student looking on like Ian Turnbull or Neil Anderson. Yeah, Mac High!
!!!!!!! GOATSE WARNING !!!!!!
I was in a meeting Thursday with a guy from Microsoft who defended the brilliance of Vista by telling us all that he got Vista on his new box, a quad core machine with 4G RAM, and said "It runs really smoothly -- the working set's only about one or one and half gigs or RAM." He then want on to say that hardware configuration is going to be really common pretty soon. It was all I could do to shake my head and keep my mouth shut.
It seems that Microsoft thinks that as soon as a new version of Windows comes out, all Windows users must immediately buy a brand new, maxed out system, install Vista and throw out whatever they had before. It's really just mind-bending how the hardware gets faster and faster, and Microsoft continues to come out with point zero versions of their operating system that demands new hardware.
If Microsoft were as smart as I thought they were, they'd happily continue to sell XP (instead of being forced into it by the marketplace), but focus new development on Vista, and work on getting the bugs out of Vista in the meantime. I am so tired of hearing MS fanatics expostulating that the latest Release Candidate is 'rock solid' for them. It was tiring when Windows 95 was in development, and it still tiring a dozen years later.
Then again, I must be in the minority -- I have Windows 98 on an old P-450, and Linux on two other systems, but I manage to get a lot done.
Feh. Consider:
1. XP is fine -- a remarkable achievement, actually -- a Microsoft operating system that's finally releatively stable. Well, they've had a few years to get it right. And getting an OS right is really, really tough.
2. Vista requires top of the line hardware to run decently -- dual core processors and 2G RAM. We had the exact same discussion over ten years ago when Windows 95 came out -- Microsoft swore it would run fine in 4M memory, and it never did -- 8M was better, and 12M was decent.
3. Vista is still not stable -- it is, after all, a 1.0 release. Geeks consider anything 1.0 from Microsoft a bit dodgy.
4. All current applications run fine on Windows XP, but may or may not run under Vista. No surprise there.
5. A recent article said that XP was still outselling Vista three to one on new system installs. It's not a tough choice: do you want the stable option that runs more quickly and is more compatible, or would you prefer the unstable option that runs more slowly and is less compatible? Hmmm. But the new one has such pretty pictures! Shiny! Shiny!
Sorry. Got carried away for a moment there.
I think Microsoft's suits need to just suck it up and keep selling Vista quietly, and give the engineers time to get the code right. The hardware will catch up to Vista, and the engineers will get the bugs sorted out. In a couple of years XP will be old hat.
I just wish they'd been able to get more of the cool stuff like WinFS into the latest version of Windows. It seems that this version is just new wrinkles in the sheet metal, and nothing much else. Sigh.
Mod parent up.
Sound is essential to a great production. I can remember in more difficult times watching a rented movie on a fourteen inch TV, but with stereo sound going to a great set of speakers. (It was a phenomenal film called Delicatessan.) The presentation was terrific, and you completely forgot that the screen was tiny -- compared to the 32 inch screen I watch now.
The sound and the pictures are supposed to support each other -- if there's clearly a mismatch, it's painful to watch and listen. If there's a really good, it becomes hypnotizing -- think Koyanniqatski (mis-spelled, I'm sure).
And here it is, in their own word. SCOX is now trading at $.37, down from an open of $.65. Geez, and the whole thing seemed like such a good idea almost five years ago.
.. if they'd moved hosting for the blog and webcam to North America or Europe once they were mentioned on SlashDot?
In this case, there is a case of too much publicity. And I'd hate to see their bandwidth bills for this month.
--Alex
I have two monitors hooked up to my system. I run WondowMaker (http://www.windowmaker.info/) so that I can flip between 1. Mail (mutt for internal mail, GAIM for internal chat and GMail for external mail), 2. Monitoring (xterms to the servers I manage, a view of the SGE queue, a view of the incoming mail feeds, and a 'ps axf' view and a tail of the access log on my busiest server), leaving plenty left over for 3. Development (xterms into development system, browser window, gvim windows). I've had as many as six workspaces active at any time, and it allows me to leave one workspace, go do something on another workspace, then come back to the first workspace knowing that it's just as I left it.
I highly recommend it -- and if you're using an old screen, the bean-counters will probably tell you it's depreciated down to nothing already, so it's not costing the company anything anyway.
I kid, I kid. There was recent ruckus about whether or not 'Perl is dying' on Perlmonks. Both languages are quite viable. Let's not start that whole ugly discussion agin. Please. Take my wife.
John Dvorak was mildly amusing in the mid-80's when I first ran into his column. Back then he would italicize the important bits which was entertaining, but after a while it just became a bit too much. This is more of the same, only twenty years later.
John, CSS uses inheritance -- it's a pretty advanced idea that egghead nerds are fine with, so just deal with it. As an earlier post says, a much better use of your time would be to complain about why browsers don't display the same page the same way -- if you manage to say something nice about Firefox, all the better. I'd suggest a calm, thoughtful, witty approach to writing, but then you'd have to drop the italics as well -- and I don't think that's gonna happen. Oh well.
I'm in Toronto, Ontario .. so it looks like it's going to be a while before I can take advantage of this amazing offer.
Slick, slicker, slickest.
That is wicked good stuff. Whoever does their Marketing gets a gold star. Entertaining, informative, reassuring, clean, neat, clever, funny, and memorable. Very, very cool.
Yet another fascinating example of a piggyback strategy. As long as Google's star shines brightly, they are going to do very, very well.
Alex
I still have two systems in my house that run Win98 -- because of the applications I need to use. They'll probably disappear in the next two years, but if you look at web logs on a public site, you'll probably see 10% of the browsers are still coming from Win98.
;)
It's not dead yet. You just wish it were.