Not much choice sometimes, I'm 6'1", weigh around 190lbs - this makes me a chunky mother. Unfortunately, whereas my gut and my legs fit just fine in one seat, due to being a bit on the tall end, I often can't fit my legs in the available space, unless I want to poke my knees in the back of the person in front of me. The same goes for arms and elbows. I usually get an isle seat so I can stick my legs out in the isle, and stick an elbow out in there too just so I can sit comfortably.
It's not just about "fatties", it is the fact that most airlines have reduced seat space and crammed more seats in compared to before. And for me, upgrading from coach to business or first class isn't an option, I'm not made of money.
True, the merb folks are a lot better in that regard, and if they succeed in "un-sucking" the greater RoR community that would be awesome. RoR is a nice piece of work, and it does deserve a better "image". One thing that it also needs is for DHH to back away a little because he comes across as some religious sect leader who's trying to convince people that his kool-aid is the best ever because it's fizzy
I gave RoR a chance and evaluated it for a while, and while RoR isn't bad, it's community is absolutely terrible. Help is hard to get, and more often than not a simple question leads to 5 people falling over eachother to call you stupid in various degrees, yet they are unable to actually offer any help. A large majority (from what I've seen) of the community can only follow the "hype" and treats the RoR dev team like deities, yet has no idea how to do certain things, how to properly structure and architect software, and responds with vitriol when asked about this.
So instead I stuck to what I know, and have been using Catalyst for my projects. That community is awesome, helpful, knowledgeable and not afraid to help out even for dumb questions.
In short: RoR: loud, obnoxious, hype followers Catalyst: quiet, friendly, no hype anywhere (which unfortunately means Catalyst is a bit in the shadows)
It is in fact easy to set up and maintain -- it just requires a bit more thinking, mostly to get the authentication and such things working right, but that's a matter of editing a config file. Maintenance wise, PostgreSQL doesn't need much of that, the occasional vacuum and that's it. With auto-vacuum enabled, even that is taken care of.
I used MySQL a lot in the past, and ended up going to PostgreSQL around version 7.3, because I needed the triggers and the views. Never looked back to MySQL, PG might be slower at certain things, but at least I don't end up getting a call at 3am in the morning in the weekend informing me the database crapped itself up again, only to have to wait for myisamchk to go through near 20Gb of data.
I've been noticing the same trend for a while now, but on the other hand, if someone fresh out of college wants the perks, the travel, the cushy paycheck and so on, that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as they've set that for themselves as a goal to obtain. The problem lies with the bunch that wants to take a shortcut and want that stuff straight from the start. I've seen a few of those during interviews and actually explained that to them as the reason they didn't get the job.
The one I did hire also mentioned that he would like to be part of the team that deals with all the "cool" stuff, that gets to travel, gets company supplied phones and laptops, and gets that cushy paycheck -- except he said that that was a goal he had set for himself, and that he was more than willing to start at the bottom of the ladder - and that as long as the company treated him well, he'd to the same.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
You're misusing the word "scalable". You probably mean vertical scalability, or performance.
And it's not saying we don't know how to build a performant application. It's saying we don't care, because programmer time is more expensive than CPU time. It's simply not worth it to optimize past a certain point.
Which is exactly the attitude that's keeping things from scaling (regardless of whether I'm using this word in it's proper context, sorry, English isn't my native language) -- because you don't care, so why care at all about optimising when well, you can just throw more hardware at it? Sooner or later you'll be spending more on hardware than you are on programmers. Besides, programmers that do not know how to optimise properly should either quit the job or go back to school and study some more.
Citation needed.
Twitter.
Also, you are again talking about vertical scalability. Rails is actually excellent at horizontal scalability, which means, specifically, "Can we throw more servers at it and have it just work?"
Not every PHP app can do that. Nor every Python, or Java app. However, unless you do something stupid, every Rails app can be scaled by throwing hardware at it.
Keep in mind, you will have to do this at some point. No Amazon, or Myspace, or Google, is going to run off a single server, no matter how massive. They all have to scale horizontally. You have to address that problem sooner or later.
Scaling is scaling, whether it be horizontal or vertical. Horizontal scaling only gets you so far in the long run as well. Then again don't take my word for it but I've seen that same "oh well we'll just throw more hardware at it" solution blow up in some seriously interesting ways.
So, I'm arguing that horizontal scalability is more important than vertical scalability. Horizontal scalability means you can ultimately handle as much traffic as you can find hardware for. Vertical scalability means you save some money on hardware -- that's all.
Vertical scalability also forces you to know what you're doing when it comes to algorithms and such things. I know, I know, I'm probably a horribly oldfashioned cunt by saying it, but really, if you're going to build a car, you might as well build yourself a fast one instead of a 10 ton truck being powered by a 2 stroke 40hp diesel engine and say "well we can always throw more engines in here".
No, it's not, but it's still pretty damned good.
Hype does not automatically make something a bad idea. Does anyone remember the hype about AJAX? I think most Rails hype is tame compared to that, but as it turned out, AJAX is pretty useful. It's not the Best Thing Ever, but it's still useful.
I'll admit it's good, but the problem comes from people who blindly follow the hype and will claim that RoR IS the best, and can do it better, and what the hell do us old Perl writing coots know anyway. I don't want to go and compare experience e-peens, but my comments on scalability are based on some interesting observations in the past.
If you can find where I've said Rails is the best thing ever, please, point it out. Otherwise, please try to reply to just my post, not every Rails developer ever.
Did I say you said rails is the best thing ever? I didn't. Why bring it up in the first place?
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
No, it's a framework based on Ruby, the language. Just as Catalyst is a framework based on Perl, the language.
Your point?
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
The idiom of "let's throw more hardware at the problem" is a way of saying "we don't know jack shit about how to build a scalable web application, so we'll hide the symptoms by throwing a bunch of additional hardware at it so it at least seems we can scale things".
Really, building a scalable web app is not hard, but if you're using Ruby on Rails, you're looking for a miracle since it's a known fact RoR doesn't scale very well. Other languages suffer from the same problem, except it seems those languages have more people using them that actually know what they're doing, instead of just following the RoR hype of it being the best thing since sliced bread, which it's not.
Re:I am afraid, there is lack of direction for Rub
on
Ruby 1.9.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
I'll take Perl and Catalyst over Ruby and Rails any day of the week. Ruby borrowed heavily from Perl, and managed to snaffle the rest of it's features out of Python, all combined into a very un-directed little language.
Bad news if you want to give all the devs their own console. You'll find that productivity will tank. In our office we've got a 360 and a PS2 sitting in the break room, and we're free to wander off and play it for a while if we feel the need for it; this way at the very least someone will notice you spending hours on end at it and will tell you to stop being a dick and get back to work.
Ofcourse the competition for the thing during break time is immense but hey, adds to the flavor.
You might not want to do that, I've been a sysadmin for a webhost for a while, and on a shared machine, yes, we do end up looking at data from time to time. The main reason being that a lot of people hire their nephews for their coding needs, and the nephew has no idea what he's doing -- and his scripts are bringing down the server which impacts all other customers on that same machine.
If we have to go in to find out what the heck is going on, leaving some bogus scripts around that do nothing is just going to make our jobs harder.
I'll also add that even if you get a VPS, it still doesn't guarantee privacy since a VPS is in essence just a "personal" slice of a shared server, and if any problems occur on a VPS we will go in to look at why, for example, the thing is running out of memory so we can tell the client about it before he calls us to ask about it. Most clients love this approach since all they need to do is either tell us they want an upgrade, tell us to leave it alone, or tell us that they want to know what's wrong so they can fix it.
The only way your data is truly private is if you have a colocated server. The only time we access those is if we need to shut it down or you authorised us to do work on it.
Outside of colocated servers, you have, in essence, no privacy.
Addendum: The hosting company I worked at did have a policy that helpdesk staff did -not- have any sort of access to the servers, and all requests that dealt with checking into sites, databases, etc. was done by my co-worker and me:)
The method that my coworkers and me used at my previous job solved this in a manner of speaking. There was another account with UID 0, which we used to su to if we needed root access to whatever it was on the machine, sudo was disabled for everything.
The password for the real root account was automatically generated, then printed on a slip of paper, which went into an envelope, which ended up being stuck on the physical server.
This way if datacenter operations needed access to the server, they could go there, take the envelope, get their access. And we'd know because we'd end up at the datacenter about twice a week anyway and could see that envelopes had been opened.
Doesn't really work if you have support staff that needs access, but even there creating a throwaway account with UID 0 will work out. Especially if you set it up in a way where.bash_history is actually a named pipe that's being read out by a little tool that sends the data straight to a central logging box so you can see what support staff have been up to.
Yes, the thing is that from my experience at Singapore, the people working there actually possess more than two braincells and will, in fact, hear your story first before coming to conclusions. Most TSA staff at screening points and so on in the US can only possibly hold a single thought at any given second, and "blood" overrides anything else to lead to a swift and quick beatdown before enough of them gather together to spark off some different train of thought.
Actually as far as Singapore goes, they don't. Went there a few months ago doing a visa run from Indonesia (I'm Dutch, by the way), and all I had to do was present my passport, and answer the usual questions on why am I coming to Singapore and so on.
... I refuse to visit the US for anything. I've spent a few years living there pre-Bush, and enjoyed immensely and still have many friends there that I'd like to visit, but the minute some minimum wage mouthbreather touches my laptop is over my cold dead body. The IP on the laptop, along with discussions that I prefer to keep private (even though they're no worse than the occasional rant on stupid users) aren't for them to see.
It's silly though the amount of people that agree to this searching. It's the same kind of people that still think it's a wonderful idea to ask the "Are you now, or have ever been a member of the nazi party" and "Are you part of a terrorist organisation" on an I-94 entry form. I mean, sure, I'll just check the "yes" box on that. How retarded does one have to be to think putting that question on a bit of paper is going to catch anyone.
How retarded does the US government have to be to think that searching laptops, optionally seizing them, and booting people back to country of origin when they don't cooperate, is going to help the "war on terror". All it will do is make sure that business will be conducted outside the US.
Sad to see how a government is so capable of tearing down the country they're supposed to govern.
The sourcecode that was leaked is all the client-side stuff. The EVE client (and server) consist of a core in C++ that does graphics and some low-level stuff, on top of which runs Stackless Python. All the logic and that fun stuff is done in Python. The client ships with a file called 'compiled.code' which contains all the Python code in pickled and seemingly encrypted form.
With the right amount of spare time and some elbow grease it's easy to get the original.pyc/.pyo files out of it, then it's a matter of running something like decompyle to get the Python code.
And that's what's been released. Still, it does allow one to make some nifty client-side bots that won't get caught.
Thing is though that they are paranoid for all the wrong reasons. Mostly fearmongering out of various news outlets about THE DANGERS!!! OF THE INTARWEB!!! (okay okay... exaggerated but hey).
Fact remains that they might be paranoid about privacy on facebook and so on, but due to their misdirected paranoia, they're also the sheep that will gladly vote for a bill to just monitor everyone and make sure that their precious offspring won't lose their privacy, conveniently forgetting that big brother watching you equates to the same thing.
But at least seemingly Big Brother has a nice hat, so that makes it okay...
Right, so basically as long as everyone else does what Daddy USA says, all will be well.
Arrogant much?
It's that exact same attitude that draws the ire of many nations, even if some are smart enough not to act on it because they know that it won't do them any good to bitch at the schoolyard bully.
Heck, in Europe, Americans and America in general aren't held in very high regard. Similarities to 1960's Soviet Russia are often brought up... ironic really, the land of the free and the home of the brave has turned into a parody of what it once opposed during the cold war.
That's great that the documents in question shaped the country -- except now they're being ignored by the current government. They're almost worthy of being called a regime. Doesn't mean people don't respect those documents or the constitution, they do, it's just your government that chooses to either ignore it or make a mockery out of them.
This basically re-inforces my ideas on not going to the US again, ever. After 9/11 I regularly had to go there for work, and the whole half-undressing in public so you could shove your shoes and your belt through the x-ray machine was annoying. Then came that whole exercise, plus the silly things like showing your underwear, also having to put your socks through, and then the most excellent liquid ban.
Guess I'll go spend my cash on vacations to Australia.
That's about as scary as a hacker getting complete access to the WindowsUpdate.com servers or some popular Linux distribution update servers, right?
Just the fact that the trixbox developers have shown a serious lack of understanding when it comes to security makes it a lot more likely that a hacker can gain access to the webserver that's being hit on by all the installed trixboxes. All you do then is tell it to go download and install some tasty rootkit.
Presto. Instant botnet for some script kiddie to play with.
Even then, suppose some organisation is using trixbox. You know they're using it, because you've managed to ferret that out. Now all you need to do is figure out who supplies their internet connectivity, do some DNS poisoning, and you've just owned yourself their phone system. Which means you can potentially record all incoming and outgoing calls, and use the phone box as a nice jump-off into the rest of the organisation's network. Industrial spy's wet dream right there.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is the could actually put both armrests down.
Not much choice sometimes, I'm 6'1", weigh around 190lbs - this makes me a chunky mother. Unfortunately, whereas my gut and my legs fit just fine in one seat, due to being a bit on the tall end, I often can't fit my legs in the available space, unless I want to poke my knees in the back of the person in front of me. The same goes for arms and elbows. I usually get an isle seat so I can stick my legs out in the isle, and stick an elbow out in there too just so I can sit comfortably.
It's not just about "fatties", it is the fact that most airlines have reduced seat space and crammed more seats in compared to before. And for me, upgrading from coach to business or first class isn't an option, I'm not made of money.
True, the merb folks are a lot better in that regard, and if they succeed in "un-sucking" the greater RoR community that would be awesome. RoR is a nice piece of work, and it does deserve a better "image". One thing that it also needs is for DHH to back away a little because he comes across as some religious sect leader who's trying to convince people that his kool-aid is the best ever because it's fizzy
I gave RoR a chance and evaluated it for a while, and while RoR isn't bad, it's community is absolutely terrible. Help is hard to get, and more often than not a simple question leads to 5 people falling over eachother to call you stupid in various degrees, yet they are unable to actually offer any help. A large majority (from what I've seen) of the community can only follow the "hype" and treats the RoR dev team like deities, yet has no idea how to do certain things, how to properly structure and architect software, and responds with vitriol when asked about this.
So instead I stuck to what I know, and have been using Catalyst for my projects. That community is awesome, helpful, knowledgeable and not afraid to help out even for dumb questions.
In short:
RoR: loud, obnoxious, hype followers
Catalyst: quiet, friendly, no hype anywhere (which unfortunately means Catalyst is a bit in the shadows)
Just my 2 cents.
It is in fact easy to set up and maintain -- it just requires a bit more thinking, mostly to get the authentication and such things working right, but that's a matter of editing a config file. Maintenance wise, PostgreSQL doesn't need much of that, the occasional vacuum and that's it. With auto-vacuum enabled, even that is taken care of.
I used MySQL a lot in the past, and ended up going to PostgreSQL around version 7.3, because I needed the triggers and the views. Never looked back to MySQL, PG might be slower at certain things, but at least I don't end up getting a call at 3am in the morning in the weekend informing me the database crapped itself up again, only to have to wait for myisamchk to go through near 20Gb of data.
Give it a shot and you will be enlightened :)
I've been noticing the same trend for a while now, but on the other hand, if someone fresh out of college wants the perks, the travel, the cushy paycheck and so on, that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as they've set that for themselves as a goal to obtain. The problem lies with the bunch that wants to take a shortcut and want that stuff straight from the start. I've seen a few of those during interviews and actually explained that to them as the reason they didn't get the job.
The one I did hire also mentioned that he would like to be part of the team that deals with all the "cool" stuff, that gets to travel, gets company supplied phones and laptops, and gets that cushy paycheck -- except he said that that was a goal he had set for himself, and that he was more than willing to start at the bottom of the ladder - and that as long as the company treated him well, he'd to the same.
Which is exactly the attitude that's keeping things from scaling (regardless of whether I'm using this word in it's proper context, sorry, English isn't my native language) -- because you don't care, so why care at all about optimising when well, you can just throw more hardware at it? Sooner or later you'll be spending more on hardware than you are on programmers. Besides, programmers that do not know how to optimise properly should either quit the job or go back to school and study some more.
Twitter.
Scaling is scaling, whether it be horizontal or vertical. Horizontal scaling only gets you so far in the long run as well. Then again don't take my word for it but I've seen that same "oh well we'll just throw more hardware at it" solution blow up in some seriously interesting ways.
Vertical scalability also forces you to know what you're doing when it comes to algorithms and such things. I know, I know, I'm probably a horribly oldfashioned cunt by saying it, but really, if you're going to build a car, you might as well build yourself a fast one instead of a 10 ton truck being powered by a 2 stroke 40hp diesel engine and say "well we can always throw more engines in here".
I'll admit it's good, but the problem comes from people who blindly follow the hype and will claim that RoR IS the best, and can do it better, and what the hell do us old Perl writing coots know anyway. I don't want to go and compare experience e-peens, but my comments on scalability are based on some interesting observations in the past.
Did I say you said rails is the best thing ever? I didn't. Why bring it up in the first place?
No, it's a framework based on Ruby, the language. Just as Catalyst is a framework based on Perl, the language.
Your point?
The idiom of "let's throw more hardware at the problem" is a way of saying "we don't know jack shit about how to build a scalable web application, so we'll hide the symptoms by throwing a bunch of additional hardware at it so it at least seems we can scale things".
Really, building a scalable web app is not hard, but if you're using Ruby on Rails, you're looking for a miracle since it's a known fact RoR doesn't scale very well. Other languages suffer from the same problem, except it seems those languages have more people using them that actually know what they're doing, instead of just following the RoR hype of it being the best thing since sliced bread, which it's not.
I'll take Perl and Catalyst over Ruby and Rails any day of the week. Ruby borrowed heavily from Perl, and managed to snaffle the rest of it's features out of Python, all combined into a very un-directed little language.
Must mean I'm older than dirt then :P
Bad news if you want to give all the devs their own console. You'll find that productivity will tank. In our office we've got a 360 and a PS2 sitting in the break room, and we're free to wander off and play it for a while if we feel the need for it; this way at the very least someone will notice you spending hours on end at it and will tell you to stop being a dick and get back to work.
Ofcourse the competition for the thing during break time is immense but hey, adds to the flavor.
You might not want to do that, I've been a sysadmin for a webhost for a while, and on a shared machine, yes, we do end up looking at data from time to time. The main reason being that a lot of people hire their nephews for their coding needs, and the nephew has no idea what he's doing -- and his scripts are bringing down the server which impacts all other customers on that same machine.
If we have to go in to find out what the heck is going on, leaving some bogus scripts around that do nothing is just going to make our jobs harder.
I'll also add that even if you get a VPS, it still doesn't guarantee privacy since a VPS is in essence just a "personal" slice of a shared server, and if any problems occur on a VPS we will go in to look at why, for example, the thing is running out of memory so we can tell the client about it before he calls us to ask about it. Most clients love this approach since all they need to do is either tell us they want an upgrade, tell us to leave it alone, or tell us that they want to know what's wrong so they can fix it.
The only way your data is truly private is if you have a colocated server. The only time we access those is if we need to shut it down or you authorised us to do work on it.
Outside of colocated servers, you have, in essence, no privacy.
Addendum: The hosting company I worked at did have a policy that helpdesk staff did -not- have any sort of access to the servers, and all requests that dealt with checking into sites, databases, etc. was done by my co-worker and me :)
The method that my coworkers and me used at my previous job solved this in a manner of speaking. There was another account with UID 0, which we used to su to if we needed root access to whatever it was on the machine, sudo was disabled for everything.
The password for the real root account was automatically generated, then printed on a slip of paper, which went into an envelope, which ended up being stuck on the physical server.
This way if datacenter operations needed access to the server, they could go there, take the envelope, get their access. And we'd know because we'd end up at the datacenter about twice a week anyway and could see that envelopes had been opened.
Doesn't really work if you have support staff that needs access, but even there creating a throwaway account with UID 0 will work out. Especially if you set it up in a way where .bash_history is actually a named pipe that's being read out by a little tool that sends the data straight to a central logging box so you can see what support staff have been up to.
Yes, the thing is that from my experience at Singapore, the people working there actually possess more than two braincells and will, in fact, hear your story first before coming to conclusions. Most TSA staff at screening points and so on in the US can only possibly hold a single thought at any given second, and "blood" overrides anything else to lead to a swift and quick beatdown before enough of them gather together to spark off some different train of thought.
I also haven't seen them do thermal imaging :)
Actually as far as Singapore goes, they don't. Went there a few months ago doing a visa run from Indonesia (I'm Dutch, by the way), and all I had to do was present my passport, and answer the usual questions on why am I coming to Singapore and so on.
No retinal scan, no finger prints.
... I refuse to visit the US for anything. I've spent a few years living there pre-Bush, and enjoyed immensely and still have many friends there that I'd like to visit, but the minute some minimum wage mouthbreather touches my laptop is over my cold dead body. The IP on the laptop, along with discussions that I prefer to keep private (even though they're no worse than the occasional rant on stupid users) aren't for them to see.
It's silly though the amount of people that agree to this searching. It's the same kind of people that still think it's a wonderful idea to ask the "Are you now, or have ever been a member of the nazi party" and "Are you part of a terrorist organisation" on an I-94 entry form. I mean, sure, I'll just check the "yes" box on that. How retarded does one have to be to think putting that question on a bit of paper is going to catch anyone.
How retarded does the US government have to be to think that searching laptops, optionally seizing them, and booting people back to country of origin when they don't cooperate, is going to help the "war on terror". All it will do is make sure that business will be conducted outside the US.
Sad to see how a government is so capable of tearing down the country they're supposed to govern.
The sourcecode that was leaked is all the client-side stuff. The EVE client (and server) consist of a core in C++ that does graphics and some low-level stuff, on top of which runs Stackless Python. All the logic and that fun stuff is done in Python. The client ships with a file called 'compiled.code' which contains all the Python code in pickled and seemingly encrypted form.
.pyc/.pyo files out of it, then it's a matter of running something like decompyle to get the Python code.
With the right amount of spare time and some elbow grease it's easy to get the original
And that's what's been released. Still, it does allow one to make some nifty client-side bots that won't get caught.
Thing is though that they are paranoid for all the wrong reasons. Mostly fearmongering out of various news outlets about THE DANGERS!!! OF THE INTARWEB!!! (okay okay... exaggerated but hey).
Fact remains that they might be paranoid about privacy on facebook and so on, but due to their misdirected paranoia, they're also the sheep that will gladly vote for a bill to just monitor everyone and make sure that their precious offspring won't lose their privacy, conveniently forgetting that big brother watching you equates to the same thing.
But at least seemingly Big Brother has a nice hat, so that makes it okay...
Right, so basically as long as everyone else does what Daddy USA says, all will be well.
Arrogant much?
It's that exact same attitude that draws the ire of many nations, even if some are smart enough not to act on it because they know that it won't do them any good to bitch at the schoolyard bully.
Heck, in Europe, Americans and America in general aren't held in very high regard. Similarities to 1960's Soviet Russia are often brought up... ironic really, the land of the free and the home of the brave has turned into a parody of what it once opposed during the cold war.
Not giving the password == not getting on your flight || being denied entry to the USA.
So yeah, you don't have many options.
That's great that the documents in question shaped the country -- except now they're being ignored by the current government. They're almost worthy of being called a regime. Doesn't mean people don't respect those documents or the constitution, they do, it's just your government that chooses to either ignore it or make a mockery out of them.
This basically re-inforces my ideas on not going to the US again, ever. After 9/11 I regularly had to go there for work, and the whole half-undressing in public so you could shove your shoes and your belt through the x-ray machine was annoying. Then came that whole exercise, plus the silly things like showing your underwear, also having to put your socks through, and then the most excellent liquid ban.
Guess I'll go spend my cash on vacations to Australia.
Just the fact that the trixbox developers have shown a serious lack of understanding when it comes to security makes it a lot more likely that a hacker can gain access to the webserver that's being hit on by all the installed trixboxes. All you do then is tell it to go download and install some tasty rootkit.
Presto. Instant botnet for some script kiddie to play with.
Even then, suppose some organisation is using trixbox. You know they're using it, because you've managed to ferret that out. Now all you need to do is figure out who supplies their internet connectivity, do some DNS poisoning, and you've just owned yourself their phone system. Which means you can potentially record all incoming and outgoing calls, and use the phone box as a nice jump-off into the rest of the organisation's network. Industrial spy's wet dream right there.