In a world gone mad..

Maybe you stumbled upon LINA. It got quite a bit of press coverage the last few days/weeks.

Now some more details emerged. Let’s just say “a few issues remain”.. :)

But here’s a funny and already pretty stable and mature alternative – at least for Windows. Run coLinux with a Gentoo or Debian image and the CygWin X server in “coherence” mode.

Nothing beats a nice xterm with bash. Especially not the Windows “shell” crap.. :)

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 7:35 pm under Rant
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Some interesting points about RoR and developing in general. And no, I don’t think 1.5 million unique users per month is that much traffic to say anything about scalability of RoR applications. But that’s not too important here. What is? Quoting from here:

I think it’s important for people new to Rails to spend some time learning Ruby first. Most Rails converts are coming from the Java or PHP worlds, and it’s tempting to force a Java or PHP mentality of coding into your first Rails app.

Seen this one far too often already.

Whenever you’re developing a new feature, ask yourself if it can be written as a plugin rather than added directly to your web app.

This I consider important meta advice. All to often we are tempted to add that new feature ‘just right here, yes, this looks ok’. Don’t. Try hard to put it somewhere outside. In the end you’ll be happy about “subsystemizing” and “modularizing” your application. Obvious? Yes. Practiced? Hardly. And yes, I know about the “Myth of Reuse”. But that’s just not a contra-argument. Sorry.

Filed by The.French.DJ at 6:55 pm under Development,Ruby
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No point in picking out this one dude with his very intelligent article. The whole concept of ‘media’ is based on pushing intelligent articles out to the intelligent masses.. But here it is anyway.. :)

Cruelty and the kitchen

Who decides, and how, which cruelties are acceptable, and which not?

Doh. How about no cruelty, stupid?

Man, how I wish I could change this world. Really change it. Twelve monkeys style. Sigh.

Filed by The.French.DJ at 2:14 pm under Rant,World
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After my previous post I started reading through the many comments to this post:

What you’re not getting about Ruby

Here’s my take at a definition of good vs bad developer:

* A bad developer will moan about not having the compiler tell him about an undefined variable when working with a dynamic language. A good developer will just use testing and other appropriate tools to make sure the code is correct.

* A bad developer will moan about 20.minutes.ago and argue that 20 should be an argument to a ‘make minutes’ functions because this is how 99% of all developers expect it to be. A good developer will embrace the simple, concise and clean new way of writing code and use discipline to not let this grow out of hand.

Meta programming is a topic in itself. Here the good, the bad and the ugly are sometimes hard to differentiate. I would argue that some of the meta programming stuff going on in the currently important (and hyped) Ruby libraries (RoR et al) is going too far. But somehow it’s OK. Because those guys involved are OK with it. Overall, however, I would argue that a truly good developer would not overuse meta programming. “method_missing” is a powerful but dangerous beast.

One more definition of a bad programmer: Someone who uses PHP. Check this example. Posted in response to the 20.minutes.ago Ruby example:

<?php
$d = strtotime("20 minutes ago");
?>

Filed by The.French.DJ at 1:47 pm under Development,Rant
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Very interesting read (taking the comments into account, too) on WTF:

The Great Pyramid of Agile

Interesting because so many “from our domain” still don’t get the basics. It is all about good developers. And yes, in a way the process or approach does not really matter. But it would be misleading to just say “Agile doesn’t work”. It’s a nice way of developing software. Nicer for the people involved. And no, the pyramid analogy is not a perfect analogy.. :) If it were a soft pyramid, then maybe..

A few posts before the Agile post I found another of the “rockstar” rants:

Rockstar Programmers

Again, the really interesting parts are to be found in the comments. Or in the “balance” between the rant and the comments. I tend to agree with “jet”s comment – if we accept the rant’s definition of “rockstar programmer”.. Rockstars will produce unmaintainable code. (But who doesn’t? :) The Graham and Joel arguments correctly differentiate between rockstars and good developers.

Not saying these two issues are directly related. It’s just funny to read through it and thinking about good developer vs bad and vs rockstar.

Filed by The.French.DJ at 1:27 pm under Development
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I finally understand why I’m not allowed to use Lisp

Funny rant. But look at the comments, too. I love this one:

The big mistake is thinking Lisp is going to grow by first being adopted
in Tall Buildings. They are the drones, the lemmings, the sheep. They
follow where We the Blessed Gurus lead them. But this time it is to the
slaughterhouse, because the world needs only fifty Lisp programmers to
write All the Code.

Amen.

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 12:13 am under Development
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Mars bars get veggie status back

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 10:17 pm under Rant,World
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Bloody Chocolate

“extremely strict vegetarian”?

I’m truly sorry for this race..

Man, I need to spend more time working on my spare-time projects. Reading ‘news’ kills me..

Amen. I guess.

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 2:31 am under Rant,World
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Eco-Extremist Wants World Population to Drop below 1 Billion

Funny how no one seems to ‘get it’:

Apparently, saving the whales is more important than saving 5.5 billion people.

Of course you don’t get it unless you admit you’re part of a massive group of idiots. This is where you have to start.

And Watson may not have the perfect solution, but it’s a lot better than just continuing to drive your fucking car and feasting on industrially produced living beings without any decency or respect..

Personally I think we would be pretty much OK with a few million humans. One billion might still be a lot of a*holes to cope with.. :)

Anyway, don’t take my word for it. Check out the comments on digg.com. Notice this reference in the comments: Georgia Guidestones :)

Seriously, I know ignorance is bliss. But you should consider the possibility that a lack of intelligence and/or wisdom plays its part in your understanding of things.

But when – even on a mental site like digg.com :) – a few ppl understand what’s going on.. maybe there’s hope left..

Amen,

tfdj

Filed by The.French.DJ at 7:27 pm under Rant,World
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