What I Get Out Of Stack Overflow
Posted on March 6, 2010
Filed Under Programming | Leave a Comment
I received a very interesting e-mail today from a reader who noticed the little box on this blog that displays my participation with Stack Overflow. I’m not going to paste the entire contents of the e-mail, however the sender did bring up some interesting questions:
- Isn’t it like Facebook, just programming themed?
- I heard editors gang up on people like on Wikipedia
- Why don’t you just join [xyz] forum or newsgroup?
- What do you get out of it if you just answer lots of questions?
The questions clearly illustrate that some people spend more time listening to the rumor mill than they do actually investigating things to their own satisfaction. Why not just go look at the site and explore it? To my knowledge, there is only one serious and hidden conspiracy. Read more
Tags: mailbag, Programming, stackoverflow
Breaking With Conventional Wisdom – Sometimes
Posted on March 6, 2010
Filed Under Programming | Leave a Comment
Despite standards, industry accepted best practices, free templates for planning networks and even common sense, not everyone can follow conventional wisdom when deploying a cloud. In fact, at least in my experience, the only times I have been able to do it ‘correctly from the start’ have been when I start completely from scratch. Most people want a relatively painless path to upgrading, not an investment in a whole new infrastructure.
This means, business nodes and storage nodes aren’t always going to have the luxury of a private interconnect. In fact, every single server in a farm may be on its own vlan, which kind of rules out things like OpenAIS, OpenMPI or anything else that needs multicast to work. Then we take the most uniquely challenging (some even say god forsaken) industry known to man, IAAS, and add that to the mix. Its very typical for successful hosts to start with just a few cheap servers completely oblivious to one another and just continue to grow in that direction. Read more
Tags: gridnix, hosting, iaas, Programming, Xen, xenstore
99 Things I Really Need To Do
Posted on March 4, 2010
Filed Under Better Living | Leave a Comment
Ok, well, I’ve done some of them. Thanks, Corey for posting your list 
Here we go:
Tags: fun, lists, mindfulness
Going Beyond HIPAA
Posted on March 4, 2010
Filed Under Computing, Rants | Leave a Comment
Behind every rule or regulation that you can imagine, you will find an intent. The intent of speed limits is to reduce deaths and injuries caused by motor vehicle accidents. The intent of HIPAA is to safe guard HI (health information) thereby transforming it into PHI (protected health information). Its one thing to implement HIPAA (and HITECH) to the letter, its another thing to understand what the two combined are actually attempting to accomplish and incorporate that intent into procedures.
Rather than take the risk of a laptop not being encrypted, its a better idea to just have “no laptop” zones. You don’t want employees downloading PHI and walking out the door with it. Even if the laptop is encrypted, your problem lies in ensuring compliance with the other parts of the guidelines. For instance, can you trust that your employee will not have PHI displayed on a screen where the general public might be able to glimpse at and read it? If not, how is HITECH going to be effective since you can’t report a breach that you can’t possibly know about? Yes, allowing a passer by to look through a window at Starbucks and see someone’s information on a laptop screen is just as much of a breach as stealing a copy of the file. Read more
Tags: Computing, dss, hipaa, hitech, pci, Rants
Stripping A File != Optimization
Posted on February 25, 2010
Filed Under Programming | 3 Comments
It is a common misconception that the “strip” command does some kind of magic optimization to an executable resulting in it running faster. Its also a common misconception that the smaller an executable is in size, the less memory it will consume.
Neither case is correct. I could write a program in 10 lines that allocates and leaks all available memory. Stripping all symbols from that executable (including debugging) just makes it harder for someone to figure out why that program is behaving so badly. The end result is now you have the same buggy code in a slightly smaller package, but now its much more difficult to debug.
Stripping a file is useful in two instances: Read more
Tags: debugging, optimization, Programming, strip, symbols
How To Get Out Of Talking
Posted on February 24, 2010
Filed Under Rants | Leave a Comment
It happens to all of us. Sooner or later, you will be forced to compose audible grunts into meaningful sequences and transmit them over the slower than snail speed of sound. Additionally, you must block until receiving an ACK over the same medium, often requesting even more transformation of thoughts into similar mutually understood grunts.
Do not despair. There is a way out of this. Read more
Crap. I’m Growing Man Boobs!
Posted on February 22, 2010
Filed Under Better Living, Humor | Leave a Comment
McDonalds: its been real, its been fun, but I think we need to see other people. I “lightly” pulled a muscle in my chest today while averting a fall due to not watching where I was going. A little while ago, I was rubbing the sore spot and noticed something I had not noticed before .. a slight “squishy” feeling. This is a sure sign of man boobs in the making, thankfully I plan to nip it in the bud.
I know its a little late to make a new year’s resolution, but I’m making one. No more fast food unless there is just no alternative. No more convenience store fried chicken, no more pizza delivery, no more microwave and eat lunches, I really have to start watching what goes into my body. Compounding this is the amount of time I stay seated while my fingers get plenty of exercise.
I’ve been meaning to eat a lot more fish anyway. My super size days are done.
144 Petabytes On Compact Flash (Yes, Just One!)
Posted on February 22, 2010
Filed Under Computing, Neat Things | Leave a Comment
You did not misread the title, its not 1.44 petabytes, its 144 (as in 12×12) on a single CF card. Read more about it here. It will still limp along at an unimpressive 32MB/sec (well, for CF, that is rather impressive) according to the CF 5.0 specification CAUTION: LINK LEADS TO AN ANGRY FRUIT SALAD.
You can also bet that these will be painfully expensive if (ever) offered in full capacity, but still worthy of a little drool. This could also be the beginning of the end of FAT16 / FAT32’s monopoly on removable storage.
Is kind of funny, I read about this while taking a break from looking at Hypertable for use on networked hand held devices. The gods must be crazy.
Tags: fat16, fat32, interesting, work, yay
keep looking »-
Me According To Ohloh
