As a reply to some of the answers given above, instant messaging and collaboration described above distract me. I am a programmer. I need not to be distracted. I need to be in the zone; when I am in the zone I can easily crank out high quality work, I can type without looking at my keyboard.
When I'm constantly interrupted by *BING* e-mail, some cow-orker with a funny joke, telephone, IM, fscking collaboration, people who can't look something up for 1 minute because they can get the answer from me in 30 seconds or whatelse then I will never ever have flow and need to look at my keyboard while typing, need to look up API's, can't concentrate and so on. Read Joel on Software regarding lost time on this.
The problem is that other people will gain 30 seconds and I will lose around 5 - 10 minutes to get into my code again. Therefore, please leave me relatively alone when I want to achieve something, and have a regular project meeting where everyone is present AND prepared.
Will CxO's be able to comprehend this and use this - in theory yes, in practice, no.
The only ones that will be using this are technical project managers and programmers. Thus about 0,1 % of the Office users and non-typical Office users that use non-typical Office functionality.
Think again when upgrading.
My wife is teaching MS Office to schoolkids. They get MS Office for 4 years. And they touch only 40% of what is in Office 97 - and not even deeply.
So, Office will have raving reviews. See what Microsoft can do - ow, amazing technology. But will we all use it? Come on... Who'se ma, uncle, PHB, CxO,... can use styles in Word, decent formulas in Excel, make a (technically) good PowerPoint, use Outlook to the max.
I know you all can. But they are using their 10% - and they will keep on using their 10% no matter what Microsoft puts in...
We have such a large (multiplatform) telephony application - and capable of are generating huge logfiles if necessary (think in multiply Gb per day if necessary, and this is already compressed).
Some hints on that.
Write a tracing component that every other component talks to. This tracing component will be responsable for:
1. after receiving a certain number of lines, analysing whether the logfile is interesting enough to be written to disk (i.e. are there errors in there?)
2. compressing the logfile
3. writing them to disk
4. go to 1, retaining a number of lines of course, because you need a context.
Have a logfile per component.
Have a master logfile where only major errors are logged in, that refer to the minor logfiles.
This, my friend, you make configurable, and runtime changable (also the compressing). Don't use your own superduper compression technique, use zlib so unzip can be used.
This way you can save much on valuable IO and processing power. Also be sure that there is ONE machine you get your timestamp from - and use GMT; this way you don't get problems when switching from summer/winter time.
Use different debug levels and debug depths, so you can decide how much information you log and how deep you allow your logging to go.
Write a log line when entering and exiting a function and structure it so that it is readable:
10:18:27.283 > main(a,b,c) 10:18:27.294 > HelloWorld(a,b) 10:18:27.294 Written 7 bytes 10:18:27.312 GoodByeWorld(c) 10:18:27.401 c == NULL 10:18:27.416 GoodByeWorld(c) 10:18:27.472 main()
This requires some effort at the start, but once you have this in your application, you will never want to give it up.
Be ware that much logging can eat up much server resource. Our application logging can eat up to 60% of the resource, but is a godsend when debugging. I don't have the sources to the application but I can debug a lot and see whether it is our problem, the database problem, the pabx problem, someone elses problem, or our problem easily with the log files.
Without them, I would be blind.
If you need to contact me, be my guest: mark.tetrode gmail.com
This is very nice, but if you are half way in a transaction and your browser craps out or does not display valuable information and you get sued your but off, you wish you had displayed this page "We don't support your page so go play at Disney.com"
Or not?
BTW, I agree with you. For 99,9/ % of the pages it is absolutely not necessary to put up an error; they should put up a warning and continue. When it does not work - you should come back with a different browser.
Microsoft is a good (this time) example. They display (and not even al the time) such a warning. MSDN browsing works perfect with firefox. I was a longtime user of.8 for the reason that I just didn't upgrade. It worked.
I have a squeezebox now since 6 or 7 months, and it is worth every penny. Installation was a breeze; plug in, installed the software on FC3, pointed it to my mp3 files and after scanning those, I was up and running. The software (being open source) is in multiple languages and keeps getting better. From time to time, there are free updates, both on the slimserver software as well as on the firmware of the thing.
I don't know what I can say bad about it, I'm totally hooked.
Yep - half of the internet content is not in your language.
But don't be afraid - most of the internet content is not in mine anyway - so I adapted and learned to read and write in other languages.
Which obviously helped me a lot in getting a bigger view of the world.
Have you ever been to wikipedia? Look at the main page at http://www.wikipedia.org/ and note that there are some languages there. And some content. The German has half of the content of the English. If I sum up the other languagees that I can read I almost come to the number of English pages.
Absolutely. Where are my modpoints when I need them? Oh wait the guy's already on 5.
Anyway - you're dead right on the subject. Why are we all still using Word? Many times I type a text, that I e-mail (I don't print it) and I get it back, revised. I re-revise it and it goes as the final draft to the client. Why we don't use a wiki for that? I don't know, probably they are not yet advanced enough - but I'd be the first one to propose one.
Also to work together with clients - much better then all those e-mails going back and forth...
But this was back in 1995 when I set up website for an international company (all documents in 5 different languages, users had a set of language preferences, when a translation becomes available, it replaces the other document, etc).
All stiched together with various perl, awk, bash scripts to move Word and HTML files to the right place.
After 10 years this problem is still not solved? I cannot imagine that... Go and have a good look around, I'm sure you will find a CMS that will fit the bill.
And otherwise... I may have some perl scripts laying around...
We all agree with you here. This is slashdot. But the outside world does not. They want to be sure that they can slash someone's balls in two when it does not work.
That's the way the world works, Mark. I know - I was sorta in the same position as you. It isn't a nice view from there. But hey, this is what they want. I used to tell them, you know, you can get this for cheap. Just let me install this that & the other. No problem, no questions asked.
But no - they don't want no hippy-communist free software that works, just let me have some of your ultime-megalomanic pieces of sh*tware that will take for ages to load. And then crashes or just does not work.
While with open source, I have it all in my own hands - and I can fix problems within hours. But oh-no we don't want to fix problems fast. We want problems fixed reliably. If you tell me that you don't know when this problem will be fixed, but you're working on it, you are a bad, bad boy. On the other hand, when you tell me that the problem will take some two weeks investigating, then three weeks bug fixing and one other week in quality assurance (what a laugh) - so in total 6 fricking weeks to fix a silly little bug, they are very happy because it is all done via their fucked up ITIL standard.
I'm going to put my straight-jacket on again - the docters are coming soon.
Not Found The requested URL/cgi-bin/tptpformmail.cgi was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.traffic-power.com Port 80
Hurray - the company that can get you #1 into google, altavista, teoma, msn, and whatever search engine they will invent tomorrow does not have a decent mailing list nor feedback form.
This trafficy-power seems to have a nice web site.
Very decent.
Look! there is even a mailinglist I can subscribe to. Quick let's do it before someone else does it.... fill in the e-mail address and clicks on subscribe...
The Firefox bookmark all tabs feature is a breakthrough, since you can close your browser, and reopen it to the same set of tabs as before, which is great when installing extensions and you're forced to restart.
You will need to do that only one more time. That is when you install the Firefox extension called SessionSaver. From the website:
SessionSaver restores your browser -exactly- as you left it, every startup, every time. Not even a crash will phase it. Windows, tabs, even things you were typing -- they're all saved. Use the menu to add + remove sessions; right, shift, or middle-clicking will delete. "Simple mode" for peace of mind, or "Expert mode" for advanced flexibility. Just Click. Install. Rad.
As has been said many times before, 1% is 30 minutes.
So, note down all problems that come in on a Monday, start working on them, and when the 30 minutes of that week is over, tell your users that their problems are queued for the next couple of weeks.
Show your boss the list every day.
Or better yet - brush up your resume - don't work for such an ID10T. He does not understand what he is talking about. Do you think he will understand programming. Or anything else?
I don't. I like a boss that knows (and admits) when he doesn't know anything. And let me take the decision.
Well, can't you guess? They will extend in once again. It is time to protest against it.
Write to your MP. Don't e-mail, fax - write. Especially handwritten letters make a difference. Organise it. Let your mother, father, etc. all write in.
Yes, I want things to be interoperable. No, I am not happy with my proprietary solution
I am forced to used proprietary formats because until now I don't see a valid e-mail programme that can handle huge amounts of data. I may have worded it provocatively, but most corporate people will need an e-mail client that has an Outlook upgrade path and one that can handle loads of data. And I haven't seen this yet.
I have tried thunderbird and although it could import my PST file (very good) It could not handle the total size of my e-mails. It became slow, unresponsive - it did not work. It works very well at home, however (but perhaps this is due to the fact that it is running on Linux there?).
What I meant to say is that I have tried thunderbird and although it could import my PST file (very good) It could not handle the total size of my e-mails. It became slow, unresponsive - it did not work. It works very well at home, however (but perhaps this is due to the fact that it is running on Linux there?).
As has been described above, some people get more mail than other people. When I delete all spam and mailing lists (which I do), I get up to 80 e-mail daily, roughly around 1-2 Mb a day. So in a year, this adds up to 350 Mb. And in 4 1/2 year this is 1,6 Gb of e-mail that I have gathered.
Outlook handles this rather well, until now. So when there is a migration path from MH to PST your mails could be handled in Outlook. But I don't think you would want that. Well, I fully agree with you, and I'm actively looking for a replacement of Outlook - but I have some prerequisites, listed above.
So it is not a stupid example. I may have worded it provocatively, but most corporate people will need an e-mail client that has an Outlook upgrade path and one that can handle loads of data.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
That will probably not happen - so I'll write a reply on the main article.
+1 for *@home
very easy to set up
As a reply to some of the answers given above, instant messaging and collaboration described above distract me. I am a programmer. I need not to be distracted. I need to be in the zone; when I am in the zone I can easily crank out high quality work, I can type without looking at my keyboard.
When I'm constantly interrupted by *BING* e-mail, some cow-orker with a funny joke, telephone, IM, fscking collaboration, people who can't look something up for 1 minute because they can get the answer from me in 30 seconds or whatelse then I will never ever have flow and need to look at my keyboard while typing, need to look up API's, can't concentrate and so on. Read Joel on Software regarding lost time on this.
The problem is that other people will gain 30 seconds and I will lose around 5 - 10 minutes to get into my code again. Therefore, please leave me relatively alone when I want to achieve something, and have a regular project meeting where everyone is present AND prepared.
More effective, probably.
Mark
This sounds very very good.
... can use styles in Word, decent formulas in Excel, make a (technically) good PowerPoint, use Outlook to the max.
Some comments.
Will ordinary secretaries be using this? No
Will PHB-es be using this? No
Will CxO's be able to comprehend this and use this - in theory yes, in practice, no.
The only ones that will be using this are technical project managers and programmers. Thus about 0,1 % of the Office users and non-typical Office users that use non-typical Office functionality.
Think again when upgrading.
My wife is teaching MS Office to schoolkids. They get MS Office for 4 years. And they touch only 40% of what is in Office 97 - and not even deeply.
So, Office will have raving reviews. See what Microsoft can do - ow, amazing technology. But will we all use it? Come on... Who'se ma, uncle, PHB, CxO,
I know you all can. But they are using their 10% - and they will keep on using their 10% no matter what Microsoft puts in...
Mark
I'd rather keep al my e-mail to my self, as a company...
The formatted log file should look of course better formatted, like this:
10:18:27.283 > main(a,b,c)
10:18:27.294 > HelloWorld(a,b)
10:18:27.301 Written 7 bytes
10:18:27.307 < HelloWorld returned 3
10:18:27.312 > GoodByeWorld(c)
10:18:27.401 c == NULL
10:18:27.416 < GoodByeWorld returned 7
10:18:27.472 < main() return
When using multiple threads add also your thread name in there will help, of course.
Mark
Indeed, absolutely.
We have such a large (multiplatform) telephony application - and capable of are generating huge logfiles if necessary (think in multiply Gb per day if necessary, and this is already compressed).
Some hints on that.
Write a tracing component that every other component talks to. This tracing component will be responsable for:
1. after receiving a certain number of lines, analysing whether the logfile is interesting enough to be written to disk (i.e. are there errors in there?)
2. compressing the logfile
3. writing them to disk
4. go to 1, retaining a number of lines of course, because you need a context.
Have a logfile per component.
Have a master logfile where only major errors are logged in, that refer to the minor logfiles.
This, my friend, you make configurable, and runtime changable (also the compressing). Don't use your own superduper compression technique, use zlib so unzip can be used.
This way you can save much on valuable IO and processing power. Also be sure that there is ONE machine you get your timestamp from - and use GMT; this way you don't get problems when switching from summer/winter time.
Use different debug levels and debug depths, so you can decide how much information you log and how deep you allow your logging to go.
Write a log line when entering and exiting a function and structure it so that it is readable:
10:18:27.283 > main(a,b,c)
10:18:27.294 > HelloWorld(a,b)
10:18:27.294 Written 7 bytes
10:18:27.312 GoodByeWorld(c)
10:18:27.401 c == NULL
10:18:27.416 GoodByeWorld(c)
10:18:27.472 main()
This requires some effort at the start, but once you have this in your application, you will never want to give it up.
Be ware that much logging can eat up much server resource. Our application logging can eat up to 60% of the resource, but is a godsend when debugging. I don't have the sources to the application but I can debug a lot and see whether it is our problem, the database problem, the pabx problem, someone elses problem, or our problem easily with the log files.
Without them, I would be blind.
If you need to contact me, be my guest: mark.tetrode gmail.com
Mark
This is very nice, but if you are half way in a transaction and your browser craps out or does not display valuable information and you get sued your but off, you wish you had displayed this page "We don't support your page so go play at Disney.com"
.8 for the reason that I just didn't upgrade. It worked.
Or not?
BTW, I agree with you. For 99,9/ % of the pages it is absolutely not necessary to put up an error; they should put up a warning and continue. When it does not work - you should come back with a different browser.
Microsoft is a good (this time) example. They display (and not even al the time) such a warning. MSDN browsing works perfect with firefox. I was a longtime user of
Mark
Hmm. According to Nature (you know, those guys that publish articles like this: "Stem cell engraftment at the endosteal niche is specified by the calcium-sensing receptor"), Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries.
So, to say it in your terms, Wikipedia sucks as much as the Encyclopedia Britannica. They'll be more than happy to hear that. From you.
-- Mark
Go to wikipedia and help them do it! It is open. Become a part of it instead of a grumpy bystander
Mark
I have a squeezebox now since 6 or 7 months, and it is worth every penny. Installation was a breeze; plug in, installed the software on FC3, pointed it to my mp3 files and after scanning those, I was up and running. The software (being open source) is in multiple languages and keeps getting better. From time to time, there are free updates, both on the slimserver software as well as on the firmware of the thing.
I don't know what I can say bad about it, I'm totally hooked.
Mark
Let's remember that Windows has had numerous incantations, while Firefox is only a few years old. Wait until Firefox reaches it's 3.0 version.
You will be amazed.
Mark
Yep - half of the internet content is not in your language.
But don't be afraid - most of the internet content is not in mine anyway - so I adapted and learned to read and write in other languages.
Which obviously helped me a lot in getting a bigger view of the world.
Have you ever been to wikipedia? Look at the main page at http://www.wikipedia.org/ and note that there are some languages there. And some content. The German has half of the content of the English. If I sum up the other languagees that I can read I almost come to the number of English pages.
Just an example.
Mark
Absolutely. Where are my modpoints when I need them? Oh wait the guy's already on 5.
Anyway - you're dead right on the subject. Why are we all still using Word? Many times I type a text, that I e-mail (I don't print it) and I get it back, revised. I re-revise it and it goes as the final draft to the client. Why we don't use a wiki for that? I don't know, probably they are not yet advanced enough - but I'd be the first one to propose one.
Also to work together with clients - much better then all those e-mails going back and forth...
I did.
... I may have some perl scripts laying around ...
But this was back in 1995 when I set up website for an international company (all documents in 5 different languages, users had a set of language preferences, when a translation becomes available, it replaces the other document, etc).
All stiched together with various perl, awk, bash scripts to move Word and HTML files to the right place.
After 10 years this problem is still not solved? I cannot imagine that... Go and have a good look around, I'm sure you will find a CMS that will fit the bill.
And otherwise
Mark
Mark
We all agree with you here. This is slashdot. But the outside world does not. They want to be sure that they can slash someone's balls in two when it does not work.
That's the way the world works, Mark. I know - I was sorta in the same position as you. It isn't a nice view from there. But hey, this is what they want. I used to tell them, you know, you can get this for cheap. Just let me install this that & the other. No problem, no questions asked.
But no - they don't want no hippy-communist free software that works, just let me have some of your ultime-megalomanic pieces of sh*tware that will take for ages to load. And then crashes or just does not work.
While with open source, I have it all in my own hands - and I can fix problems within hours. But oh-no we don't want to fix problems fast. We want problems fixed reliably. If you tell me that you don't know when this problem will be fixed, but you're working on it, you are a bad, bad boy. On the other hand, when you tell me that the problem will take some two weeks investigating, then three weeks bug fixing and one other week in quality assurance (what a laugh) - so in total 6 fricking weeks to fix a silly little bug, they are very happy because it is all done via their fucked up ITIL standard.
I'm going to put my straight-jacket on again - the docters are coming soon.
Mark
Hmm
. cgi
/cgi-bin/tptpformmail.cgi was not found on this server.
let's send some feedback then via http://traffic-power.com/feedback.html
I click on submit
http://www.traffic-power.com/cgi-bin/tptpformmail
Not Found
The requested URL
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.traffic-power.com Port 80
Hurray - the company that can get you #1 into google, altavista, teoma, msn, and whatever search engine they will invent tomorrow does not have a decent mailing list nor feedback form.
What a load of crap.
Very decent.
Look! there is even a mailinglist I can subscribe to. Quick let's do it before someone else does it.
Hmm, what do I get for a page:
What a losers
No comment.
Mark
As has been said many times before, 1% is 30 minutes.
So, note down all problems that come in on a Monday, start working on them, and when the 30 minutes of that week is over, tell your users that their problems are queued for the next couple of weeks.
Show your boss the list every day.
Or better yet - brush up your resume - don't work for such an ID10T. He does not understand what he is talking about. Do you think he will understand programming. Or anything else?
I don't. I like a boss that knows (and admits) when he doesn't know anything. And let me take the decision.
30 minutes. Sheez...
I simply cannot imagine that getting that much radiation every day would be unharmful for your body.
Mark
Well, can't you guess? They will extend in once again. It is time to protest against it.
Write to your MP. Don't e-mail, fax - write. Especially handwritten letters make a difference. Organise it. Let your mother, father, etc. all write in.
Make a difference.
Yes, I want things to be interoperable.
No, I am not happy with my proprietary solution
I am forced to used proprietary formats because until now I don't see a valid e-mail programme that can handle huge amounts of data. I may have worded it provocatively, but most corporate people will need an e-mail client that has an Outlook upgrade path and one that can handle loads of data. And I haven't seen this yet.
I have tried thunderbird and although it could import my PST file (very good) It could not handle the total size of my e-mails. It became slow, unresponsive - it did not work. It works very well at home, however (but perhaps this is due to the fact that it is running on Linux there?).
What I meant to say is that I have tried thunderbird and although it could import my PST file (very good) It could not handle the total size of my e-mails. It became slow, unresponsive - it did not work. It works very well at home, however (but perhaps this is due to the fact that it is running on Linux there?).
As has been described above, some people get more mail than other people. When I delete all spam and mailing lists (which I do), I get up to 80 e-mail daily, roughly around 1-2 Mb a day. So in a year, this adds up to 350 Mb. And in 4 1/2 year this is 1,6 Gb of e-mail that I have gathered.
Outlook handles this rather well, until now. So when there is a migration path from MH to PST your mails could be handled in Outlook. But I don't think you would want that. Well, I fully agree with you, and I'm actively looking for a replacement of Outlook - but I have some prerequisites, listed above.
So it is not a stupid example. I may have worded it provocatively, but most corporate people will need an e-mail client that has an Outlook upgrade path and one that can handle loads of data.