This is a reiteration of what the engineer said, but...
CVS and CMS systems are functionally the same -- however, the big win with CMS systems is in the user interface rather than in the technology.
HTML designers use Macs. They don't want to figure out what 'cvs co mozilla-seamonkey -r 1414143221' means. If you give them a nice user interface, they won't complain about it and tie up the engineers all the time.
I make assumptions all the time about people's comfort level with command line systems. Usually I find out I need to do lots and lots of hand holding, to the point where I am officially support and spend my time looking at line options and environment variables.
There are a number of content management systems that are expressly for html designers as well as coders, intended to fit in the development of a web application.
Recommending JServ as an alternative solution to Dynamo is like (strained analogy) giving sheet metal and welding tools to kids vs. giving them a climbing frame.
Caching data in a hashmap is a good first pass solution, but then you have to deal with threading issues, which brings up the problem of State. Writing an LRU thread-safe cache is perfectly possible, but a total waste of time if you're trying to write a web application.
If you must go for a free application server, choose Zope or The Locomotive. I haven't tried them out, but they seem to have the (minimal) functionality required...
Since I'm an ATG employee, I'm going to restrict my comments to the strictly personal non-Dynamo related side.
I've written server-side Java using Apache Jserv before I ever used Dynamo. Server side Java alone will screw you up horribly, because you can't easily generate dynamic HTML pages, and unless you write your own templating feature you're stuck mixing HTML code with Java code.
This will stymie the designers completely, because the only way they can make changes to the page is to ask the programmers to do it for them. The programmers are stuck doing both design and programming. Forget about making easy progressive changes to the code -- if you have one page that you want to change every third element, you'll have to trawl mounds of printlns.
Not to mention that there's no personalization. There's no database cache so you go to the database every time you need data (which can be horribly expensive). There's no connection pooling. If you want to grab stuff from the database, you have to write dynamic SQL to grab elements... I can't describe how tedious this can get.
If you want to write everything yourself or don't have the money, use Jserv. It's a good Java server, and it does everything it's supposed to. Whether it will do everything you need is another matter.
I'm using an IBM Thinkpad right now which has reasonable RAM and CPU, but lousy IO. I was thinking of supplementing it with an external SCSI drive, or an internal SCSI drive in an enclosure.
Is there any specific reason to go for external SCSI? I'm more interested in minimizing seek times than I am in huge storage, so I'm currently leaning to the IBM Deskstar 9LX, but I've seen cool things like the PocketHammer which might give an edge.
Simply put, if you want to go to America then you have to find a company here which is willing to put up a work visa for you. Advertise on DICE and e-mail some recruiters. I know that some recruiters in the bay area specialize in H1 work visas exclusively, so you can get worked into the system.
Don't count on a green card. I got lucky -- I got a green card straight off but I know people who had to wait three or four years for them.
Why is it that IP trunks seem to be backhoed at the drop of a hat, while phone lines are somehow immune? Why doesn't the phone line between Boston and San Francisco go down?
After the big MCI outage, it's time the phone companies put big red signs on OC-* pipes saying "NEVER cut through this pipe". I take it the gas company isn't about to pay for the lost and delayed packets.
WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com) is one of the underappreciated jewels for programmers and anyone who wonders how you can turn into a 'good' programmer, or what a good programmer is anyway.
I bought this book as soon as I saw Martin Fowler's name on it, and it hasn't disappointed me. On some level, it's design patterns in practice, but it deals with the niggling deals of loose code far more effectively than DP. I liked it.
The testing framework methodology really interests me, but I found I was spending more time writing the tests than actually writing the code. YMMV.
Okay, I think I have an explanation for the stick figures.
Remember the mad woman who was interviewed beforehand? She said the Blair Witch had hairy arms and legs, and was wearing a shawl... she raised the shawl and she could tell 'it was female'.
The largest stick figure has grass and weeds tied into the arms and legs. The stick figure is the blair witch, with her shawl open.
FAIR may be a good idea in theory, but they have their own biases as well. Several times they have rejected statistics and studies that they don't like with studies which are equally biased.
For more information, read Christina Hoff Summers book, "Who Stole Feminism?" There's a rebuttal by FAIR in which a statistic was picked literally out of the pages of a magazine.
The PPTP implementation is vulnerable to several well known cryptographic attacks. MS's record on good crypto is as good as their record on fixing security exploits.
Check out Counterpane's report here. Counterpane is the company owned by the same guy who wrote Applied Cryptography and the Solitare system used in Cryptonomicon.
I've seen lots of ads all over San Francisco for CoVad or Concentric, but they charge $50 a month for service which may not be all that great -- they were out for almost an entire week once in January.
PacBell charges $10 a month for DSL, but you have to find it here. Yes, that is $10 a month. Be prepared to be put on hold a lot, but it works great when it's in.
Actually, exactly that situation has been spelled out in Britain, where privacy advocates asked the Yellow Pages not to give out their database on the web because people could look up an address from a phone number.
The really scary part is not the psychos. It's the direct mailing people. If they can doing reverse lookups, any time you phone someone up they can find your phone number from call return, get your address, and start compiling information on what you buy. Yes, and junk mail you. And link it to your credit rating. And .
The problem with port forwarders as I've experienced them is that they will only forward to one machine. Meaning that if you have one machine behind an ip-masq gateway it will work fine, but if you have two or more computers, all the inbound packets will go to the IP address specified by the gateway.
It would be great to be able to have dynamic port forwarding (dunno how you'd distinguish which IP to forward to -- base it on the sequence number?) so that you could have two inbound streams to the same gateway, and have those streams demuxed to the appropriate IPs.
FreeS/WAN does IPsec fine through firewalls
on
IP Address Shortage
·
· Score: 1
Admittedly I'm not an expert, but you can use FreeS/WAN to tunnel through a firewall and connect two NATted subnets. The tunnel exists between the two public addresses of the firewall, but I don't see any reason you couldn't repeat the process host-to-host inside the NATted region.
Okay, so we're running low on class C addresses. The moment it comes to a crunch, people will assign private addresses and NAT them.
But something that's always amazed me is that the address space from 240 to 247 is UNASSIGNED! They're reserved for future use... now people want to go to IPv6 instead of ever using those addresses. Why? Do they have cooties?
Reading these missives makes me hurt so badly I have trouble reading through them. It really amazes me that people can do that to children, and then keep doing it even when the consequences of abuse are so, so clear.
I understand the problem. They don't know. They have no idea there is a problem; their behaviour is exactly what causes kids to snap and even kill.
Ironically, the very thing which they think might be responsible could actually help them. It's a simple solution -- it's worked for Amnesty International for decades. E-mail the schools. Don't let them act without letting them know you know what they're doing, and you don't approve. Tell them about the Hellmouth. Tell them why what they're doing is wrong.
I would love to see the Geek community united to the point where it is a force for social change as well as just the technical. This seems like an excellent place to start.
I suppose while we're on the subject, we could talk about database theory. I've been looking for some good books on distributed object databases -- anyone have any recommendations?
I have never trusted SAMs publishing ever since I bought a book as an innocent undergrad only to find a note in the front page...
"Due to a spelling error, all instances of the word struct have been replace with the word strict. In order to save trees, we have elected not to reprint the book, and ask you to see in your mind a struct for a strict."
Halfway through the book there's a phrase "[...] what do we use for this ADT? Why, it's our old friend the strict."
I've written 50K lines of code a little less than four months, in a 2 person team. My coding speed is 500 lines a day in a coding run and I've seen people who are better than me.
Admittedly, it takes longer to debug everything, but those numbers above have to be bogus. If Rob can write 15K, slashdot, study and party, then it's not programmers that are the bottleneck, but the managers.
Taken to the logical extreme, you should complain to your newspaper that it reviews movies which paid money for advertising. Slashdot makes no secret of Amazon's partnering program, and Rob needs the money.
I need not rely on/.'s opinion though: a review of the amazon.com site shows that the book's actually getting mixed reviews there.
Personally, the idea of buying a book and supporting Slashdot gives me a warm fuzzy feeling all over.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a reiteration of what the engineer said, but...
CVS and CMS systems are functionally the same -- however, the big win with CMS systems is in the user interface rather than in the technology.
HTML designers use Macs. They don't want to figure out what 'cvs co mozilla-seamonkey -r 1414143221' means. If you give them a nice user interface, they won't complain about it and tie up the engineers all the time.
I make assumptions all the time about people's comfort level with command line systems. Usually I find out I need to do lots and lots of hand holding, to the point where I am officially support and spend my time looking at line options and environment variables.
Probably the most popular are TeamSite and Documentum, but there are also contenders such as LiveLink and NetPerceptions.
My own personal opinion leans towards TeamSite, but because I've heard good things about rather than trying it myself.
Yeah, but templates aren't part of JServ.
Recommending JServ as an alternative solution to Dynamo is like (strained analogy) giving sheet metal and welding tools to kids vs. giving them a climbing frame.
Caching data in a hashmap is a good first pass solution, but then you have to deal with threading issues, which brings up the problem of State. Writing an LRU thread-safe cache is perfectly possible, but a total waste of time if you're trying to write a web application.
If you must go for a free application server, choose Zope or The Locomotive. I haven't tried them out, but they seem to have the (minimal) functionality required...
Since I'm an ATG employee, I'm going to restrict my comments to the strictly personal non-Dynamo related side.
I've written server-side Java using Apache Jserv before I ever used Dynamo. Server side Java alone will screw you up horribly, because you can't easily generate dynamic HTML pages, and unless you write your own templating feature you're stuck mixing HTML code with Java code.
This will stymie the designers completely, because the only way they can make changes to the page is to ask the programmers to do it for them. The programmers are stuck doing both design and programming. Forget about making easy progressive changes to the code -- if you have one page that you want to change every third element, you'll have to trawl mounds of printlns.
Not to mention that there's no personalization. There's no database cache so you go to the database every time you need data (which can be horribly expensive). There's no connection pooling. If you want to grab stuff from the database, you have to write dynamic SQL to grab elements... I can't describe how tedious this can get.
If you want to write everything yourself or don't have the money, use Jserv. It's a good Java server, and it does everything it's supposed to. Whether it will do everything you need is another matter.
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/boomslang1000p review/
I'm a sucker for the ole' "increase your quake skillz", but how is this mouse ergonomically speaking? Anybody used it?
I'm using an IBM Thinkpad right now which has reasonable RAM and CPU, but lousy IO. I was thinking of supplementing it with an external SCSI drive, or an internal SCSI drive in an enclosure.
Is there any specific reason to go for external SCSI? I'm more interested in minimizing seek times than I am in huge storage, so I'm currently leaning to the IBM Deskstar 9LX, but I've seen cool things like the PocketHammer which might give an edge.
Simply put, if you want to go to America then you have to find a company here which is willing to put up a work visa for you. Advertise on DICE and e-mail some recruiters. I know that some recruiters in the bay area specialize in H1 work visas exclusively, so you can get worked into the system.
Don't count on a green card. I got lucky -- I got a green card straight off but I know people who had to wait three or four years for them.
Why is it that IP trunks seem to be backhoed at the drop of a hat, while phone lines are somehow immune? Why doesn't the phone line between Boston and San Francisco go down?
After the big MCI outage, it's time the phone companies put big red signs on OC-* pipes saying "NEVER cut through this pipe". I take it the gas company isn't about to pay for the lost and delayed packets.
WikiWikiWeb (http://c2.com) is one of the underappreciated jewels for programmers and anyone who wonders how you can turn into a 'good' programmer, or what a good programmer is anyway.
I bought this book as soon as I saw Martin Fowler's name on it, and it hasn't disappointed me. On some level, it's design patterns in practice, but it deals with the niggling deals of loose code far more effectively than DP. I liked it.
The testing framework methodology really interests me, but I found I was spending more time writing the tests than actually writing the code. YMMV.
Or just 'current', the idea meaning that the news is up to date.
Or maybe just because slash slash slash dot dot org sounds funny.
Okay, I think I have an explanation for the stick figures.
Remember the mad woman who was interviewed beforehand? She said the Blair Witch had hairy arms and legs, and was wearing a shawl... she raised the shawl and she could tell 'it was female'.
The largest stick figure has grass and weeds tied into the arms and legs. The stick figure is the blair witch, with her shawl open.
Check out Episode 3.1 -- Rob takes a script kiddie to where "all the cool linux people hang out."
God help me, I listened and understood all the jokes. There is no hope.
FAIR may be a good idea in theory, but they have their own biases as well. Several times they have rejected statistics and studies that they don't like with studies which are equally biased.
For more information, read Christina Hoff Summers book, "Who Stole Feminism?" There's a rebuttal by FAIR in which a statistic was picked literally out of the pages of a magazine.
The PPTP implementation is vulnerable to several well known cryptographic attacks. MS's record on good crypto is as good as their record on fixing security exploits.
Check out Counterpane's report here. Counterpane is the company owned by the same guy who wrote Applied Cryptography and the Solitare system used in Cryptonomicon.
If you need a VPN, use FreeS/WAN.
I've seen lots of ads all over San Francisco for CoVad or Concentric, but they charge $50 a month for service which may not be all that great -- they were out for almost an entire week once in January.
PacBell charges $10 a month for DSL, but you have to find it here. Yes, that is $10 a month. Be prepared to be put on hold a lot, but it works great when it's in.
Actually, exactly that situation has been spelled out in Britain, where privacy advocates asked the Yellow Pages not to give out their database on the web because people could look up an address from a phone number.
The really scary part is not the psychos. It's the direct mailing people. If they can doing reverse lookups, any time you phone someone up they can find your phone number from call return, get your address, and start compiling information on what you buy. Yes, and junk mail you. And link it to your credit rating. And .
The problem with port forwarders as I've experienced them is that they will only forward to one machine. Meaning that if you have one machine behind an ip-masq gateway it will work fine, but if you have two or more computers, all the inbound packets will go to the IP address specified by the gateway.
It would be great to be able to have dynamic port forwarding (dunno how you'd distinguish which IP to forward to -- base it on the sequence number?) so that you could have two inbound streams to the same gateway, and have those streams demuxed to the appropriate IPs.
Admittedly I'm not an expert, but you can use FreeS/WAN to tunnel through a firewall and connect two NATted subnets. The tunnel exists between the two public addresses of the firewall, but I don't see any reason you couldn't repeat the process host-to-host inside the NATted region.
r eeswan-1.00/doc/index.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~freeswan/freeswan_trees/f
Okay, so we're running low on class C addresses. The moment it comes to a crunch, people will assign private addresses and NAT them.
But something that's always amazed me is that the address space from 240 to 247 is UNASSIGNED! They're reserved for future use... now people want to go to IPv6 instead of ever using those addresses. Why? Do they have cooties?
Reading these missives makes me hurt so badly I have trouble reading through them. It really amazes me that people can do that to children, and then keep doing it even when the consequences of abuse are so, so clear.
I understand the problem. They don't know. They have no idea there is a problem; their behaviour is exactly what causes kids to snap and even kill.
Ironically, the very thing which they think might be responsible could actually help them. It's a simple solution -- it's worked for Amnesty International for decades. E-mail the schools. Don't let them act without letting them know you know what they're doing, and you don't approve. Tell them about the Hellmouth. Tell them why what they're doing is wrong.
I would love to see the Geek community united to the point where it is a force for social change as well as just the technical. This seems like an excellent place to start.
Will.
I suppose while we're on the subject, we could talk about database theory. I've been looking for some good books on distributed object databases -- anyone have any recommendations?
Sorry about that, URL was wrong.
e b/db
The web tools review is Phil Greenspun's book. He also has a high signal forum at
http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic=w
I have never trusted SAMs publishing ever since I bought a book as an innocent undergrad only to find a note in the front page...
"Due to a spelling error, all instances of the word struct have been replace with the word strict. In order to save trees, we have elected not to reprint the book, and ask you to see in your mind a struct for a strict."
Halfway through the book there's a phrase "[...] what do we use for this ADT? Why, it's our old friend the strict."
I was young and stupid. Never again.
I've written 50K lines of code a little less than four months, in a 2 person team. My coding speed is 500 lines a day in a coding run and I've seen people who are better than me.
Admittedly, it takes longer to debug everything, but those numbers above have to be bogus. If Rob can write 15K, slashdot, study and party, then it's not programmers that are the bottleneck, but the managers.
Taken to the logical extreme, you should complain to your newspaper that it reviews movies which paid money for advertising. Slashdot makes no secret of Amazon's partnering program, and Rob needs the money.
/.'s opinion though: a review of the amazon.com site shows that the book's actually getting mixed reviews there.
I need not rely on
Personally, the idea of buying a book and supporting Slashdot gives me a warm fuzzy feeling all over.