Edge Case

The review starts off like this:

Windows 7 edges out Snow Leopard—Apple’s latest Mac operating system—in several important ways and will leave any computers running an older version of the Mac OS in the dust.

Ooh, them’s fighting words. It then goes on to explain how I’m now “in the dust”:

What’s so great about Windows 7? For starters, it offers everything you want in an OS:

OK. This list should be awesome.

Programs load and run quickly,

They do now anyway.

your computer pretty much never crashes,

Uh, ibid, ya’ll.

and the system mostly stays out of your way.

At the risk of repeating myself, it already does. Also, MOSTLY? Not completely or entirely or wholly or totally? Just mostly? Maybe a service pack will fix that.

But wait, here’s the awesome:

This last point represents a major improvement over Vista, which used to interrupt your work repeatedly to ask whether you really, truly wanted to do that thing you just asked it to do.

Ok so it’s WAY more awesomer now that it doesn’t fuck with you, but Vista did and no version of Mac OS X has ever really had a reputation for fucking with you, but hey whatever it’s better now that it doesn’t. WAT?

Windows 7 also gets along well with a wide range of third-party peripherals, offering quick, easy connectivity to printers, music players, and other gadgets of all sorts—another big plus over Vista.

It’s so cute the way the media pushes the idea of “music players” as if anyone had anything other than an iPod, iPod Touch, or iPhone. There’s iXXX and Zune and that’s … about it.

The OS has a fast and accurate built-in search engine that easily finds all of your documents and programs.

Wow if only I had that oh right it’s been there for years. (FWIW I still never use Spotlight for a damn thing, but then again I know where all my shit is. I guess regular people need this stuff.)

Plus, it’s visually arresting—in many small, beautiful ways, Microsoft’s engineers have polished up the Vista design, creating an interface that feels fresh even after you’ve been at it for eight hours straight.

And yet if there’s one thing 9 years of Mac OS X have taught us, most everyone in the world works very hard to turn that shit off after about 3 weeks, because while it “feels fresh” 8 hours later, like a fish it’s rotten after a few weeks.

I will admit that Libraries sound somewhat useful, like Smart Folders already are. And at least the author admits that the Taskbar is an improvement on the Dock (which has scarcely been touched in 9 years).

But like most RAH! RAH! WINDOWS! authors, the author thrills in the amazing solutions to problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place:

These virtual folders corral files with the same characteristics from different places on your hard drive—say, office documents, or photos—into a single index. This way, when you click the Photos library, you see all your pictures in one place, even though the actual files may be all over your machine.

Why, pray tell, are your images “all over your machine”? We’ve had this desktop GUI paradigm thing for over 20 years: can’t you put all your shit in a fuckin folder in the same place? I know Windows only got long file names a few years ago but come on, learn to organize your shit.

Or, on Aero Peek:

One innovation, called Aero Peek, lets you find the right window even if your screen is drowning in little boxes.

If your screen is “drowning in little boxes”, it seems to me your applications and/or window manager are insane, and the need for a new method of managing them is not the right answer. Your “screen” (desktop) should never be drowning in the first place. Again, haven’t developers figured this shit out yet?

The author makes an wholly inaccurate cognitive leap here:

For example, the Mac’s Smart Folders feature lets you create something like Windows 7’s Libraries. But the Windows version is more customizable—and thus more useful—than the Mac’s.

OK, well, no, actually. Intense, abundant customization benefits few users and frustrates even more. Having fewer options makes people happier. (Complain all you want, they have science and you have anecdotes.)

Look, I get it: Windows 7 undeniably is an improvement over the execrable Vista, and brings the Windows OS more-or-less up to par with Mac OS X. And yes, I also agree that Snow Leopard produced little in the way of serious, user-facing features like, oh, the Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, and so on.

This review, and numerous others like it, all read like breathless love poems to an abusive spouse who has finally achieved some sort of inner peace and isn’t hitting you any more. At long last, you can cope with information overload and your difficult-to-manage PC. Hooray.

The Great Rewrite, ongoing.

One of the things I notice is how, from a high-level perspective, it’s not as bad as I think.

It’s all mostly very “anti-if“, if you think about it. The piece of code I’m looking at today, for example, can be refactored from

if (a) {
// do something
}

if (b) {
// check for A condition
// then do B
}
etc

to have a more MVC “controller/action” pattern eg

class aThingee {

public aAction {
// do A things here
}

public bAction {
// check that A condition was set, and do B thing.
}

}
etc


That would go a LONG way to improving clarity, readability, and of course testability; our application simply cannot be tested now w/o sitting at a browser and pushing buttons until something happens.

I still maintain that at the end of the day, this is a from-scratch rewrite no matter how you want to spin it: to get to a state where you’re using something even remotely MVC-ish is herculean at best. That said, I now see a lot better how to “fold in” a lot of the existing code into a newly “skeletonized” MVC structure.

Untitled.

Mayhap, that I am cynical

“Fate of some Sun technologies still up in the air” (here).

Glassfish is Sun’s “reference implementation” of the J2EE standard. Does Oracle need that, with WebLogic already in the fold and a serious revenue generator? Can you monetize multiple J2EE stacks, esp. when a J2EE stack is pretty much one-size-fits-all to begin with?

Netbeans is an IDE that is really fantastic and more than excellent competition for Eclipse; it’s lighter and faster, I think, and certain can appeal to a big segment. But does it drive revenue? Can you monetize it?

See where I’m going here?

Translation of common pundit/enthusiast terms to regular-people speak (an ongoing series)

imperfect user interface: sufficiently awful as to have the average user give up, or create such awkward “cargo cult” use patterns that it becomes a hindrance, not a benefit, to using the application/device.

somewhat laggy: Sufficiently slow as to cause the average user to notice.

today’s hardware: any PC, PC component, or consumer electronics device you a)can’t afford, or b)isn’t out yet, or both.

The funniest part of the Peace Prize thing…

… is right now a lot of PBO’s most enthusiastic supporters are saying, out loud and in public:

‘Cause, srsly, wat?

Obviously useless dipshit scumfucks like Limbaugh and Beck will throw giant fits, that’s to be expected. But it’s to be expected if he deserved it.

It should also be noted that extensive freakouts over it (eg Limbaugh, Beck, and basically all the Republicans in the world) are idiotic and shallow: I’m not entirely sure exactly what kind of shit winning this award means to anyone ever. Look, it’s great that Jimmy Carter got one for making Egypt and Israel stop hating on each other, seriously it’s awesome, but it didn’t bring about lasting world peace. It brought about a period of relative calm after which a bunch of other assholes jumped into Egypt’s place (condemning them all the while, you’ll note).

So really, if the reality is he wasn’t seeking the award and they (the Nobel people) had some great brain flash to give it to him to basically say “FUCK YOU” to GWB or something, then really, what the hell, man. That makes Barry an innocent of sorts and turns the WHOLE GODDAMN THING into serious high-school-grade drama. Except with adults, on a world stage. Is that where we’re at, as a people?

WAT

So, Amazon … exactly what led you to think that “Meyenberg Goat Milk (Powdered), 12 oz powder” was, in fact, desired by me?

I have never purchased milk, nor goats, nor powders, nor any combination thereof, from you. And yet, here we are today: “We think you’d like this goat’s milk”. I think there’s something you’re not telling me, and frankly that upsets me.

I thought we could talk to each other.

I thought we’d shared something special.

Virtualization provisioning and planning: what’s it all MEAN?

I want to run N instances of Linux in a virtual machine, specifically with Xen. These instances will run a PHP app, which is to say, apache httpd and sftpd.

I have what I thought was a simple question:

Just how much horsepower does it take, per instance?

And what I mean is: you can set up images to use a specific amount of RAM. Since these virtual instances are using part of the resources of the main (dom0 in virt-speak) server instance, just how do you estimate your needs? Moreover is there a reasonably concise way of estimating load, eg if under X requests/sec you use Y RAM and Z CPU on “bare metal”, is there any means by which you can estimate the number of instances you can safely run on a given box?

These and many more questions I assumed simple don’t seem to be answered in the usual places, eg the Wiki and the FAQ.

VMWare will tell you the answers to these questions (and many more!) and all you have to do is pay for it; they sell you a piece of Windows software to plop on your server or whatever to figure all this out.

I suppose, in my laziness, I had expected there to be “VirtDave’s Guide To Virtualization!!!!11″ somewhere; there seems to be for just about everything else out there. But instead most of the virtualization stuff is marketing fluff (there’s a LOT of it out there, disguised as technical data) or blogs about various nitty gritty technical details (HOWTO bridge something something “peth0″ something something), but never the prelude, the story about the story.

The reason all this scares me is, I’ve pretty much figured out that some of our current network services can be virtualized, by nature of the hardware they’re on being so. fucking. weak. Our DNS, SMTP and other support services can easily run as virtual instances, as they use virtually no CPU, RAM or disk to begin with.

But running our app? I guess the only way to find out is to obtain a spare $10k 8U megabox and see how many instances of LAMP I can throw at it before it melts, and have it all done before we have to give the box back (I think Sun does loaners, right?).

That makes me sad.

Switching Platforms: ultimately lock-in is mental

Today I had an absolutely awful experience with Microsoft Windows.

Without going into too much technical detail, installing a new SSL certificate required a full reboot, as opposed to simply completing the wizard to import, setting the cert for the host in IIS, and restarting IIS. There are a lot of reasons this could be considered shitty – I’ve had a lot of issues in my time with Linux and Mac OS X but never once have I had to restart the entire machine to swap out a few hundred bytes into an application/service/daemon.

The entire experience illustrated the fundamental disconnect between the Unix mindset and the Windows mindset:

Convert XBEL to Yojimbo with Ruby and Appscript

Let’s assume you have an XBEL file full of links, say from WebNoteHappy, and you want them into Yojimbo.
[snip]
Up on Github.