*sigh* You avoided the comma splice, but capitalized the 'L'. I could dismiss that if you hadn't used "Your" instead of "You're" to start the next sentence.
I'll be needing your English Prof.'s email address.:)
I completely agree. The only thing I would (should?) add is that trying many configurations will tear through storage like you wouldn't believe. Sure, you could expand the disks as needed, but that kills performance. I ended up putting together a SAN (single box, but with an actual backend network tier) for something like a grand a year and a half ago.
You just need a box with at least 5 bays, an external 5 drive hot-swap canister, a 'gaming' motherboard with a decent south bridge and a bunch of SATA ports, a few gigs of RAM and four or five drives (from different lots!). I setup a plain old Slackware box with iSCSI, carved up some partitions and threw them on to my network. The external hot-swappable trays are worth the $100 just for the ease of adding storage without rebooting or having to crack open the box.
Good. That means that you've discovered the top 25%. Anyone who considers themselves the top 10% has never read code or seen a top 10% developer. I thought I was great until I met one of those guys. It's humbling, but a carrot at the end of the stick, nonetheless.
Next time someone tells you they're in the top 10% compare their code to the Samba, Linux, or Subversion code base; they won't stack up. The problem is that the people who think themselves great aren't reading other peoples code, so they're not getting any better. Also, contrary to popular belief, preferred language means absolutely nothing. I'm sure there are VB.NET programmers out there that are excellent (Jeff Atwood, perhaps?), and I've read two books on Perl where the authors were simply lousy programmers.
Finally, formal education also has almost no bearing on talent. A developer with a formal education might know a slightly more low-level technical definition for something that a self-taught developer will just refer to "...just the way that seemed most logical to do it..." I've met a good many self described developer that really don't quite 'get' the concept of an interface, but can rattle off a textbook definition of it. For that matter, I've also seen that many programmers don't know what a library is, or they're stop reinventing the wheel for every trivial task.
Don't forget the part where Windows will actually swap out libraries... Just what I wanted, a shared library hitting the disk so that anything I could possibly want to use is now exempt from the run queue.
The only part about the whole thing that makes it any better, is that after the whole visual C runtime stomping fiasco of yesteryear, no one actually uses shared libraries - they all ship with their own. Just for kicks, I did a search for msvcr*.dll... 63 matches. Granted, that's a skewed number since I do development on this box, but still... 63.
Some of my favorite VFS settings for Linux are: swappiness, vfs_cache_pressure, and overcommit_memory. Between those three and the swap 'pri' (if you didn't know, two swaps with the same pri will round robin, very cool!), you really can decide how your memory/swap is used.
As a final thought on the subject, am I the only one who defrags Windows only to get a fragmented swap where half of the file is at the end of the disk? I mean, ideally, I like my swap generous and wide, smack in the middle of the drive so that I'm at most half a stroke away from it and passing over it at least once per I/O elevator cycle. In Windows I always get part 1/3 in (taking up valuable space on the fast part of the disk) and then part all the way at the end of the disk... even with a statically sized swap file.
Does OOo 3 let you do network administrative installs again? They had it back in the early 2.Xs and then switched the MSI / bin package such that you couldn't have an 'answers.txt' for automating installs. For me it was close enough to a deal breaker that I didn't really bother to try pushing it at work. We've got Office 2K, and just about the only thing I like about it is a single network admin install that I can patch and forget (and a batch file on the Samba server).:)
Unless it's Access 2000, in which case, you can't elevate it because there is no upgrade path to.NET. Or if it uses DAO which has (almost?) the same arguments as ADO/ADO.NET, but in a different order. This would leave you with the binary decision to either, wrap the VB6 code in.NET wrappers using legacy COM and recreating every form, report and reference to the now deprecated 'null' or to simply rebuild from scratch. Sorry, I had to vent about an, internal, 250,000 SLOC, Access app I inherited.
Granted, they're doing better than guessing... but in reality, I only care that they get it right on the risks that count. They could be 1 for 10, if the harm that the single exploit would cause was more than the sum of the other 9, and be doing decent.
For instance, if they patched the priv. escalation to SYSTEM that has a broad surface area (think, say, remote IIS exploit) over 9 exploits that require physical access and can only get guest access. If someone else has physical access to your box, it's no longer yours, anyways. Risk assessment has to account both for the opportunity and consequences of a given security hole.
Sounds about right, I'm at $11/hr. in PA. I'm a software development major, but my job is at a small company (~20 employees) and I end up doing more admin stuff than writing code. Although I look for any excuse that I can to write some. At the end of the day, I wind down by doing some fun code, so it's all good anyways... I could use the admin. experience since developers are notoriously bad at it.
I've used FOG before, a few months ago, in fact. It just isn't production ready yet. IIRC, you had to install a service on the windows box, etc. The web interface was somewhat counterintuitive and left a bit to be desired. It also had a few rather annoying bugs. This may have changed since the last time I used it. I'd say that as it was a few months ago, you'll be pulling you hair out since it works just enough to let you see what it's capable of, and then falls through on delivery of said capability. Give it another few months if it isn't there yet, it will be great once it gets to RC maturity.
I always fall back to using the PartImage live CD, or a live CD that uses partimage, and then booting a VM with the parted daemon to accept the incoming system image. It will GZip the image on the fly, then you can just split(1) and burn to DVD (dual layer burners are cheap now, but use archival grade media or DVD-RAM for long term storage... you'll thank yourself for spending the few extra bucks/pounds down the road.).
Many live CDs have PartImage now, Trinity Rescue Kit, Ghost 4 Linux, Knoppix, System RescueCD (just had another release lately), and the rest of the usual suspects, as well as many forensics live CDs.
FWIW, I have used partimage to mirror a Windows install on to another drive, and then back to the original again, and since you get a gzipped img file, you can use it with KVM, Xen, VMware (after conversion to vmdk or ovf). Check out Convirt for provisioning systems from a gzipped img file. It's also not production ready, but very cool nonetheless.
Screw that, I've rm -rf'ed myself once. They don't let you shoot yourself in the foot. They give you a high powered sniper rifle with a laser sight and then cheer you on! Taunting you all the while with a file called/./\ delete\ me.
Make it over bluetooth and I'm in. I want 300 MS downtime, at most, as I walk to the door! If it takes longer than that, it'll have to finish over wifi as I leave the driveway.
Have you tried shifting some memory towards the LAMP stack, cranking down your VFS_cache_pressure, and booting WoW up under WINE/Crossover? Sure, your wikis performance will suffer, but if you take the URL down from your back window, maybe that'll keep the rest of us from pinging you while you game. Let me know if you get teamspeak working with bluetooth under WINE, I've been trying to get that to work forever!
Actually, I've been enjoying this stupid tricks series. Especially since I know I can always google these later when I've got a regex problem... it's one of those things that I look up every time I have to use them and then promptly forget the next day.
No doubt, for all the things I dislike about Ballmer, I'll call a spade a spade; he played this one well. Now he can come back in a month or two when the stock bottoms out and offer $10/share, and with the ball in his court he can probably make other stipulations on the deal. I'm thinking he got this play straight out of Billg's play book - Bill's been known to be an awesome poker player from what I've heard.
I've tried that, and almost every time you'll find that the shield is braided... solder just rolls off of the mesh (for me at least, I'm a software geek - my solder-fu is weak, at best) and you'll find that it's just not economical when it takes a few hours to patch the wire. The more economical thing is to hang on to the wires and use them as crude jumpers/whatevers when you'd otherwise not have anything to work with. Jump-starting a power supply at 4:30 AM to test something on the bench comes to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
*sigh* You avoided the comma splice, but capitalized the 'L'. I could dismiss that if you hadn't used "Your" instead of "You're" to start the next sentence.
:)
I'll be needing your English Prof.'s email address.
I completely agree. The only thing I would (should?) add is that trying many configurations will tear through storage like you wouldn't believe. Sure, you could expand the disks as needed, but that kills performance. I ended up putting together a SAN (single box, but with an actual backend network tier) for something like a grand a year and a half ago.
You just need a box with at least 5 bays, an external 5 drive hot-swap canister, a 'gaming' motherboard with a decent south bridge and a bunch of SATA ports, a few gigs of RAM and four or five drives (from different lots!). I setup a plain old Slackware box with iSCSI, carved up some partitions and threw them on to my network. The external hot-swappable trays are worth the $100 just for the ease of adding storage without rebooting or having to crack open the box.
Good. That means that you've discovered the top 25%. Anyone who considers themselves the top 10% has never read code or seen a top 10% developer. I thought I was great until I met one of those guys. It's humbling, but a carrot at the end of the stick, nonetheless.
Next time someone tells you they're in the top 10% compare their code to the Samba, Linux, or Subversion code base; they won't stack up. The problem is that the people who think themselves great aren't reading other peoples code, so they're not getting any better. Also, contrary to popular belief, preferred language means absolutely nothing. I'm sure there are VB.NET programmers out there that are excellent (Jeff Atwood, perhaps?), and I've read two books on Perl where the authors were simply lousy programmers.
Finally, formal education also has almost no bearing on talent. A developer with a formal education might know a slightly more low-level technical definition for something that a self-taught developer will just refer to "...just the way that seemed most logical to do it..." I've met a good many self described developer that really don't quite 'get' the concept of an interface, but can rattle off a textbook definition of it. For that matter, I've also seen that many programmers don't know what a library is, or they're stop reinventing the wheel for every trivial task.
Don't forget the part where Windows will actually swap out libraries... Just what I wanted, a shared library hitting the disk so that anything I could possibly want to use is now exempt from the run queue.
The only part about the whole thing that makes it any better, is that after the whole visual C runtime stomping fiasco of yesteryear, no one actually uses shared libraries - they all ship with their own. Just for kicks, I did a search for msvcr*.dll... 63 matches. Granted, that's a skewed number since I do development on this box, but still... 63.
Some of my favorite VFS settings for Linux are: swappiness, vfs_cache_pressure, and overcommit_memory. Between those three and the swap 'pri' (if you didn't know, two swaps with the same pri will round robin, very cool!), you really can decide how your memory/swap is used.
As a final thought on the subject, am I the only one who defrags Windows only to get a fragmented swap where half of the file is at the end of the disk? I mean, ideally, I like my swap generous and wide, smack in the middle of the drive so that I'm at most half a stroke away from it and passing over it at least once per I/O elevator cycle. In Windows I always get part 1/3 in (taking up valuable space on the fast part of the disk) and then part all the way at the end of the disk... even with a statically sized swap file.
Does OOo 3 let you do network administrative installs again? They had it back in the early 2.Xs and then switched the MSI / bin package such that you couldn't have an 'answers.txt' for automating installs. For me it was close enough to a deal breaker that I didn't really bother to try pushing it at work. We've got Office 2K, and just about the only thing I like about it is a single network admin install that I can patch and forget (and a batch file on the Samba server). :)
Try using mopeds?
Unless it's Access 2000, in which case, you can't elevate it because there is no upgrade path to .NET. Or if it uses DAO which has (almost?) the same arguments as ADO/ADO.NET, but in a different order. This would leave you with the binary decision to either, wrap the VB6 code in .NET wrappers using legacy COM and recreating every form, report and reference to the now deprecated 'null' or to simply rebuild from scratch. Sorry, I had to vent about an, internal, 250,000 SLOC, Access app I inherited.
Granted, they're doing better than guessing... but in reality, I only care that they get it right on the risks that count. They could be 1 for 10, if the harm that the single exploit would cause was more than the sum of the other 9, and be doing decent.
For instance, if they patched the priv. escalation to SYSTEM that has a broad surface area (think, say, remote IIS exploit) over 9 exploits that require physical access and can only get guest access. If someone else has physical access to your box, it's no longer yours, anyways. Risk assessment has to account both for the opportunity and consequences of a given security hole.
Sounds about right, I'm at $11/hr. in PA. I'm a software development major, but my job is at a small company (~20 employees) and I end up doing more admin stuff than writing code. Although I look for any excuse that I can to write some. At the end of the day, I wind down by doing some fun code, so it's all good anyways... I could use the admin. experience since developers are notoriously bad at it.
D'oh! Freakin URL copy and paste!
I don't think EE is up to 1.6 yet. Although SE 1.7 is getting ready to roll, so EE 6 can't be far behind.
BTW, IIRC, we're at version 1.5.16 and 1.6.10.
Ahhh, jealous of the garbage collection, and tempted by the C-like syntax, are we? :)
Fear not, fellow camel-caser, Linux already has Binary Kernel Support for Linux!
I've used FOG before, a few months ago, in fact. It just isn't production ready yet. IIRC, you had to install a service on the windows box, etc. The web interface was somewhat counterintuitive and left a bit to be desired. It also had a few rather annoying bugs. This may have changed since the last time I used it. I'd say that as it was a few months ago, you'll be pulling you hair out since it works just enough to let you see what it's capable of, and then falls through on delivery of said capability. Give it another few months if it isn't there yet, it will be great once it gets to RC maturity.
I always fall back to using the PartImage live CD, or a live CD that uses partimage, and then booting a VM with the parted daemon to accept the incoming system image. It will GZip the image on the fly, then you can just split(1) and burn to DVD (dual layer burners are cheap now, but use archival grade media or DVD-RAM for long term storage... you'll thank yourself for spending the few extra bucks/pounds down the road.).
Many live CDs have PartImage now, Trinity Rescue Kit, Ghost 4 Linux, Knoppix, System RescueCD (just had another release lately), and the rest of the usual suspects, as well as many forensics live CDs.
FWIW, I have used partimage to mirror a Windows install on to another drive, and then back to the original again, and since you get a gzipped img file, you can use it with KVM, Xen, VMware (after conversion to vmdk or ovf). Check out Convirt for provisioning systems from a gzipped img file. It's also not production ready, but very cool nonetheless.
I've got it running on my primary desktop, but I decided this morning that if it hoses the install... it's only two weeks until Fedora 10 releases.
Screw that, I've rm -rf'ed myself once. They don't let you shoot yourself in the foot. They give you a high powered sniper rifle with a laser sight and then cheer you on! Taunting you all the while with a file called /./\ delete\ me.
Make it over bluetooth and I'm in. I want 300 MS downtime, at most, as I walk to the door! If it takes longer than that, it'll have to finish over wifi as I leave the driveway.
Have you tried shifting some memory towards the LAMP stack, cranking down your VFS_cache_pressure, and booting WoW up under WINE/Crossover? Sure, your wikis performance will suffer, but if you take the URL down from your back window, maybe that'll keep the rest of us from pinging you while you game. Let me know if you get teamspeak working with bluetooth under WINE, I've been trying to get that to work forever!
Actually, I've been enjoying this stupid tricks series. Especially since I know I can always google these later when I've got a regex problem... it's one of those things that I look up every time I have to use them and then promptly forget the next day.
vgetty, FTW?!
No doubt, for all the things I dislike about Ballmer, I'll call a spade a spade; he played this one well. Now he can come back in a month or two when the stock bottoms out and offer $10/share, and with the ball in his court he can probably make other stipulations on the deal. I'm thinking he got this play straight out of Billg's play book - Bill's been known to be an awesome poker player from what I've heard.
Especially when someone figures out that the adobe update has to run as an admin...
nohup, FTW!
GORILLAS.BAS: Microsoft's only open source game.
Lest we forget Allegiance...
I've tried that, and almost every time you'll find that the shield is braided... solder just rolls off of the mesh (for me at least, I'm a software geek - my solder-fu is weak, at best) and you'll find that it's just not economical when it takes a few hours to patch the wire. The more economical thing is to hang on to the wires and use them as crude jumpers/whatevers when you'd otherwise not have anything to work with. Jump-starting a power supply at 4:30 AM to test something on the bench comes to mind.
Asterisk box w/ bluetooth, FTW!