There’s been some great discussions about the state of programming. Confession: I’m much more of a sysadmin and architecture guy than anything else at this point. If it doesn’t have a quick configuration file or a GUI, at this point, I don’t do much with it because I don’t have the time to learn everything. That’s even after focusing our core web environment on two technologies (php/python) and doing our best to reject anything that doesn’t fit into them.
Here’s the first one: Whatever Happened to Programming @ The Reinvigorated Programmer, and here’s it’s second part: It May Not Be As Bad as All That.
Pay special attention to the addendum in that second article. The money quote for me was in the big pull from a comment by jdeitrich on HackerNews:
We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?
It’s the death of the hobbyist programmer. There’s a new framework release in Symfony or Zend Framework every time I re-surface a week or two later. Even with 10 years experience with programming, unit tests, and a decent level of comfort from the experience with 0.x versions and up of these frameworks, I spend all the time I *should* be coding with my nose in the docs updating code that’s been deprecated or migrated. Just keeping up in one framework can be a full time job.
How can anything get done like this?
Wordpress 2.9 changed the permission structure away from the permission-based ACL, which confused many users, and created a role-based ACL where roles have permissions. This has royally fubared a few of my sites, which used extensive ACL settings with some custom plugins to enable fine-grained permissions. On the other hand, few people understood the old permission format, things were complicated enough that a user could trip over themselves and inadvertently grant multiple contradictory permissions to someone, and it was difficult to teach and explain the administrative interfaces.
The first step towards straightening out the new permissions structure is creating and/or …
One method of backup or recovery isn’t enough. Period. No matter what anyone tells you, what the book says, what your boss says, or what you think you need, you need to be backing things up in many ways.
Here’s a few examples.
MySQL
Theoretically, you could recover anything you needed from the binary log, as long as you’ve got a good starting point and a good ending point. (This, by the way, is a good reason to flush the binary logs and take a backup on a regular basis.) What if your binary log’s corrupted, though? You need to …
Besides the obvious, the thing that pisses me off most about Google Buzz is having to mark things read twice — once in google reader, once in Buzz. Still experimenting to see if I can hide/unfollow people in Google Reader and not have them unfollowed in Buzz, or vice versa.
I’m happy to see it; I’m happy to be involved in it.
Sun has some of the best ideas in the world. From a creativity point of view, they’re pretty amazing. From an implementation point of view, with some notable exceptions (ex: Fishworks), they’re pitiful. Sun couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse wearing a suit made of hundred dollar bills.
Half of Sun’s ideas were half-baked. (Either go fully baked, a’la Steve Jobs, or lay off whatever writes you make bad haiku, mmkay?) The x45xx line of servers is a wonderful idea and a wonderful form factor, and Sun overcame significant …
Check this out:
RHN Fail
Yeah, that’s what you see when you visit rhn.redhat.com — which you need to use to administer redhat subscriptions. I can’t get my servers to subscribe while the site’s down, and I can’t manage my entitlements or buy new ones.
One of my consulting projects has been on hold for days while RHN sorts itself out. Worse, you can’t even log in to report the problem. If you click on the “contacting us” link, you get taken to a page with a …
If you’re using raw access to storage LUNs with VMWare, and you’re using Windows, you can use the LSI Logic SAS virtual SCSI adapter option and create virtual drives. This is better than using the Microsoft iSCSI initiator because you can edit the drive mappings with the machine powered off and you can clone the machine and easily redirect all of your storage before powering the machine on.
The correct driver to be using is the LSI SAS 1068 driver. You’ll need to make a floppy image using an image tool — if you’ve access to a linux box, …
GhettoVCB – VCB for free. Doesn’t get better than that.
Software problems are the #1 thing that will keep an Airbus A380 on the ground. Yes, airplanes are complicated things … but at the same time, not much is required to keep most of them in the air.
The thing that speaks volumes to me about these problems are a few key quotes.
Clark says that the problem with the nuisance warnings has been their diverse nature, but “the common thread” is the software. He says Airbus executive vice-president programmes Tom Williams and his team “have sat in my office many times and said they can’t identify trends, which
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