So, I was reading through the May ’06 LOPSA Live transcript and came across a curious statement. [5:04p] chrisd: One of the things we can all relate to is the fact that, when everything goes right, nobody knows your name. [5:04p] chrisd: But when something breaks, everybody hounds you. [5:05p] chrisd: It’s a thankless job….
Well, today made it official. I have in my possession my Bachelor of Science and Master Degrees in Business Administration. It’s been a long seventeen years since I graduated high school and started on my advanced education, especially the first three and last four (considering I didn’t do anything about schooling for the middle ten)….
I just saw the “announcement”:http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=8933&tstart=0 my second OpenSolaris bugfix was accepted and integrated. This one is a little more substantial than the first, fixing a memory access error that didn’t check to make sure the memory location existed first. I don’t know… maybe I’ll go back to being a software developer one of these days….
I’ve always hated the “For Dummies” and “Complete Idiots Guide To” series. Maybe its just me, but I have a real problem with a book that starts out by insulting me. I wouldn’t mind seeing a series named “For the Uninformed”, at least that isn’t denegrating me. I saw to me the ultimate in these…
I’m converting a site over to LDAP from NIS. It’s a legacy HPC shop with dollars on the line for every minute of unavailability, so there’s lots of stuff that “they”, both vendors and customers, don’t really want to fix if it ain’t broke. Converting from NIS to LDAP is one of those sticky gray areas, especially when you’re talking about decades of legacy. Fortunately the problem area is restricted to just administrative stuff — no end-user type of access was ever supported. Limits the machines running special things to just a handful.
Having taken a good look at the various NIS/LDAP wrappers available, none really seemed to fit the bill precisely in a clean enough fashion for my sense of taste… My airplane reading for last year’s SAGE conference was Perl Best Practices, and I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the quality of code that I’ve been able to write since then. Following some of the guidelines, such as leaning on Pod::Usage for automatic documentation, and designing around the data, really makes an impact. Writing code that catches error conditions and reports on them in meaningful ways is also a useful practice — I’m particularly fond of the beginning section that pulls in all the required perl modules in a graceful(tm) fashion.
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I’m trying to build my linkedin network. My profile can be found here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenrea
Well, with less than 90 minutes (45 reading the book, 45 of coding and copying) I’ve got a shopping cart running. I’m finally getting the hang of this Rails thing. It’s clear that knowing the Rails helper functions and libraries is going to be at least as important as being able to write Ruby code….
Although I had some problems getting mySQL installed and talking to Ruby/Rails (all my fault!), once that was resolved, it took less than an hour or so to get the sample storefront up and running.
I’ve always been a fan of incremental development and “scaffolding”, and Rails is the very first programming system I’ve seen that really, really supports this model, and damn well.
Thanks to Jim Grizansio, the OpenSolaris Community Manager from Sun, my blog is now appearing on “OpenSolaris Blogs”:http://opensolaris.org/os/blogs/ and Jim’s “Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/jimgris site. Ok, I’m strange, I find this to be extremely exiting.
I’ll be presenting today at the “Central Ohio Linux User Group”:http://www.colug.net/. My topics today will be OpenSolaris and LOPSA. COLUG, although billed as a Linux User Group, is really focused on all Open Standards technologies. Anyone from Central Ohio, come on out. Also, if you’re within a couple of hours drive of Columbus, or if…