Coding is Hard

Kindle Screensaver Backgrounds

Posted 4 days ago.

 

I just spent a few minutes with Google and my coworkers figuring out the Kindle DX screensaver backgrounds. Some of them were sort of tough:

• Odher-style adding machine and Kindle email address
• Kindle definition
• Birds
• Virginia Woolf
• Jules Verne
• Cover of the Lindisfarne Gospels
• Jane Austen
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Emily Dickinson
• Ophiuchus constellation
• Oscar Wilde
• Hevelius sextant with second wife Elisabetha
• James Joyce
• Mark Twain
• 17th/18th oil painting of Sybilla Persica
• John Milton
• Lewis Carroll
• John Steinbeck
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Erasmus – 1523 portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger
• St. Jerome in His Study by Dürer
• Cardinal Albert of Hohenzollern, Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg: engraved portrait by Albrecht Dürer, 1519
• Charlotte Brontë
• Palladio Rotonda floorplan
• Agatha Christie
• Alexandre Dumas

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C++

Posted about 1 month ago.

 

The trick to writing good C++ code is to write it like you were writing a scripting language.

Here are some tips:

• Use the STL (I shouldn’t have to say this). C coders use arrays. C++ coders use vectors.

• Use RAII instead of dynamically allocating memory. No more memory leaks. If you need a pointer, use a Boost smart pointer.

• Use BOOST_FOREACH (or even better #define foreach BOOST_FOREACH)

• Use Boost’s regular expression libraries. Write some helper code in a utility file to make it easy on yourself.

• Use Boost’s lexical_cast library or write a template to automate casting using “stringstream.” Again, put it in the utility file.

• If you are a command-line coder, write a make file first. This doesn’t quite give you the full interpreted experience, but it does make your life quite a bit easier.

• This one I’m not sure of, but I’ll put it here anyway. Use Boost.member_function to fully leverage the STL. Right now it’s the best way to get functions and containers to interact. Unfortunately, Boost.Lambda isn’t something that I’d want to use in production code and the C++ lambda language support is still some months or years off.

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Krazy Kat

Posted 2 months ago.

 

… be not harsh with “Krazy” — He is but a shadow himself, caught in the web of this mortal skein. We call him “cat”, We call him “crazy”, Yet he is neither. At some time he will ride away to you, people of the twilight. His password will be the echoes of a vesper bell, his coach a zephyr from the West — Forgive him, for you will understand him no better than we who linger on this side of the pale

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Phusion Passenger

Posted 3 months ago.

 

Phusion Passenger is really neat. I don’t think that I’ll go back to mongrel.


Cons:

• No Debian packages.
• Didn’t play well with Debian Lenny apache2 configuration files
• Gem install suggested I install some strange prefork-dev packages when apache2-dev sufficed

Pros:

• Hey, it’s mod_rails
• Easiest apache mod that I’ve ever had to compile. The gem install was wonderful.
• No bugs or crashes so far

There seems to be a lot of serious effort (and therefore cash) invested in this program. I hope they find some way to make a lot of money off of it.

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Ruby Gems

Posted 3 months ago.

 

Sometimes I’m a little slow. In order to use a gem in irb, do the following:

> require 'rubygems'
> gem 'whatever'
> require 'whatever/library'

Ta dah!

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Encryption

Posted 3 months ago.

 

The last post on backups leads in to this post. Currently my encryption practices are all over the place. I use full hard drive encryption on one of my boxes. On another, I encrypt the entire home directory. On a third, I only encrypt confidential files.

Of course, encryption provides little protection against data intrusion on a running system, but it does provide some peace of mind in case your laptop or hard drive is stolen.

On some systems, full disk encryption is more trouble than it’s worth — Windows, for example, which only has this option available for some configurations. There, it’s generally better to encrypt individual directories. On newer distributions in the Linux world, the situation is somewhat better. Especially now that encrypted drives are automatically recognized by most recovery tools, come time to fix something.

Am I going to change how I do things? It may be a good idea to take a hard look at my practices on my semi-encrypted systems, and encrypt more directories. Other than that, I’m not too worried right now.

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Backups

Posted 3 months ago.

 

On my home computers, I keep all important data on mirrored drives. By “important data,” I mean data that I’d rather not lose, but in reality I could start over without too much trouble. Still, I had been planning to implement something a bit more robust in the future.

As I see it, here are the problems with my current set up:

1. What if all the data on one of my drives gets erased, either maliciously (fairly unlikely), or by accident (oops! didn’t mean to put that space into rm -rf / baddir/)?
2. What if someone breaks into my home and steals everything?

Clearly, off-site backups of some sort are the next step that I need to take in data security. Small amounts of data can be stored in encrypted format on the web (in gmail, for example). However, that’s no solution for hundreds of gigabytes.

So the other day I went shopping at Newegg. There were several RAID’d enclosures available. The cheapest non-JBOD solution was a little under $200 without drives. Throwing in a pair of 1.5 Terabyte drives for mirroring would have more than doubled the cost. But I don’t need that sort of reliability for backups. If my backup drive fails, I can just buy another. So I wound up buying a cheap 1 Terabyte external drive copying all my data to that. I can store it at another location to provide some off-site protection. If I were paranoid, I’d buy two. But I think I’ll spend my time worrying about getting hit by a bus instead, thank you.

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11th post

Posted 3 months ago.

 

This post just exists to see if my web blog behaves properly in the presence of more than 10 posts. Unit testing? What’s that?

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Rails freeze

Posted 3 months ago.

 

If you are going to perform a rake rails:freeze:gems, be aware of the following: the freeze will put the latest version of rails on your system into vendor/rails/. It will not use the version that your install currently points at.

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Data versus talent

Posted 3 months ago.

 

Theocacao has an interesting post about Doug Bowman’s recent complaint about Google.

“Doug’s observation is that at Google, every design decision must be backed by data. In essence, you must prove you’re right. The post is quite short, but it resonates with me because I’ve seen the same thing at other companies.”

He mentions the “belief is that data can’t lie.” Data is the great leveler, of course. With data, a manager can make a decision based on a subject about which he knows very little — yet… Data is not perfect. In many fields, or most, there is never any replacement for judgment or talent. No matter how hard people try to abstract it away.

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