Day: December 1, 2002

We’re currently installing Red Hat 8.0 on Adam’s Thinkpad laptop.  We had to boot it with linux nousb at the boot: prompt.  Hopefully we’ll be able to sort that out later.

Adam is in town from West Virginia for the turkey day break.  He’s doing a little reinstall on his laptop (IBM Thinkpad on the right) and is surfing the net on my ancient Toshiba Pentium 75 (on the left).  Heather is reading to the left of this picture.  You can barely see her feet if you squint really hard.  You can click on this thumbnail to check out a fuzzy 640×480 version taken with my ancient Hawking USB webcam.

PCLinuxOnline points out that PostgreSQL 7.3 is out.  Changelog is here.

If you are looking for Microsoft Windows XP boot disks or setup disks, you can find them at Microsoft’s Download Center.  This entry is for those googling for answers.

Kerneltrap:

The good doctor Con Kolivas [interview] recently posted some interesting kernel benchmarks generated with his contest benchmarking tool [story]. Using resources provided by the OSDL, Con compared 2.4.19, 2.4.20, 2.5.49 and 2.5.50, each with a single processor enabled and with dual processors enabled.

Below many of the tests, Con makes some quick observations about the results. Con’s original email is followed by an edited version I’ve added to hopefully make it easier to compare the results between UP and SMP. Read on for the hard data…

The details are in the rest of the article, but as far as I can see there are some things that 2.4 does slightly faster but other things that 2.5 does significantly faster.  I’m sure hiccups will be ironed out by the time 2.6/3.0 is released.

Terence Parr has some excellent information to share:

Software is more an art or skill than a science or engineering discipline. The most effective means of becoming a great programmer is through an apprenticeship (even if self-directed). There is no substitute for coding a big system that evolves over time. It seems to take about 2 to 3 years before somebody absorbs the important lessons. You can read books and papers in an effort to avoid common mistakes, but talking to and working with other programmers still seems to be the best (if slow) approach. As Chris Brooks says, becoming a commercial programmer is like becoming an architect; being a junior associate for a while is part of the process.

In this document, I have tried to remember and distill my hard-fought 3-year experience as I evolved into a programmer capable of building a commercial product, http://www.jguru.com . Naturally this is a not complete list of programming advice, but rather what I learned on this project.

[Via Gordon Weakliem]

Adam Wendt:

Here’s a cool flash animation of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire. Definitely one cool tune and one cool piece of flash.

I figured if it’s stuck in my head, it might as well be stuck in yours.

Graham Glass:

solaris: i highly recommend this movie. it’s not a run-of-the-mill flick, but a haunting love story that seems to get better the more you think about it. and the sound track is fantastic – i really hope they bring it out soon on CD!

Dave:

Saw Solaris today. Quick review: Skip it.

Slashdot has a semipositive review.

“Murphy giveth, and Murphy taketh away.”
–Me, tho I’m sure it’s been said before.