The gullible consumer

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, September 29. 2006 in Junk Drawer

I have more than a passing interest in web hosting, but I am constantly amazed at what some web hosts try (and succeed) to get away with. What I really love are those mega web hosts that provide dozens of gigs of local storage, "unlimited" bandwidth and a whole laundry list of "technologies" provided with each account. Oh, yes, and the accounts are some incredibly low price like $5 a month. And when they describe their network center it's as if they were hosted in the US Pentagon; I especially like the ones that provide pictures which invariably show barbed wire fences and canine patrols. Yep, all for $5 a month. And yet, if you do just a tiny bit of research you see that on the areas that should make the most difference, they are almost amazingly out of date: super old versions of Apache (usually 1.3.25), PHP, OpenSSL, MySQL, etc... Where the rubber meets the road, they are incredibly incompetent. And yet, they are signing up people like it's going out of style. Just goes to show you; even though he never said it, P. T. Barnum was right.

Hey, it's only democracy in action

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Wednesday, September 27. 2006 in Programming

The Primary Election held in Maryland 2 weeks ago was, to be charitable, a fiasco. Election judges that simply didn't bother to show up, equipment that was either not set up or was still locked up, and, worse of all, e-poll registration machines that crashed at the drop of a hat. Heck, it even happened to me, and I needed to wait for about 15 minutes while the machine rebooted and they had to convince the machine that I had not already registered. Well, it appears that the e-poll machines and the software behind them (both by Diebold) were never really tested. In fact, the primary was just a super nice Beta test for the system. They then tracked the problems down to basically a memory leak. After 40 to 50 people were registered, the machine would crash. Just this week Diebold stated that "Hey, we fixed it!" As proof they ran this super test: they registered more than 100 (*gasp*) people through the upgraded machines and no crash! Wow! 100! Do these people have any sense of scale? This is woefully short of the number of people that the machine will be expected to handle. What sort of testing is this? But what am I complaining about... after all, it only affects one of the cornerstones of a democracy. We can't be bothered with protecting our democracy when we're busy doing it elsewhere.

Conrad Poohs

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Monday, September 25. 2006 in Junk Drawer

Anyone else see the Sept 25th issue of Time Magazine. On the cover is a "picture" of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Holey moley if it doesn't look like something from Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. I half expected him to open his mouth and his teeth to start dancing around.

Stay true to a language?

Posted by Jim Jagielski on Friday, September 22. 2006 in Programming

One thing which I find somewhat troubling, switching from language to language, is that one tends to use idioms and techniques in one language, that are really better suited for another. This is more often problematic when porting and application between languages, but can really happen at any time. It's ever more an issue when the languages share a lot of similarities. For example, consider this Perl code snippet:
($id,$name)=($1,$2) if $line =~ /|name="(\w+)" (.*?)|/;
Now with some very minor changes, this is also valid Ruby:
nid,name = $1,$2 if line =~ /|name="(\w+)" (.*?)|/
But even so, it is a very Perlish-way of writing Ruby. Instead, you could do something like:
if (m = /|name="(\w+)" (.*?)|/.match(line))      nid = m[1]      name = m[2] end
Which is certainly uses more Ruby-like concepts, but is more verbose and not that nice anyway (yes, you could make it less verbose, but stay with me here). I like the Perlish-way better. It's certainly cleaner. So do you write clean, concise code, even if it's not "true" to a language, or do you stay close to the ideals of a particular language, even if it means the code isn't as clean or clear as you'd like...? Me, I'm lazy, so I'll do whatever is easier without being so terse as to be painful. If a language gives me shortcuts, I'll use them, even if it means some language snobs may look down their noses. As far as the above, heck, I'm going to start calling that idiom a "Ruby-ish way" of doing it. Certainly if one started with Ruby and then learned Perl, that's what they would think.

Generation e-gap



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