Archive for August, 2005
August 15, 2005 at 1:35 pm · Filed under General
At work today, Tychay shared some of his excitement over DTrace. The PHP community is discovering the benefits of this system. I also had a discussion with another co-worker about this last Friday. So this is worthy of a blog post.
Terry sent me these links:
http://netevil.org/node.php?nid=413
http://blogs.sun.com/bmc?entry=dtraceandphp
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/bmc?entry=dtraceandphp_demonstrated
Here is one for Terry:
This is a sample session of a guy finding a memory leak in a window manager. Imagine doing that without this tool. Very very difficult.
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/alanc?entry=dtracingdownanxserver
I read about DTrace when it came out and talked about some of the cool things it does. Read about the binary instrumentation techniques. I think they have set the bar for my expectation. This product is so cool I thought about running DTrace on a box at home. The problem was, I couldn’t get OpenSolaris to install. I also found the environment to be clunky. They need to remember that people don’t want to invest 2 hours of their time to get a Unix proper for use (editors, nice utils, and a decent tool chain.) So, I didn’t take it any further.
Still, I see myself using DTrace in the future. If I ever run into a serious issue or performance question, I will try it out on OpenSolaris and find the problem quickly.
Also, several thoughts. come out of this.
This didn’t come from the BSD/GPL community. Why? Because real software innovation requires actual change and research and sweat. You can’t pull a 3 year project off like this without paying some decent salaries and having some infrastructure and tools for these guys at Sun to pull this off. (Note, Sun, in their questionable environment, has open sourced this gem. No doubt the Linux idiots will find flaws in it and try to create their own “Better (TM)” version.
This was a Small team that pulled this off at Sun. Small teams work better than large teams.
Having symbols for all code in your system is essential for people to diagnose issues. I’m glad Sun is taking this to heart. If you use Microsoft’s WinDbg tools, they give you symbol availability to just about every .EXE and .DLL they’ve shipped, via the internet. This visibility is essential for programmers to find bugs and solve problems quickly.
Binary instrumentation is the future. End of story.
August 15, 2005 at 11:14 am · Filed under General
Completely self-describing, funny stuff from the Jherr - Driving Sideways
http://www.bpninc.com/evideo/videomachi.mov
http://www.kkmime.org/
It’s funny because it’s true.
August 11, 2005 at 1:18 pm · Filed under General
I gotta make this sticky somehow, maybe I’ll put it in the links on the right.
Anyways, sometimes I feel a bit self-conscious about blogging. That people who read this may wonder why I do this. Blogging is more for me when you really get down to it. I mean c’mon, there aren’t that many consistent readers of my blog (other than me 
).
So, here are the reasons:
<li> It's an easy way for me to just throw something out there that my friends can read without having to email them.
Sometimes its just some helpful info that may help others. Hopefully a search engine will pick it up and save someone out there hours of effort with something that is undocumented or unintuitive.
Sometimes it is just thinking out loud. I make mistakes. Serializing the idea out helps me record the mistaken thinking or improved conclusion.
Maybe, I may change a mind out there in the wilderness. That would be nice.
August 3, 2005 at 10:05 am · Filed under General
The other day, while glancing at the news, I saw that Bush was trying to support “Intelligent Design” in the schools. Immediately, I thought he must have meant, Frank Loyd Wright or IM Pei or Ray and Charles Eams. I thought, ‘huh, it’s about time.” Being an ignorant idiot that I am, I felt bliss.
Today, however, I received an email from my sister. She has unveiled his real intent. The result of which forces me to never look at noodles the same way. I strangely feel a new resonance with my inner Pirate voice.
May you be touched forever by his noodly appendage.
August 1, 2005 at 10:13 am · Filed under General
So lately, I’ve been thinking about both platforms. I’ve been thinking about switching from Win32 to the Mac OS X land. The best way to make the judgement is to use both and compare. Luckily, for a little while at work, I got to use an eMac while developing the Plaxo for Thunderbird extension. Here are some observations:
Anti-Mac:
Windows gets the keyboard. On a Mac, unless you dig and dig, it is hard to navigate the UI with just the keyboard. On Windows, this is established and natural. I find this to be an absolute Must Have for OS X before I switch. They are moving towards this. The Mac even looked outside of its own realm and copied the ALT-TAB idea from Windows. They need to go much farther.
The Mac is just retarded with the single menu at the top. Every Mac person I talk to gets defensive about this. Eventually, this will fall too just like the whole “I really only need one button on a mouse”. I mean come on. With wide screen displays, why should I move my mouse ALL THE WAY to the left in order to change a preference when the App is all the way to the right. This will clearly end only when Steve Jobs tells his flock that this is OK to have as a preference.
Update: Lack of debugging tools. No strace or truss! No winspy!
Mac nits: (not deal breakers)
The one button mouse. (Easy to fix)
The Terminal app STILL sucks. After 15 years, you would think they could get this right. (Probably easy to fix).
Costs. (Although less so. In fact, I think this will switch over. Microsoft is trying to squeeze more $$ from their customers, and succeeding.)
Their reluctance to REALLY innovate in the App-Kit layer. They need to figure out a new path for the post Objective-C world. They need a component object model. I mean compare Safari to Firefox.
Smaller market for skill set.
More, Not Invented Here but clearly being done everywhere else surprises?
Microsoft is catching up again.
Pro-Mac:
Unix. No comprimises have to be made. Web servers, PHP, vi. Nice!
95% of what I do is free or bundled on a Mac. (Web, IM, Free compiler tools)
Great graphics engine (Quartz and the PDF for free rendering are excellent.)
It looks really nice… good experience.
Great for video and media.
Great hardware, everything works.
No spyware worries.
Anti-Both:
Both are a bit bloated.
Both force me to compromise in some way.
Pro-Both:
They don’t suck like Linux.
Thoughts?
August 1, 2005 at 9:41 am · Filed under General
Good, long article on Microsoft Vista.
I really like the new UI. More on this in the next post.
August 1, 2005 at 9:31 am · Filed under General
Here is a good site for Programmer Fonts.
and another.
and another Proggy Fonts.
I’ve been using Sheldon for quite a while. Fonts are SO important.
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