Year: 2002

Bill Carlson: 12 reasons good programmers shouldn’t worry.

2. Not that many years ago, systems level knowledge was needed to do much of anything. Now, one can make a good living as a developer without knowing what a pointer is. I firmly believe this to be a good thing, but wonder if it means that there will be fewer systems guys “in the pipeline”; just because they don’t have to learn that stuff. I still feel these are valuable skills needed for development that don’t involve dropping DB fields on a web form. [via Krzysztof Kowalczyk]
 

Philly.com: There’s a three minute discrepancy between when the cockpit voice recorder ends and when seismologists have pinpointed the crash.  What’s your conspiracy theory? [via Metafilter]

PC Linux Online: Truth and Myth about [SuSe’s] YAST License.

pyblosxom: An interpretation of Rael‘s blosxom written in python.  It looks like it is 100% blosxom compatible, and the author, Wari Wahab,  even implemented the humorous RSS 3.0 spec.

Geekiest. Enterprise Java Bean jokes. Evar!

A bunch of 17 year olds – ClassCast, IllegalArgument and ArrayOutOfBounds – decide to chance their arm, and try and get served at the bar. The Bartender takes one look at them, and asks them for ID. ClassCast hands over his fake ID, IllegalArgument hands over his brother Throwable’s ID, but ArrayOutOfBounds doesn’t have any fake ID. The Bartender says “Sorry guys, you’ll have to leave unless I can see some ID”. ClassCast pleads with the barman “can’t you just bend the rules for us ?” and the barman says “Sorry, no Exceptions”.

Web Services DevCon

It’s official. I just signed up for the Web Services DevCon in October.  I was kinda bummed when the SeatsLeft web service still returned 29, the number that was there before I registered…

Urchin: A log analysis tool that looks like it’s got some cool whizbang features.  I’m fine with Analog and Wusage though.

Wired News: Watch out for that linux worm, slap!

Diaries.com: A Manilla based weblog community.  An example weblog called “ShareMe” (by Fred Grott) sports an almost radio-like look and RSSage.

Matthew Leeds at Network World Fusion:

The most expensive real estate you’ll ever lease is collocation space. A single rack in a cabinet, roughly two feet square, runs about $1,000 per month, and that’s before you start paying for bandwidth or managed services.

The article is a practical guide to getting the most out of your colocation.

Loosley Coupled: Why not RSS 2.0 Lite, Rich, and Classic?

The Register on Fujitsu hard drives:

Says Phillip Errington of Fast N Easy Computers in Stockport: “We have been observing a gradual increase in failure of 10Gb and 20Gb fujitsu drives, normally with the same error; drive disappears from the IDE channel and won’t appear at boot up.

Sometimes the drives can be booted after this occurs if the drive is left for a while to cool down, but normally its bye bye to everything.

This critical failure is very disturbing as it comes with little warning. We have seen a high percentage failure and a fair few drives now. One company had every drive in each of its 10 machines fail.”

How high are the failure rates?

But is it really only 2-3 per cent? And is the recall limited to Japan? Judging from the emails we have received – more than 200 and rising – dud Fujitsu HDDs have been sold into the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Poland. The problem of huge failure rates for 20GB Fujitsu drives – of the order of 30-50 per cent and sometimes even higher – is reported by system builders, network admins, schools and corporates, especially businesses using Compaq Deskpros.

Ouch!  Then again, every HDD company seems to have a major dud like this every once in awhile.  I remember back in my pentium days, Western Digital Caviar drives were the only way to go.  Then I had two 6.4giggers go down on me.  Then I switched to IBM Deskstors (I have a 15 gig ATA100 that’s been running every day for two years or so).  Then IBM started having problems so I switched to Maxtors, drives that I wouldn’t have touched with a ten foot pole a few years earlier.  The Maxtors are fire so far.  I have a couple of fourty giggers running 24/7 with no problems. 

I also have a few small Segates kicking around, as well as a tiny Conner drive that still runs every once in awhiile.  I remember our first hard drive.  10 megs.  Bigger and heavier than a brick.  It was soooo much cooler than switching dual 320k floppies though.

AMD Struts their 64-bit stuff: CNet covers AMD’s new ad campaign that sports the tagline “AMD Me.” It’s just a little cheezy, but an ad campaign is better than no ad campaign at all…

AMD will aim its campaign specifically at individuals, both consumers and corporate IT workers, who are well-versed in technology and considered experts by their peers, the company said in a statement.

“Hey, if you’re going to the fridge, can you beer me?  On second thought, AMD me.”

The Fuzzyblog points out some undocumented private IP subnet ranges.  These are very interesting and come from Apokalyptic:

82.X.Y.Z
• 83.X.Y.Z
• 84.X.Y.Z
• 85.X.Y.Z
• 86.X.Y.Z
• 87.X.Y.Z
• 88.X.Y.Z
• 89.X.Y.Z
• 90.X.Y.Z
• 91.X.Y.Z
• 92.X.Y.Z
• 93.X.Y.Z
• 94.X.Y.Z
• 95.X.Y.Z

PCLinuxOnline: Red hat defends Gnome and KDE configurations.

For the upcoming release of Red Hat Linux, we decided to configure both desktop environments we ship, KDE and GNOME, to look and behave in similar fashion. Our goals were to improve the user experience and to reduce work for ourselves. This decision has gained quite a bit of attention, some positive, some negative. My intent here is to explain what we are doing, why we doing it, and with luck, dispel some rumors that have sprung up around the project.

The page at Red Hat has more.

JT Smith at NewsForge: An article on open source database systems vs. the commercial ones:

I remembered Oracle with fondness since it was one of the first databases I ever worked with. But now, to more experienced eyes, Oracle is the nightmare that haunts me as I sleep. And it is the thorn in my side while I am awake.

Wired News/Leander Kahney: “Devan Simunovich is a one-man Macintosh retro revival movement.”

Krzysztof Kowalczyk points to an entry by Doug Kaye which shows that RackShack.Net is the fastest increase in IP addresses in the month of August.  They do dedicated servers, and from their pricing and what I’ve heard about them, they do it right and cheap. If you can snag a Celery 1.3/512MB/60GB/Red Hat 7.2 with 400GB/mo of transfer, this place is doing a good job at keeping prices down.

Slashdot: Jersey officially limits G-forces on roller coasters. Over the years,  Six Flags Great Adventure, Jersey’s largest theme park has had several incidents, a few involving death. These injuries and deaths are linked to improper operators or poorly maintained rides, not G-forces.

I remember the Haunted House fire of 1984 (towards end of page), and they have had a few other accidents over the years.

While I’m on the subject of roller coasters, here’s an interesting tidbit about a ride that made me feel like I was getting my butt kicked by a bully:

Well folks after three years of speculations it seems that we can finally put the rumors about Drachen Fire to rest.  Busch Gardens Williamsburg has announced that they were not able to sell the ride and it is in their best interests to remove the coaster.  When the ride closed back in 1998 the original plans were to modify the ride and make try to improve the ride.  Plans would then change to Busch Gardens Williamsburg attempting to sell the ride.  Unfortunately the ride never could find a buyer so the inevitable step would occur.  It has now been announced that the ride should be completely removed before the opening day for this 2002 season.   Drachen Fire was designed by Arrow Dynamics (Ron Toomer to be exact) and opened in 1992.  The ride would remain a popular attraction for several years before starting to slide in popularity in the late 1990’s.  One of the rides inversions was removed after the 1994 season in order to make the ride less intense.  As for the land that the coaster stood on, no plans have been announced for what Busch Gardens Williamsburg plans to put there.

And while I’m on the subject of Jersey, here is the best slashdot comment of the day:

I’m from Jersey.

Are you from Jersey?

I’m from Jersey.

Really? What exit?

It’s so true.

David M Johnson (of Blogging Roller fame) likes Eclipse:

Overall, I was very impressed.  Netbeans can do most of things I have described above, but they always seem like a struggle to me.  This was my first time with Eclipse and things just seemed obvious to me.  I hate to say it because Netbeans has served me well and I really like Swing, but Eclipse has a much more streamlined, intuitive, and snappy user interface.  Eclipse is a pleasure to use.

Be gentle though, I went to his site this morning and got this:

An unexpected error has occured in Roller .

Update: Everything is back online.