Nah, that was the only thing I could quickly find online that had a date in the right period. Search for "global cooling" on google, and you'll find lots of modern-day theories as well.
I was merely pointing out that the environmentalist lobby seems to like to hop from one theory to the other. I couldn't find it, but the same types of people who've written doom and gloom books on the effects of global warming and how we've got to stop killing the earth before we kill ourselves, have also written books on global cooling, which, in general, could easily be adapted to the current popular theories by almost a literal substitution of "cooling" with "warming" (including the effects on food production, geographic areas, etc).
I was actually trying to go for a "funny" rating, but should have realized with the/. population that it was either too subtle, or too close to their sacred oxen...
I wish I could say that I had. The trouble being, I got the itch to move out of defense work at probably the exact wrong time. Had I been more patient, I would have probably been one of the lead developers on a proof of concept to examine switching from VxWorks on PC104+ to RT/Linux on the same platform. I'd ask some of my old coworkers, but I've lost touch with them, and the one or two I still keep in touch with periodically are no longer working there either.
<speculation> Chances are, the project is either going along well (assuming it was approved), or has already completed what it was set out to look at. Since VxWorks provides essentially a GNU suite for development and cross compiling (we were targetting x86, building on Solaris), I can't imagine that switching to RT/Linux would have been much more difficult. I'd like to think that by now, the project I was working on is no longer locked into a single-source supplier for the OS (Wind River Systems), and that there's now a heterogeneous environment for development. I guess I'll never know... </speculation>
What you're describing is what's known as a Professional Engineer (PE) certification. *Very* few engineers go for their PE, since it takes a lot of time and a lot of money, though the resulting salary increase is very nice. A PE is equivalent to "MD" after a name, or being licensed to practice law. IE, not everyone involved in medicine is an MD, not everyone who works in law offices is a lawyer and has passed the Bar (think paralegals, etc), and not everyone involved in engineering is a PE.
It's also necessary to usually have at least 4 years of qualifying experience before you can even take the examination.
Just remember, when a PE signs off on something, he's signing off on the work of everyone who's worked on the project. Given what I know of most of the other developers I've met, I don't think I'd be willing to be liable for their code...
25-30 years ago, everyone was in an uproar over the environment changing as well. Only, it wasn't global warming that was the threat to Life As We Know It, it was global cooling.
Generally, if you s/warming/cooling/g, you end up with all of the arguments from the 1970s about that particular environmental scourge.
What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?
If they find something that Should Not Be Brought Back Up, why, obviously, most of the expedition will die horrible deaths, one at a time, or in small groups. The organism will terrorize the vessel they're travelling in, which will coincidentally be caught in a storm preventing any contact with the outside world. Rescue will also be impossible.
In the end, it will be up to the suave, dashing Hero and the Eye Candy. In a last, desperate move, they'll manage to barely defeat the organism, saving humanity. And then the storm will clear, and a Coast Guard ship will be on the horizon...
I'm very happy with my SMC card. It was a tossup between "immediacy" and "wait for orinoco gold". Immediacy won. But aside from the lack of external antenna jack, I haven't found anything wrong with the SMC NICs... Now if I'd know about 3Com's XJACK NIC for 802.11b, I might have gone with that, since I *hate* dongles or anything permanently sticking out the side. As it is, I'm afraid of snapping the antenna off of most wireless NICs when I transport my laptop. Glad I have a metal CD case I can stick it in...
You might want to reconsider the choice of an SMC Barricade. While it has OK range, it's not the best. The two highest that I've found are SMC's stand-alone WAP (which I would have gotten, if MicroCenter hadn't pissed me off with a bait-and-switch attempt on the Barricade+NIC), and the Linksys WAP11. I have the Linksys, and a friend/coworker has the SMC standalone. Both have at least a 50% greater range than the Barricade (Linksys's is 50%, the standalone SMC's is about 70%-80%).
Plus, this friend originally had a Barricade, and got absolutely *awful* reception in his house. The switch to the WAP-only SMC product (wish I could remember the name) greatly improved his wireless experience.
Of course, if you *need* the other features of the Barricade, and live in a tiny area (like a 1 bedroom apartment), you might be OK.
Let me start with a disclaimer that it's been about 2 years since I had to work with Rose.
With that in mind, here's what I found out about using Rational Rose on a unix platform:
Rose is not a native unix app. It was ported from Windows using a commercial API kit to allow the Windows API calls to stay as they were. This caused startup to be incredibly so, even on fairly heavy (at the time) hardware with a single user on the box. And usually a couple times a month, something would cause the datafiles for this toolkit to self-corrupt, requiring the removal of a.subdir in order to even launch Rose again (and losing a lot of customizations).
Opening up a Rose "petal" file, and then saving it, results in changes to the data, even if you didn't even touch the layouts. This was especially a pain in the ass when you'd open a file to look at a diagram, close it, then do a cvs update. Conflicts galore. If you didn't have everything stored in separate files, like, if you had a bunch of related diagrams stored in one petal file (not to mention it sounds like you're saying pedophile all the time), you were royally fucked if you went and updated a portion after someone had checked in a new version of the file (and didn't touch the area you were working in).
It's unstable. Incredibly unstable. Like I said, it's basically a recompiled Windows app. So bus errors, seg faults, etc., were common after using it for more than about a half hour. Some of our folks never learned the "save early, save often" approach when using Rose (which was another adventure if your diagrams had any complexity), but I did after losing a few hours' work the first few times I used it.
As other replies have said, the C++ code generation is pure crap. If Rose decided to do something one way, you were forced to write code to do it that way, even if you knew there'd be an implementation problem. And no STL support.
In generated code, you had to be DAMNED sure that you only filled in the skeletons between Rose's "begin" and "end" comment blocks, or it would silently throw away all the code you'd written. Since we weren't using code generation ourselves, I discovered this talking to coworkers on another project who were forced to generate all of their class skeletons within Rose.
Mixing C and C++ was a bit of a chore, too. We had some custom hardware we needed to interface with, and there was no easy way to designate the design of this portion of the code within Rose. That could just be the overall unfamiliarity we had with the product though.
That's about all I can remember right now. I've tried to forget the whole sordid affair. Not that I'm soured on UML itself, but just Rational's products.
This is a technique I hope to follow with a few "personal" projects that I'm about to start. I'm refusing to write any code until I get down at least a spec for what each section is supposed to be doing.
Alas, since the UI is wholly divorced from the back-end (I discovered I'd designed in my head an n-tier system just by seeing what I hated about both similar and unrelated software I've been forced to work with), I'm not sure I could follow everything precisely the way you suggest. After all, in the overall design, there will actually be several clients, each displaying data appropriate to its interface (web vs. fat client vs. text vs. scripted API vs. ???). I know what I can, and in fact must, do is define just how the "back end" (in terms of the clients) tells the clients what to display, what to get from the user, etc.
I've also got to point out that in the past, I've been guilty of the "jump right in and code immediately" method of development. Unfortunately, I didn't have much in the way of control, since we were under pressure from both upper management and the customer (they have a lot of boats and guns...) to produce code for testing immediately.
Even though this was for a "next generation" of a system already in place, it was a complete rewrite in a language the customer wasn't all that familiar with (C++), and so they were concerned that we wouldn't be able to guarantee anything would even work, let alone within the tight timing constraints required by parts of the overall system that weren't being changed.
We had to deal with collecting all sorts of assinine metrics, such as the SLOC (Source Lines of Code) you've mentioned. Of course, the number of comments was also a metric that needed to be collected, and so we somehow had to find time to do those while frantically trying to keep pace with specs that seemed to change arbitrarily on a weekly or monthly schedule. Assinine? Yes. Real life? Yes. The only saving graces were that we'd managed to convince everyone who made decisions that some ridiculously low SLOC count was what we were responsible for in terms of monthly performance (giving us some breathing room to do intelligent design), and regular (weekly) code reviews amongst all the developers, spec writers, and the customer, to verify that what we were doing was, in fact, correct. (Though it seemed at times that we spent the majority of the meetings teaching all of the non-developers how to code in C++)
Oh, you've really touched on a sore spot. At a company I worked for once, there was a group of managers and developers who were working on coding standards for the entire division. Somehow, since *my* manager knew I was a fairly proficient coder, and wanted to make sure our group had input, I ended up on the panel. I remember telling a manager for another project point blank that he was an idiot for insisting that:
char* foo, bar;
was good coding practice, while
char *foo, bar;
wasn't, because the code was declaring two pointers, and so the * should be with the type and not the variable name.
Even pulling out K&R, and writing sample code showing the sizeof(foo); vs the sizeof(bar); wouldn't convince him that he was wrong.
Unfortunately, I don't think it was ever "officially" settled. Nor were several of the other corrections that I immediately made to his "proposed" coding standards document he handed out at the first meeting.
Thankfully, my manager at the time listened to me (and also, helpfully, knew C and C++), so when we got the coding standards, they were filed with the rest of the useless paperwork we got, and we kept on writing things properly, including:
comment blocks before each function describing usage, parameters, expected range of return values, and error conditions
comments describing thee amount and type of testing done to verify things worked
comments about who had done what with what code and when
comments preceeding anything non-obvious about the code itself
Three guesses as to which project was ahead of schedule. (Of course, not entirely fair, since we also didn't force code generation via Rational Rose. We instead reverse-engineered all of our final UML from the code we'd written and tested, and knew worked the way it was supposed to...)
On one of the last projects I worked on, the specs we received from the customer were horrendous. Actually, it wasn't the customer themselves who had done the specs, but another contracting firm. Spending 5 months on the project, and finding repeated errors in the "data maps" (it was apparently too bloody difficult for us to be supplied with a schema for the DBs we were supposed to be accessing and updating), I'd finally had enough.
Querying the DBs directly showed that the data maps were works of pure fantasy in several spots, or would lead to outright data loss if followed precisely. In a fit of pure...creativity...I ended up setting a "$workAroundFuckups" variable, and in the sections where it was needed, had a false evaluation do precisely what thee datamaps said, which would corrupt data. If the variable was true (ie, non-zero), it would work correctly, which meant ignoring the data maps and doing what was needed to have the data be entered correctly.
I ended up getting moved to another customer (due to the limited resources *we* had, not because of my creativity), so I don't know if the remaining folks on the project removed it after I left. When I added it, I explained to them precisely why I'd added it, and since they'd had similar experiences with what we were given to work with, were behind me 100%.
This wasn't even the *only* part of the project which was FUBARed, but it was unfortunately what I spent many a 15+ hour day dealing with, so I was rather familiar with it. Had I access to the server that *read* the data and used it, I probably would have just gone in and redesigned everything "for free", just to avoid having to deal with such a horrible layout.
This is also the client where, after a few months of an irksomely out of sync clock (off by 12 hours...made figuring out when something happened a bit of a PITA), I finally went in and set the damned clock to the proper time. Not surprisingly, the same folks who made that wonderful novel for us were the ones admining the dev server we were working on. AFAIK, no one ever noticed that the time suddenly became "correct" either.
No, it was originally VeriSign who took over, as the following email I received to both admin@ and hostmaster@ for my.us domain on 2000/11/21 shows:
To all administrative and technical contacts:
Effective November 28, 2000, VeriSign Global Registry Services ("VeriSign GRS"), a division of Network Solutions, Inc., will assume direct administration of the.US domain. This transition will not result in any technical service-level change. VeriSign GRS services will be available to domain name registrants for whom VeriSign GRS maintains the.US domain name registration record subject to the terms of its interim service agreement, a copy of which appears below for your review.
Your continued registration of a.US domain name beyond November 27, 2000, and the use of our.US domain name registration services constitutes your acceptance of the terms of the Agreement below.
Best regards,
United States Domain Registry VeriSign Global Registry Services www.verisign-grs.com usdomhelp@verisign -grs.com
Although, the arguably worst part of the time VeriSign/NSI was controlling.us directly was, IMHO, the requirement to sign and fax in a copy of the agreement--in 2000, when at least a year and a half earlier everything was handled in email by ISI--in order to activate a new.us domain. I wonder how many people decided to just forget about getting a.us domain when they got to that part...
[register.com] told me 'Somehow your zone file got corrupted, you have to realize that.us domains are a new thing and it's not going smoothly for many people.'
Maybe what the should have said is "a new thing for us". I remember several years ago registering a.us back when it was run by someone competent. Once VeriSign/NSI took it over, I knew there'd be problems. I moved across the country after this took place, tried to register a new.us domain using the same application I'd used, substituting for the new state and locality, and was rejected because they couldn't read plain English. They suggested some assinine, misspelled name which was only tangentially related to what I'd requested, even though the domain I was requesting was available.
I can't imagine that things have gotten any better since then, even with a new company handling.us registrations. Since I was rejected, I've gone with a.org domain through joker, and haven't looked back since.
In their attempt to monopolize as much domain registration as possible, VeriSign/NSI has managed to cause a lot more damage for.us than there have been benefits.
The linked eWeek article only mentions that Samba's a finalist, and that the winners will be announced May 7. Since it's past that date, where's a link to the actual winners list? Not that I'm doubting that Samba could easily beat out the others, but I need to rub someone's nose in the fact that Samba won.
(1) Backstabbing and in-fighting among the professors. Let's face it, not all profs are looking out of the best interest of the students. Some just want to do their research and not be bothered by such pesky details such as students who want to learn....
Don't forget the reverse is also true. I remember a professor at the university I was at who was let go precisely because he spent so much time with the students, helping them to learn, and not nearly enough time publishing papers. There was even a petition signed by a few hundred students, to no avail. Last I heard, he'd gotten a better-paying job at a lab in the area.
(2) A lazy student gov't Let's face it, what is the job of student gov't? To serve themselves and get laid, what else! Really, the student gov't where I'm at is corrupt and has done nothing for the students. However, I hear their desks are used for more than writing papers...
Damn, I must've missed that action when I was in the SGA. I was part of a group that actually got pissed off with the then-current, frat-run SGA. We organized online, initially via the general discussion newsgroup, then through a nice majordomo list (it helped that we were almost all CS and/or IS students initially). We ran a unified campaign for both the "executive" and "legislative" sides ("judicial" was appointed by the administration).
We took the legislative, but certain large special interests on-campus managed to secure the presidency. One half of the student government was arguably corrupt, but it wasn't the side I was in. Not that we were able to do anything about it, even though we worked our asses off, even working through the summer before the new year started. We managed to rewrite most of the policies and governing documents, since no one had bothered to keep track of such pesky things as amendments, the passed/failed legislation, etc.
I'd like to think that we made a difference, but being brutally honest, we didn't accomplish much. I went back a few years later, and basically everything we'd done had been reversed. Then, because of a certain amount of...financial improprieties...allegedly perpetrated by some people on the exec side, what little influence the student government had was eventually crushed by the university administration. Nowadays, I don't even recognize the new organization at all.
But that year and a half was one of the best times I'd ever had. There were 4 of us living together on-campus, all who'd gotten involved. We became the de facto campaign headquarters, and throughout the year we actually served, still managed to have most of the senate over regularly, and at all hours. Ah, the sleepless nights...tripping over campaign materials...having a half dozen people sleeping on the floor...
Why not give me the check instead? Since you seem to be willing to give someone an interest-free loan, make it someone who can use it and benefit from it.:-)
I just recently made the jump to the wireless world. I have to say, it's pretty nice being able to sit in bed, or on the sofa, or even out on the balcony, and still waste time reading/., chatting on IRC, and even doing real work. I'm actually upset I didn't jump back in October when I started a good 4-month stint of working from home every day for a single client.
So now, I had to make the same hard choices about networking security, and how to keep just anyone from accessing my WAP (a LinkSys WAP11... I wanted simple to set up)... Enter NoCatAuth.
I'm in the process of getting a box together to setup NoCat on, and until then, my WAP is sitting powered off for the most part, except for testing. Since I haven't gone through the actual install yet, I can't comment on its ease-of-use compared to the FreeBSD example in the article, but it seems to have several points going for it.
Namely, I like the idea of guerilla wireless communities, and the ability to grant certain individuals more access than others. A few friends and coworkers recently went wireless as well, and since I trust them enough to hook up wired to my own LAN, I trust them enough to connect wirelessly.
As for the "public", I'll likely open things up a bit once I've satisfied myself that connections are going only where *I* want them to go, instead of back into my internal network. Likely, I'll be blocking several outbound ports, but I'll have to see. I'll definitely need to go about making sure that anything sensitive is going over SSH or an IPsec tunnel (joy, finally a use for FreeS/WAN here).
If this article had come out maybe a few days earlier, I might have considered building a WAP instead of just buying one, but I'm happy with my choice.
I'd be happy to know about anyone else's experiences with setting up their own WAPs, either for purely internal access, or for public consumption, especially regarding issues such as security, NoCat, this FreeBSD-type AP, etc.
(Oh, for anyone else who started to tear their hair out because the LinkSys WAP11s don't really like to speak to normal SNMP tools, I discovered this utility that talks to it beautifully, with a text-mode interface)
It would have been nice for the person who submitted the article to at least include the link to the article that paragraph came from...
Yeah, well, looking at the dates on both the k5 and infoanarchy articles, and considering how the/. article's linked to the infoanarchy one, it looks like k5 was posted over an hour later, so it's likely not the source the submitter found it on. Not to mention that the same person is creditted on both infoanarchy and k5 with the article. Not everyone flocks to k5 as the end all and be all of "better-than-slashdot news".
You'll also note that the/. article starts off:
JohnBE writes "'This article
See the double quote followed by the single quote? Looks like the submitter was quoting the article. The relevant single quote ends here:
as a whole.'
at which point the "this article", hyperlinked to the infoanarchy piece, is supplied. Which looks an awful lot like attribution to me.
Back in the mid-80s, HeathKit used to sell a clock kit that would sync to the RF time broadcasts from the atomic clock in Ft. Collins. A little googling around yielded this link and this link and also this link (those last two look like they could be different fronts for 1 company). It's a "cooler" design than the old HeathKit one, which was blocky and looked like a typical "kit" deal, and I'd probably call to make sure it just sends a burst of ascii data down the serial port if you feel like rolling your own software, but it seems to come with Dos, Win3.1, 95/98, and NT software, as well as docs on the exchange protocol the clock uses. At $100, it's probably one of the cheaper solutions out there, and assuming you have a free serial port (which it sounds like if you're planning to use GPS), probably a fairly painless operation.
Now that I think about it, I might get one of these for myself, and stop relying on NTP.:-)
Yes, I'm well aware of what this kit =~ s/k/sh/ does (or in my case doesn't) do. But the mere fact that IPs were transitioned off at @Home before the "migration" kit arrived is bad enough.
Now, I've migrated, and while I can get email @cox.net, it's been 5 hours, and their damned webspace activation page still doesn't work. I can't connect to cox.com/service, which is the only place contact information seems to exist. I can't use their online technical support either, since it only supports windows.
If I hadn't already made the decision to switch to DSL, this experience would have convinced me to. In the meantine, I guess I'll be forced to run my own web server to make up for the lack of service I'm getting from Cox.
In over 3 years of @Home service on both Comcast and Cox (Maryland and California), not once until a few days ago was my IP ever changed, nor had I ever run DHCP on my box. All I did when I got the service installed was ask for IP, netmask, network, etc, etc. Then everything was hardcoded.
Yes, I saw pings from a dhcp server either intermittently (comcast, or cox until the last few months) or as frequent as several hits every 3 minutes (cox in the last few months). And I was aware that I was going to have to switch. Of course, I was waiting for Cox's completely worthless "migration kit", which, as I said previously, arrived a few days after they forcibly switched me to a cox.net address (which also made access @home services interesting for about 24 hours).
As it is now, my IP hasn't changed since that hard-switch from 24.x.x.x to 68.x.x.x (which, as others have found, causes other problems, since some routers/firewalls were hardcoded not to route 68.x.x.x since it had "never" been assigned to anyone). Yes, I'm now running DHCP, but I'm also telling it to bitch moan and scream that it wants the same IP address every time.
Cox is forcing DHCP. I've had a fixed IP from at home for three years. For a short time I had DSL, but that died when I moved. Last week I got a cardboard toolbox with a letter and a CD in it. It warned me that I had to apply the software soon, using the authorization code printed in the letter, or lose service. The CD, needless to say, contained M$ and Mac binaries.
Cox decided to force a switch of my IP the other day. This was after a week of my wondering where the bloody hell my "lunchbox" with the useless CD was. It showed up 2 days *after* the bastards forcibly changed my IP on me. I've also noticed several dozen unique IPs in the Comcast/Cox 68.x.x.x block hitting my firewall on port 80 since the switchover (Cox had been blocking 80 and 25). Three guesses as to what all the ones that respond are running.
Needless to say, I'd already initiated the process of switching over to DSL. Phone line was changed from a Cox-provided (they do phones here in Orange County, CA too) to a PacBell-provided line. As soon as the number switches (any day now), I call up Earthlink, get told again that they don't have static IP available in my area, and I tell them that PacBell (who is their sole provider here) has already told me I can get static IP from them.
Only 2 things make broadband worthwhile for me: static IP, and good news servers. Unfortunately, it's looking like it's going to be an either/or decision, and static will win every time.
Funny, before this, Cox was supplying cable, phone, and broadband to me. They've just now lost me as a phone customer, are about to lose me as a broadband customer, and if I can find a good deal on satellite, they'll also lose me as a cable customer. Good job, Cox!
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, that was the only thing I could quickly find online that had a date in the right period. Search for "global cooling" on google, and you'll find lots of modern-day theories as well.
/. population that it was either too subtle, or too close to their sacred oxen...
I was merely pointing out that the environmentalist lobby seems to like to hop from one theory to the other. I couldn't find it, but the same types of people who've written doom and gloom books on the effects of global warming and how we've got to stop killing the earth before we kill ourselves, have also written books on global cooling, which, in general, could easily be adapted to the current popular theories by almost a literal substitution of "cooling" with "warming" (including the effects on food production, geographic areas, etc).
I was actually trying to go for a "funny" rating, but should have realized with the
I wish I could say that I had. The trouble being, I got the itch to move out of defense work at probably the exact wrong time. Had I been more patient, I would have probably been one of the lead developers on a proof of concept to examine switching from VxWorks on PC104+ to RT/Linux on the same platform. I'd ask some of my old coworkers, but I've lost touch with them, and the one or two I still keep in touch with periodically are no longer working there either.
<speculation>
Chances are, the project is either going along well (assuming it was approved), or has already completed what it was set out to look at. Since VxWorks provides essentially a GNU suite for development and cross compiling (we were targetting x86, building on Solaris), I can't imagine that switching to RT/Linux would have been much more difficult. I'd like to think that by now, the project I was working on is no longer locked into a single-source supplier for the OS (Wind River Systems), and that there's now a heterogeneous environment for development. I guess I'll never know...
</speculation>
What you're describing is what's known as a Professional Engineer (PE) certification. *Very* few engineers go for their PE, since it takes a lot of time and a lot of money, though the resulting salary increase is very nice. A PE is equivalent to "MD" after a name, or being licensed to practice law. IE, not everyone involved in medicine is an MD, not everyone who works in law offices is a lawyer and has passed the Bar (think paralegals, etc), and not everyone involved in engineering is a PE.
It's also necessary to usually have at least 4 years of qualifying experience before you can even take the examination.
The National Society of Professional Engineers will have probably more information than you want to deal with on the subject.
Just remember, when a PE signs off on something, he's signing off on the work of everyone who's worked on the project. Given what I know of most of the other developers I've met, I don't think I'd be willing to be liable for their code...
25-30 years ago, everyone was in an uproar over the environment changing as well. Only, it wasn't global warming that was the threat to Life As We Know It, it was global cooling.
Generally, if you s/warming/cooling/g, you end up with all of the arguments from the 1970s about that particular environmental scourge.
What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?
If they find something that Should Not Be Brought Back Up, why, obviously, most of the expedition will die horrible deaths, one at a time, or in small groups. The organism will terrorize the vessel they're travelling in, which will coincidentally be caught in a storm preventing any contact with the outside world. Rescue will also be impossible.
In the end, it will be up to the suave, dashing Hero and the Eye Candy. In a last, desperate move, they'll manage to barely defeat the organism, saving humanity. And then the storm will clear, and a Coast Guard ship will be on the horizon...
I'm very happy with my SMC card. It was a tossup between "immediacy" and "wait for orinoco gold". Immediacy won. But aside from the lack of external antenna jack, I haven't found anything wrong with the SMC NICs... Now if I'd know about 3Com's XJACK NIC for 802.11b, I might have gone with that, since I *hate* dongles or anything permanently sticking out the side. As it is, I'm afraid of snapping the antenna off of most wireless NICs when I transport my laptop. Glad I have a metal CD case I can stick it in...
You might want to reconsider the choice of an SMC Barricade. While it has OK range, it's not the best. The two highest that I've found are SMC's stand-alone WAP (which I would have gotten, if MicroCenter hadn't pissed me off with a bait-and-switch attempt on the Barricade+NIC), and the Linksys WAP11. I have the Linksys, and a friend/coworker has the SMC standalone. Both have at least a 50% greater range than the Barricade (Linksys's is 50%, the standalone SMC's is about 70%-80%).
Plus, this friend originally had a Barricade, and got absolutely *awful* reception in his house. The switch to the WAP-only SMC product (wish I could remember the name) greatly improved his wireless experience.
Of course, if you *need* the other features of the Barricade, and live in a tiny area (like a 1 bedroom apartment), you might be OK.
Let me start with a disclaimer that it's been about 2 years since I had to work with Rose.
.subdir in order to even launch Rose again (and losing a lot of customizations).
With that in mind, here's what I found out about using Rational Rose on a unix platform:
Rose is not a native unix app. It was ported from Windows using a commercial API kit to allow the Windows API calls to stay as they were. This caused startup to be incredibly so, even on fairly heavy (at the time) hardware with a single user on the box. And usually a couple times a month, something would cause the datafiles for this toolkit to self-corrupt, requiring the removal of a
Opening up a Rose "petal" file, and then saving it, results in changes to the data, even if you didn't even touch the layouts. This was especially a pain in the ass when you'd open a file to look at a diagram, close it, then do a cvs update. Conflicts galore. If you didn't have everything stored in separate files, like, if you had a bunch of related diagrams stored in one petal file (not to mention it sounds like you're saying pedophile all the time), you were royally fucked if you went and updated a portion after someone had checked in a new version of the file (and didn't touch the area you were working in).
It's unstable. Incredibly unstable. Like I said, it's basically a recompiled Windows app. So bus errors, seg faults, etc., were common after using it for more than about a half hour. Some of our folks never learned the "save early, save often" approach when using Rose (which was another adventure if your diagrams had any complexity), but I did after losing a few hours' work the first few times I used it.
As other replies have said, the C++ code generation is pure crap. If Rose decided to do something one way, you were forced to write code to do it that way, even if you knew there'd be an implementation problem. And no STL support.
In generated code, you had to be DAMNED sure that you only filled in the skeletons between Rose's "begin" and "end" comment blocks, or it would silently throw away all the code you'd written. Since we weren't using code generation ourselves, I discovered this talking to coworkers on another project who were forced to generate all of their class skeletons within Rose.
Mixing C and C++ was a bit of a chore, too. We had some custom hardware we needed to interface with, and there was no easy way to designate the design of this portion of the code within Rose. That could just be the overall unfamiliarity we had with the product though.
That's about all I can remember right now. I've tried to forget the whole sordid affair. Not that I'm soured on UML itself, but just Rational's products.
Actually, they weren't. I can't quite say who they were, but you're about as far away as you can get from what they do...
Unfortunately, the precedence tables for operators says you're wrong.
Has this progressed much to supporting languages other than TeX, Pascal, and C?
I have "Literate Programming" by Knuth, but there always seems to be something more important coming along that I need to read "first".
This is a technique I hope to follow with a few "personal" projects that I'm about to start. I'm refusing to write any code until I get down at least a spec for what each section is supposed to be doing.
Alas, since the UI is wholly divorced from the back-end (I discovered I'd designed in my head an n-tier system just by seeing what I hated about both similar and unrelated software I've been forced to work with), I'm not sure I could follow everything precisely the way you suggest. After all, in the overall design, there will actually be several clients, each displaying data appropriate to its interface (web vs. fat client vs. text vs. scripted API vs. ???). I know what I can, and in fact must, do is define just how the "back end" (in terms of the clients) tells the clients what to display, what to get from the user, etc.
I've also got to point out that in the past, I've been guilty of the "jump right in and code immediately" method of development. Unfortunately, I didn't have much in the way of control, since we were under pressure from both upper management and the customer (they have a lot of boats and guns...) to produce code for testing immediately.
Even though this was for a "next generation" of a system already in place, it was a complete rewrite in a language the customer wasn't all that familiar with (C++), and so they were concerned that we wouldn't be able to guarantee anything would even work, let alone within the tight timing constraints required by parts of the overall system that weren't being changed.
We had to deal with collecting all sorts of assinine metrics, such as the SLOC (Source Lines of Code) you've mentioned. Of course, the number of comments was also a metric that needed to be collected, and so we somehow had to find time to do those while frantically trying to keep pace with specs that seemed to change arbitrarily on a weekly or monthly schedule. Assinine? Yes. Real life? Yes. The only saving graces were that we'd managed to convince everyone who made decisions that some ridiculously low SLOC count was what we were responsible for in terms of monthly performance (giving us some breathing room to do intelligent design), and regular (weekly) code reviews amongst all the developers, spec writers, and the customer, to verify that what we were doing was, in fact, correct. (Though it seemed at times that we spent the majority of the meetings teaching all of the non-developers how to code in C++)
char* foo, bar;
was good coding practice, while
char *foo, bar;
wasn't, because the code was declaring two pointers, and so the * should be with the type and not the variable name.
Even pulling out K&R, and writing sample code showing the sizeof(foo); vs the sizeof(bar); wouldn't convince him that he was wrong.
Unfortunately, I don't think it was ever "officially" settled. Nor were several of the other corrections that I immediately made to his "proposed" coding standards document he handed out at the first meeting.
Thankfully, my manager at the time listened to me (and also, helpfully, knew C and C++), so when we got the coding standards, they were filed with the rest of the useless paperwork we got, and we kept on writing things properly, including:
Three guesses as to which project was ahead of schedule. (Of course, not entirely fair, since we also didn't force code generation via Rational Rose. We instead reverse-engineered all of our final UML from the code we'd written and tested, and knew worked the way it was supposed to...)
On one of the last projects I worked on, the specs we received from the customer were horrendous. Actually, it wasn't the customer themselves who had done the specs, but another contracting firm. Spending 5 months on the project, and finding repeated errors in the "data maps" (it was apparently too bloody difficult for us to be supplied with a schema for the DBs we were supposed to be accessing and updating), I'd finally had enough.
Querying the DBs directly showed that the data maps were works of pure fantasy in several spots, or would lead to outright data loss if followed precisely. In a fit of pure...creativity...I ended up setting a "$workAroundFuckups" variable, and in the sections where it was needed, had a false evaluation do precisely what thee datamaps said, which would corrupt data. If the variable was true (ie, non-zero), it would work correctly, which meant ignoring the data maps and doing what was needed to have the data be entered correctly.
I ended up getting moved to another customer (due to the limited resources *we* had, not because of my creativity), so I don't know if the remaining folks on the project removed it after I left. When I added it, I explained to them precisely why I'd added it, and since they'd had similar experiences with what we were given to work with, were behind me 100%.
This wasn't even the *only* part of the project which was FUBARed, but it was unfortunately what I spent many a 15+ hour day dealing with, so I was rather familiar with it. Had I access to the server that *read* the data and used it, I probably would have just gone in and redesigned everything "for free", just to avoid having to deal with such a horrible layout.
This is also the client where, after a few months of an irksomely out of sync clock (off by 12 hours...made figuring out when something happened a bit of a PITA), I finally went in and set the damned clock to the proper time. Not surprisingly, the same folks who made that wonderful novel for us were the ones admining the dev server we were working on. AFAIK, no one ever noticed that the time suddenly became "correct" either.
Plus, according to this site on November 2, 2000 Amendment 21 was added to the NSI Cooperative Agreement. It wasn't unter October, 2001 that Neustar was granted control of US-DOM, with the transition completed in November, 2001.
Although, the arguably worst part of the time VeriSign/NSI was controlling
[register.com] told me 'Somehow your zone file got corrupted, you have to realize that .us domains are a new thing and it's not going smoothly for many people.'
.us back when it was run by someone competent. Once VeriSign/NSI took it over, I knew there'd be problems. I moved across the country after this took place, tried to register a new .us domain using the same application I'd used, substituting for the new state and locality, and was rejected because they couldn't read plain English. They suggested some assinine, misspelled name which was only tangentially related to what I'd requested, even though the domain I was requesting was available.
.us registrations. Since I was rejected, I've gone with a .org domain through joker, and haven't looked back since.
.us than there have been benefits.
Maybe what the should have said is "a new thing for us". I remember several years ago registering a
I can't imagine that things have gotten any better since then, even with a new company handling
In their attempt to monopolize as much domain registration as possible, VeriSign/NSI has managed to cause a lot more damage for
The linked eWeek article only mentions that Samba's a finalist, and that the winners will be announced May 7. Since it's past that date, where's a link to the actual winners list? Not that I'm doubting that Samba could easily beat out the others, but I need to rub someone's nose in the fact that Samba won.
(1) Backstabbing and in-fighting among the professors. Let's face it, not all profs are looking out of the best interest of the students. Some just want to do their research and not be bothered by such pesky details such as students who want to learn. ...
Don't forget the reverse is also true. I remember a professor at the university I was at who was let go precisely because he spent so much time with the students, helping them to learn, and not nearly enough time publishing papers. There was even a petition signed by a few hundred students, to no avail. Last I heard, he'd gotten a better-paying job at a lab in the area.
(2) A lazy student gov't Let's face it, what is the job of student gov't? To serve themselves and get laid, what else! Really, the student gov't where I'm at is corrupt and has done nothing for the students. However, I hear their desks are used for more than writing papers...
Damn, I must've missed that action when I was in the SGA. I was part of a group that actually got pissed off with the then-current, frat-run SGA. We organized online, initially via the general discussion newsgroup, then through a nice majordomo list (it helped that we were almost all CS and/or IS students initially). We ran a unified campaign for both the "executive" and "legislative" sides ("judicial" was appointed by the administration).
We took the legislative, but certain large special interests on-campus managed to secure the presidency. One half of the student government was arguably corrupt, but it wasn't the side I was in. Not that we were able to do anything about it, even though we worked our asses off, even working through the summer before the new year started. We managed to rewrite most of the policies and governing documents, since no one had bothered to keep track of such pesky things as amendments, the passed/failed legislation, etc.
I'd like to think that we made a difference, but being brutally honest, we didn't accomplish much. I went back a few years later, and basically everything we'd done had been reversed. Then, because of a certain amount of...financial improprieties...allegedly perpetrated by some people on the exec side, what little influence the student government had was eventually crushed by the university administration. Nowadays, I don't even recognize the new organization at all.
But that year and a half was one of the best times I'd ever had. There were 4 of us living together on-campus, all who'd gotten involved. We became the de facto campaign headquarters, and throughout the year we actually served, still managed to have most of the senate over regularly, and at all hours. Ah, the sleepless nights...tripping over campaign materials...having a half dozen people sleeping on the floor...
Why not give me the check instead? Since you seem to be willing to give someone an interest-free loan, make it someone who can use it and benefit from it. :-)
I just recently made the jump to the wireless world. I have to say, it's pretty nice being able to sit in bed, or on the sofa, or even out on the balcony, and still waste time reading /., chatting on IRC, and even doing real work. I'm actually upset I didn't jump back in October when I started a good 4-month stint of working from home every day for a single client.
So now, I had to make the same hard choices about networking security, and how to keep just anyone from accessing my WAP (a LinkSys WAP11... I wanted simple to set up)... Enter NoCatAuth.
I'm in the process of getting a box together to setup NoCat on, and until then, my WAP is sitting powered off for the most part, except for testing. Since I haven't gone through the actual install yet, I can't comment on its ease-of-use compared to the FreeBSD example in the article, but it seems to have several points going for it.
Namely, I like the idea of guerilla wireless communities, and the ability to grant certain individuals more access than others. A few friends and coworkers recently went wireless as well, and since I trust them enough to hook up wired to my own LAN, I trust them enough to connect wirelessly.
As for the "public", I'll likely open things up a bit once I've satisfied myself that connections are going only where *I* want them to go, instead of back into my internal network. Likely, I'll be blocking several outbound ports, but I'll have to see. I'll definitely need to go about making sure that anything sensitive is going over SSH or an IPsec tunnel (joy, finally a use for FreeS/WAN here).
If this article had come out maybe a few days earlier, I might have considered building a WAP instead of just buying one, but I'm happy with my choice.
I'd be happy to know about anyone else's experiences with setting up their own WAPs, either for purely internal access, or for public consumption, especially regarding issues such as security, NoCat, this FreeBSD-type AP, etc.
(Oh, for anyone else who started to tear their hair out because the LinkSys WAP11s don't really like to speak to normal SNMP tools, I discovered this utility that talks to it beautifully, with a text-mode interface)
Yeah, well, looking at the dates on both the k5 and infoanarchy articles, and considering how the
You'll also note that the
See the double quote followed by the single quote? Looks like the submitter was quoting the article. The relevant single quote ends here:
at which point the "this article", hyperlinked to the infoanarchy piece, is supplied. Which looks an awful lot like attribution to me.
Back in the mid-80s, HeathKit used to sell a clock kit that would sync to the RF time broadcasts from the atomic clock in Ft. Collins. A little googling around yielded this link and this link and also this link (those last two look like they could be different fronts for 1 company). It's a "cooler" design than the old HeathKit one, which was blocky and looked like a typical "kit" deal, and I'd probably call to make sure it just sends a burst of ascii data down the serial port if you feel like rolling your own software, but it seems to come with Dos, Win3.1, 95/98, and NT software, as well as docs on the exchange protocol the clock uses. At $100, it's probably one of the cheaper solutions out there, and assuming you have a free serial port (which it sounds like if you're planning to use GPS), probably a fairly painless operation.
:-)
Now that I think about it, I might get one of these for myself, and stop relying on NTP.
Yes, I'm well aware of what this kit =~ s/k/sh/ does (or in my case doesn't) do. But the mere fact that IPs were transitioned off at @Home before the "migration" kit arrived is bad enough.
Now, I've migrated, and while I can get email @cox.net, it's been 5 hours, and their damned webspace activation page still doesn't work. I can't connect to cox.com/service, which is the only place contact information seems to exist. I can't use their online technical support either, since it only supports windows.
If I hadn't already made the decision to switch to DSL, this experience would have convinced me to. In the meantine, I guess I'll be forced to run my own web server to make up for the lack of service I'm getting from Cox.
In over 3 years of @Home service on both Comcast and Cox (Maryland and California), not once until a few days ago was my IP ever changed, nor had I ever run DHCP on my box. All I did when I got the service installed was ask for IP, netmask, network, etc, etc. Then everything was hardcoded.
Yes, I saw pings from a dhcp server either intermittently (comcast, or cox until the last few months) or as frequent as several hits every 3 minutes (cox in the last few months). And I was aware that I was going to have to switch. Of course, I was waiting for Cox's completely worthless "migration kit", which, as I said previously, arrived a few days after they forcibly switched me to a cox.net address (which also made access @home services interesting for about 24 hours).
As it is now, my IP hasn't changed since that hard-switch from 24.x.x.x to 68.x.x.x (which, as others have found, causes other problems, since some routers/firewalls were hardcoded not to route 68.x.x.x since it had "never" been assigned to anyone). Yes, I'm now running DHCP, but I'm also telling it to bitch moan and scream that it wants the same IP address every time.
Cox is forcing DHCP. I've had a fixed IP from at home for three years. For a short time I had DSL, but that died when I moved. Last week I got a cardboard toolbox with a letter and a CD in it. It warned me that I had to apply the software soon, using the authorization code printed in the letter, or lose service. The CD, needless to say, contained M$ and Mac binaries.
Cox decided to force a switch of my IP the other day. This was after a week of my wondering where the bloody hell my "lunchbox" with the useless CD was. It showed up 2 days *after* the bastards forcibly changed my IP on me. I've also noticed several dozen unique IPs in the Comcast/Cox 68.x.x.x block hitting my firewall on port 80 since the switchover (Cox had been blocking 80 and 25). Three guesses as to what all the ones that respond are running.
Needless to say, I'd already initiated the process of switching over to DSL. Phone line was changed from a Cox-provided (they do phones here in Orange County, CA too) to a PacBell-provided line. As soon as the number switches (any day now), I call up Earthlink, get told again that they don't have static IP available in my area, and I tell them that PacBell (who is their sole provider here) has already told me I can get static IP from them.
Only 2 things make broadband worthwhile for me: static IP, and good news servers. Unfortunately, it's looking like it's going to be an either/or decision, and static will win every time.
Funny, before this, Cox was supplying cable, phone, and broadband to me. They've just now lost me as a phone customer, are about to lose me as a broadband customer, and if I can find a good deal on satellite, they'll also lose me as a cable customer. Good job, Cox!