i guess many of us geeks went through the one or other phase in their life when they felt themselves trapped in the system with no way out. "the system" meaning any kind of mental state that prevented a clear view on the situation.
brenda just posted this URL and i can only encourage all to read it. keep it in mind and have a look at it when feeling unsure if that all out there that seems to lock you in is "real" or just you looking the wrong way.
trust me, most of the time it is you, the rest of the time it helps to step back and look at the bigger picture. lets face it, we are a strange breed but we can do things the programmatic way, just think of it from time to time.
@bluehackers.org ... brilliant job
on a related mission to my new years resolution i got the erlang usergroup finally kicked off. after several informal meetings with brenda and me at curry and other occasions i formalized things a bit and kick it off on 3rd of february.
more info over here
see you there ...
long time no posts here. it was a very busy time and the turn of the year was reserved for recreation. that meant no hacking, or at least near to no hacking. it is now well into january already and my new year resolutions include way more activities in the open source space. i use open source every day and contributed to some projects but never released stuff i wrote. that is partly due to the environments i worked in and partly pure laziness.
fighting the latter one i started to release my daemon framework that i use for event driven programming in perl for quite a while. this framework is a grown thing and it takes quite a bit to clean it up and make it a framework rather than a bunch of libraries that happen to be used together. the first step was to create a git repository on gitgub and import all the stuff initially. i cleaned it up a bit and packaged it as a CPAN package and viola, here is Net::Server::Framework.
this package is a complete event driven infrastructure that still needs heaps of documentation and misses quite some parts as i did not get around cleaning up all the parts i wanted to. it obviously includes some parts that just grew and should have been replaced ages ago. all in all you can, however, take the beast, unpack it and start writing daemons.
in a post that will come later on i'll explain the inner workings a bit more, the idea of it is, that you write a daemon per functionality and then let those daemons interact with each other. if you are familiar with erlang you will notice the parallels here and probably understand why i think that erlang is a perfect fit for my sick brain and the problems i try to solve. the stuff you find on the github repository contains two working daemons that you can use as templates.
go out and play with it, feel free to mail me with questions, have fun with event driven programming.
it has been a pain for a long time but actually in the meantime it looks like it is really straight forward. i checked out the recent version of couchdb from the apache incubator svn repository, complied it and ... it works, right out of the box.
what do you need?
well, a recent version of erlang obviously, i run erlang-lite-r12b4,1 which is the latest as far as i know (R12b4 is the latest version of the OTP framework) the erlang-lite port is under 'lang'.
the mozilla spidermonkey libs (under lang as well) and the gnu build tools, but they hang around normally anyway. remember to use gmake not the standard BSD make.
then we can start:
$ svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/couchdb/trunk couchdb
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure
$ gmake
$ sudo gmake install
then you can simply run couchdb from the command line (i normally run it in a screen to have the log handy and to see crash dumps if the occur).
time to relax ...
dns is in trouble, at least caching dns. i guess everyone who is into that topic is busy patching his resolvers. the funny thing about that topic is the kids that start wining that this is all bad and that the new design does not work for them and so on. it looks like paul vixie now stepped up to calm the crowds. his post is nice, i love clarity :-)
problem with the post is that the kids don't know paul or don't value his input but hey, after 7th of august there is not too much to worry about kids anymore. the internet will be a mess and there will be heaps of crying kids, complaining that all this is not fair and that there was too less time for them to patch and all the usual bla bla ...
there is a moment in your live where you learn pretty radical that there are some guys you better listen to when they say that things go bad. if you think you know better the world will show you that you are wrong. this is one of those moments.
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the poor guys of vodafone had their shop open till about 6:00 this morning and reopened at 9:00. i was in the shop at around 9 and found some pretty tired faces :-)
it looks like the credit check thing is the part that takes the most time. mine failed obviously the first time as i am no kiwi and they wanted to have my passport and visa faxed to the vodafone credit check team. even today in the morning there are queues at all three voda stores in welli and guys are running around shops asking for stock figures. the 16gig version is pretty much sold out now as it looks like.
well ... i finally managed to get my hand on one as well :-) lets see how it compares to the first generation iPhone.
some pictures from the iPhone launch down here in Wellington. The queue was about 150 guys long and was well treated by Vodafone staff. It was only around 10 degrees down here and Vodafone served coffee and provided caps for the freezing queue.
At midnight the store opened and the first in line - and only the first - entered the store to get his iPhone. It took about 20min till he came out again. I am curious how long it took the last guys to get their phones :-)
the plans for the iPhone in NZ are plain ridicules. NZ is light years behind the global standard and vodafone is trying to sell it to us as a premium service for the high price segment. mobile data usage is standard elsewhere but it looks like vodafone NZ did not even bother to look abroad. 250 meg for 80$ a month is a joke when you compare it to europe or the states.
this video shows the reaction down here quite good :-)
http://www.youtube.com/v/291gK1ikf1w&hl
Technorati Tags: iPhone
the iPhone plans for NZ are online ... well, were, for about a minute or so till the vodafone servers crashed. here is a screenshot:
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PHP itself has not too much to with it actually, well, it has, but the biggest problem with that language is the entry barrier. it is too low. every 10 year old can learn how to write basic php code and then starts to mess around with it, writes broken stuff and wonders why on earth software design is told to be complicated.
i got one of those php projects on the desk in the moment. a customer needs to get that project online and "just needs some bugs fixed". end of the story is that they refuse to have it rewritten because they sank too much money in it already and now got only the budget to fix the remaining bugs. turns out there is no "remaining bugs" there is just broken code around broken design around missing experience around no f**ing clue what software design is in the first place.
i saw lots of broken code in my live and i am well aware that i wrote broken code as well when i was a teen, probably even later. i wrote php as well as other stuff but i learned programming with real languages. programming is more than knowing the syntax, it is software design. it is the concept of how to optimize not only how to bump lines of code into an editor. this code rejects every idea of design. it has nothing to do with programming it is only inconsistent lines of code that happen do display things (at least from time to time).
why blame php? i think php is a language that can be used by guys knowing their business (even then it is a pain). it does not try to force you to a clean design. it does not provide you with a consistent API (positional parameters are interchanged every now and then) and it does not force you to actually design your code. this leads to the problem that every teen thinks to be able to write an application 10 times too big for him and the result even does nearly what was required. the problem is that the code is not maintainable because it was not planned, the code will never scale because the concept of scaling has never been considered. the code is cluttered and not readable because a codebase normally reflects the state of mind of the programmer this is a bad picture for the poor guy who cranked out those lines.
if all that sounds a bit frustrated then you are probably right. i never saw such bad code before not even in perl. most probably because perl has a higher entry level (replace perl with the language of your desire, i just used perl as it is often referred to as write only code).
it is embarrassing to know that someone paid good money for such a mess!
