WAMP/LAMP WebDev

On Dennis Ritchie Passing

2011-10-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

On October 12th, 2011 Dennis Ritchie died. Most of you are too young to remember who he was. To old geezers like me he was a programming geek many of us wanted to be. He invented the C programming language. It has been far too long since i have written a line of C. It is such a wonderfully elegant and powerful language.

Back in the day to be able to say you programmed in C gave you a certain stature among fellow programmers. The raw power and sheer beauty of pointers. The brilliance of the header files in abstracting the machine but still allowing us an intimate experience to use all its power. Being able to wisely know when to use register to create lighting fast stacks. Macros and other preprocessor directives. i could go on and on.

Most modern day block languages can be traced back to C.

Most of us involved in programming plumbing, or working to build higher order code have moved on to using higher level languages. While most still involved in plumbing and infrastructure use C++, it really is C that led the way to where we are today.

SQL, TCP/IP, The modern GUI. They all have roots that can be traced back to C. C freed us from the tedium of assembler. It allowed us to start thinking less about the machine and more about the virtual space that is software that we wanted to dream in.

Dennis Ritchie was a true icon in the programming community and will be missed. His passing is the passing of an era that in digital years seems to these gray temples like ancient history.

i forgot why i like developing software

2011-07-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

it is easy for me to get caught up in the technology wars, chasing after the silver bullet in technology, the negativity that is associated with having to deal with bad software, bad implementation practices, and much more...

... but, i am getting weary lately of getting bent by all these distractions.

Software is what i want it to be. there may be norms, there may be standard practices, there may be accepted and practiced conventions. But there are no rules. There is only your imagination and your ability to break free of so many of the norms that stifle creativity.

i forgot why i like developing software. i actually do this more times than i care to admit. i do all the bad things i mentioned above. i only have myself to blame when i do this.

i like developing software because there really are no limits or boundaries other than your own imagination and ability. i am talking about developing software as a one person shop, where there are no meetings, no deadlines. A world limited only by your own imagination and skill.

i also, far too often, forget the joy of engaging in an activity where you have total freedom, and total control. kind of like the guys on Swamp people, though probably not as cool as being a gator hunter. i suspect i forget this because i have to spend far too much of my time these days developing things i am just not all that interested in.

work really sucks when you are doing things that are not of much interest. when you have a gig that engages you it is not really work at all. But, with time being scarce and at a premium i still need a development fix that interests me.

i have found a new hobby in hydroponic gardening. i am documentating my experiences and learning. i want to put together a website on the subject. Putting two and two together i just do not want to go the drudgery of yet another website (yaw). I want to try a new user experience for delving into information. i have no idea what that new experience looks like at the moment, but that is half the fun ...

and, like i'm sitting on the beach in the keys with a cold one i have no sense of time or urgency to get anything done :-).

When Developers Do Not Work In Production...

2011-07-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

...Software suffers.
This will certainly ruffle some feathers. I suspect if I was working in development and did not have any experience with how my stuff worked in production I might take offense.
In defense of developers, it is seldom part of the plan of development leadership to expect their development staff to gain this experience. I am not talking about some afternoon field trip to one of the production customers to be a nuisance looking over their shoulders. I am talking about some real time on the pond. Sitting down with the end-users and asking them what they like and more importantly what they don't like. Getting to know their workflows and how your software facilitates, or more importantly how is impedes their work.
I am not just talking about application development that ends up in the hands of end-users. End consumer of software like Report Writers, Business Rules Engines, BI software also needs some TLC.

For example, years ago I worked with a Report Writer that in the interest of maximal reuse the vendor decoupled the query from the presentation layer. To make matters worse they stored all the queries for every report in a single file. The production systems I deal with can have up to 1500 reports to manage. They might also have as many as 8-10 staff members that write reports. To further compound this the development environment for writing reports is on each report writers individual Windows workstation. The runtime enviroment is on a Posix server. And, workstation and the server had their own, out of sync version, of that one file that held all the queries. Meaning...

We (actually, us and our customers) had NO means of keeping that query file in-sync between all the different report writers working on different reports and queries.

Further they had no means of getting the queries in-sync with that single file on the server.

As a remedy, we created a special tool that took the query from the workstation query file and appended the query file on the server. In the next two releases of their product that we upgraded to they changed their underlying metacode and broke our tool.

This approach made troubleshooting and support very difficult.

For example, if you wanted to share a report, or open a case for a report you were having trouble with here was the process you needed to go through.

Send them the report file (which contained the presentation layer)
Cut-n-paste the query from the other file to send to them. You also had to send them the name of the query (case-sensitive) so they to add it to their environment.

I could go on and on. Needless to say we got them to add functionality that coupled the query with the report. But, the real point I wish to make is that the developers lack of understanding of what it takes to support multiple employees writing reports in an operational environment contributed to what was one of the biggest software fiacos I have witnessed in my 20 years in this game.
While that example is extreme it serves to satisfy the old cliche that "you will never understand until you walk a mile in their shoes."
The #1 problem with software today is the inability to gather bullet proof requirements and translate them into killer apps. While there are many, many reasons for this, one is... that it is hard to communicate effectively with someone that has no experience with the boots you have to walk in.

I do apologize if this offended anyone. Though, it does not change my perspective on this matter one iota.

RAID Fun and Games - Part 2

2011-05-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

My "Mediasonic USB 3.0 & eSATA 3.5-Inch 4-Bay" Raid enclosure came. Seemed like a very solid and well put together device. Newegg had mostly good reviews on it. A few days later my 4 1TB Western Digital hard drives cames from geeks.com. They were $65 each. A helluva deal. Unfortunately they had an outer "caddy" and DID NOT physically fit into the raid enclosure.

I am not exactly destitute, but my outlay was $450 for a 4TB raid setup that I could use for various mucking around. Not exactly chump change. I tried to get some support, but that was a big strikeout. I really did not want to try and remove the caddy. I really had no other options for buying other drives, and did not want to take a chance on desktop hard drives as there were some folks on newegg talking about problems they encountered that made me wary.

The Mediasonic unit had its own raid controller built into the enclosure. Given the fact that the whole device cost only $200 I suspect the raid controller was not doing the raid in hardware as those controllers (the low end ones) tend to cost more than $200 alone. Still, I was just not trusting going with desktop drives given some of the reviews I read on Newegg.

I returned the drives (pained me to do so). Geek.com was really good about taking them back. Will do business with them again. They have some great deals, especially if you do not mind technology that is a little older.

While I like the Mediasonic enclosure I could not find any information (their forum, the general internet, etc...) that definitively stated they were doing software raid. The whole point of this exercise was to be able to play around with various raid configurations. I could live with a software raid setup, but the lack of information on the subject has been dissapointing.

I will continue to research the subject (though not as diligently) and maybe there will one day be a part three to this.

RAID Fun and Games - Part One

2011-04-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Recently I decided that I wanted to put togther a RAID array at home so I could do some database benchmarking. I wll not bore you with the details. I like to get my hands dirty on things like this from time to time as I feel it enhances my role as a solutions architect.

I did not want to spend a fortune on doing this. I wanted a RAID enclousre that supported at least four drives. Also, my plans were to use an older laptop to interface to the enclosure so I needed the enclosure to have an onboard RAID controller. After looking at reviews on the newegg website I decided that the "Mediasonic HFR2-S3B PRORAID Box 4 Bay Raid Enclosure" was going to be my choice. It has an onboard RAID controller and it supports Firewire, USB 2.0, and eSata. USB will work well with the connecting laptop.

I was a bit puzzled by the reviews for this and other products. They were all over the map, and prompted me to do further research before I do the deal. Turns out there are two classifications of eSata drives:

Desktop Drives
Enterprise Drives

Enterprise drives have TLER, CCTL, ERC (depending on the hard drive manufacterer. Three acronyms for the same thing.). These are, according to Wikipedia, "firmware bugfixes to reduce the amount of time a drive will attempt to recover from an error." Most RAID arrays assume that after 7 seconds that the drive is no longer available to the RAID array and RAID will drop it from the array. The goal of these three techniques is to prevent drives from prematurely falling out of the RAID array.

This is good as rebuilding a disk in a RAID array can take a great deal of time (sometimes measured in days). Given that the general goal of a RAID configuration is performance, availability, and protection of your data, having a good drive fall out of an array would seem to defeat these three goals.

It used to be that one could enable TLER on desktop drives. In fact, for some time Western Digital offered a utility to do this. It no longer does. Additionally, recovery times of todays desktop hard drives can be up to two minutes. This and the fact that you can no longer enable TLER on them make them unsuitable for use in a RAID array.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The key word for many of us is inexpensive. Let me put this in perspective for you. A 1TB Western Digital Blue Caviar hard drive is $65.00. This is a desktop disk. A 500mb Western Digital WD5002ABYS costs about $82. This is an enterprise drive. I am using Amazon for my source of pricing - researched on 4/6/2011. So, 1/2 the disk space costs about 25% more.

Apparently enterprise drives are hardier than desktop drives. I am not a hardware guy so I cannot speak to this.

In my research I was able to determine that we used to be able to enable TLER on desktop drives, but no longer can. I was not able to find a reasonable explanation as to why we can no longer enable TLER (or the other listed standards). In other words, those of us that wish to use desktop drives in a RAID array no longer can (at least not safely).

This is not my biggest issue on this matter. In researching this subject the lack of cohesive information as to what drives can be used in a RAID array is hard to come by. Ridiculoulsly and painfully hard to come by.

Also, all of the "all over the map" reviews and vendors forum discussions now make sense to me. Many claim great success using desktop drives in RAID arrays, while others write about their nightmares in using desktop drives in RAID arrays. The people claiming grand success have not yet encountered an error that takes their drive more than 7 seconds to recover from. Those experiencing problems have.

Vendors should be responsible and ...

Provide a list of drives suitable for their RAID enclosures and/or RAID controllers.
Acknowledge and provide better information on this subject

I have spent close to 8 hours researching this subject. I almost dropped $250 on desktop drives that given my luck would have worked like a champ in my RAID array until a day after they went off warranty.

alchemy 0.95beta Released to SourceForge

2011-03-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

i just released version 0.95 of alchemy to SourceForge. Below are the readme.txt notes for this release.

About alchemy
The alchemy framework has been used to create two production systems. One which host a database with over 150 tables and 1 billion rows of data. Another hosting a database with over 225 tables, 15,000 fields, and 4.3 billion rows of data.

New Stuff
Enhanced login module with encryption and multi-salts

Document Management Module.
Lots of cool new JQuery integration and examples.
Enhanced context management.
New DataMiner tri-frame module.
Hooked up examples in the framework demonstrating functionality.
UI Template patterns.

Still Needs Work

Documentation needs some TLC and some more depth.
Integration of DataMiner login into alchemy login.
More examples demonstrating functionality added to framework.

Perl For Windows Admin and Software Build Management

2011-02-25T21:10:00.000-08:00

i tend to only do one Perl project a year. This has been the trend for the past few years. But they all have filled some pretty big holes and remind me what a cool and utilitarian language Perl still is. Currently i am working on a tool similar to ant. i just finished coding out the functions that allow me to check a source and target build, doing a two way compare that produces three lists (for analysis and build):
1) files on source that are not on target
2) files on target with newer timestamp than source
3) files on target that are not on the source
Perl is still my #1 language for work like this.

I also pulled two great Perl resources from my bookcase. Win32 Perl Programming - The Standard Extensions by Dave Roth. If you are looking to use Perl with Windows sysadmin this is THE BOOK for the job. Also Network Programming with Perl by Lincoln Stein is a killer reference.

While i spend a great deal of my current life in Php i do enjoy these times when i get to do a Perl gig.

In Search of a New UI

2011-01-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

As I have been in software engineering over the years I have seen a lot of technologies and technical fads come and go. I have been witness to some pretty incredible growth in bandwidth, capacity, and hardware technology. I have been able to watch open source software, which I first regarded as communism masked as technology change the technical landscape. I have also had the good fortune to become a convert and to be a part of this movement that still has not been fully adopted and embraced by much of the business community.

I have also watched certain hardware and mobile devices, and Apple steer technology back into the land of the proprietary. I think the forces of open source are too strong to let such a shift occur en masse.
What I have not seen in either the internet or the intranet are applications that truly put the technology stacks to their fullest capability. Sorry, but the Facebook UI and the apps leaves me wanting. In the space I live, the electronic medical record (aka: EMR) there is just to lack of imagination as to what is possible in the user experience (UI) and in defining workflows that addresses real business needs, that places healtcare providers more with their patients and less with the computer. In the business application space I cannot say I am all that impressed with ERP and other types of business apps. This criticism is as much leveled at myself as it is at the industry at large. For I fervently believe that real growth and innovation will seed and flourish when you are willing to hold up the mirror in front of you prior to pointing fingers.

Now that I am working in the front-end space I have come to realize just how much norms have stagnated our notion of what an application needs to be. As I am becoming more adept with these technologies I am coming to understand what an application and a workflow can be.

In concert with that last thought it has been my observation over the years that we (myself included) like to blame the shortcomings of technology for our own lack of a) knowledge; b) technical design; and c) functional design. Back in the 90's when I was making low level hWnd calls from VB to do what I thought should be standard UI fare there may have been some truth to these arguments. Though if you asked me back in the day I really did hold a similar position on such matters... just not as strongly formed as my experience then was far less.

As I look over the landscape of the technology stack I currently work with (Php, Javascript, JQuery, CSS, Html) I realize that there really is nothing lacking other than my own ability and imagination. Having prior experience in the Java world I can say the same about that technology stack as well.
Such a realization is empowering as it allows you to really dream and contemplate what is possible. It emboldens me as for every thing I wish to do, I realize that the only impediment I face is my own lack of knowledge and understanding as to how to go about solving the problem. This in itself is very cool as I have always loved to learn.

The freedom of the open source movement and the internet has created an asynchronous development environment and an informal community of developers that are driven by their passion for software and their love of sharing the fruits of their labor with others. This community has created more jobs and revenue than the world of proprietary software. It has created opportunity for those that are economically challenged. It has created a space for learning and sharing that is unprecedented in the history of ones and zeros. If it is comminism, then I, gladly am a commie.
I know firsthand that a real developer would practice their craft for free if they could not do it as a profession. Money is always tangential to the labor of love one gets in being able to play with technology and build things others find value and merit with. Sure, there is some hubris in what we do, but for the most part the business of technology becomes our rubics cube. There are so many of these proverbial cubes in the technology space that we have great choice as to where we want to play... Configuration Management, Database Development, Database Management, Application Development (both backend and frontend), Process Automation, Testing, Scalability. The list goes on and on and on.

Today it is time for me personally to re-think and dream about what an application can be, and to attempt and put those dreams into practice. Whether successful or not the most fun is always to be had in the journey itself.

Javascript: The Learning Curve From Hell

2011-01-03T13:30:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching Douglas Crockford's talk at Google on Javascript. Javascript: The Good Parts on You Tube. It was both validating and enlightening.

Though I have been writing Javascript since 1998 I have been doing a rather crappy job. Everytime I try to spend some time and actually learn the language it ends up pissing me off even more. But, if you want to write code in the browser that is compatible natively with all the browsers you have only one choice.

It was refreshing to here someone that is so invested in this language discuss all the crappy things about the language. For example: I had no idea until 30 minutes that putting your opening braces on their own line was a problem. First, WTF?. Second, you think this knowledge would be a bit more widespread.

I have also been blown away by what I have observed as a total lack of consistency in the syntax of this language. I thought he did a rather nice job of addressing that issue.

Having spent so long as a developer on the server-side I now find myself at the client side needing some engineering discipline and rigor. I have been able to use third party controls written by others like Matt Kruse. I also have been able to put to use John Resings JQuery library and all of its wonderful add-ins. But, learning to write my own quality Javascript has been a humbling and butt kicking experience.

Doug has certainly shed some light on some of my discontent. I have just ordered his book "Javascript: the Good Parts". Beginning to sound like a commercial. But, I am desperate at this point to get my arms around this language. It is critical to my ultimate success and the evolution of the work I am doing. Hopefully this book can put me on that path. I will let you know at some point how it goes.

Art and Programming

2010-10-26T21:51:00.000-07:00

This has been a subject I have thought about for a very long time. Actually it is much more than thinking. It is also doing. In the past fifteen years I suspect I have written at least 1/2 million lines of code across a number of different languages. Everything from simple toycode to gnarley programs that do cross tabulation, or programs that convert and flatten proprietary hierarchical dictionary data [convert and flatten proprietary hierarchical dictionary]

There is a definite element of art to programming. If you do not wish to call it art, then one needs to accept that it as at least craftsmanship. Writing a quality program, or abstracting and developing a killer library takes a great deal of intellectual capital. There is enormous amounts of creativity involved in looking at and solving problems in code. For me not to consider this discipline as art is up there with stating that accounting and taxes are nothing more than problems we solve with math.

Ha! Have you ever known math that mostly boils down to simple arithmetic to be so mind bending?

Our buds at Wikipedia say that "Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects the senses, emotions, and/or intellect."

They go on to describe traditional things like music, painting, photography as art. I own a bunch of different types of cameras and dabble as a rank amateur in photography. I see many parallels between the two disciplines. The process involved in setting up a shot. Is it a worthy subject? Is the light right? How do you set everything up so the film records the same thing, the same experience you are witnessing? So many elements of design to consider.

If you are developing an application, and you are working with more than a narrow set of design inputs you are dealing with a similar canvas. There are numerous ways in which to can go about solving the problem. The technologies (the medium) you have to work with dictate how you will work. As you explore the possibilities and endless alternatives you begin to see patterns emerge. Will you, or how will you deconstruct and reuse these patterns? Again, so many elements of design to consider.

So we don't have galleries for our work. So much of the thought and design is only seen and appreciated by our peers and contemporaries. So what?

Art does not always have to be overt. Art does not always need to be for the masses. Art does not always have to be 100% pure. We call music art. Yet there are styles and genres (Jazz, Reggae, Rock, Country, Hip-Hop) that are nothing more than patterns we arrange. These higher order patterns are based upon a finite set of chords and notes and tones and symbols that we arrange and rearrange. Is programming that much different?

Okay, our net result is not something we can construe as art. But the process we go through to design and create can be. Meaning, it not always is.

I know many programmers that would not consider what they do to be art. And, I would concur that most coding is not art, and most people that code are not artists. This is reasonable. Not everyone that owns a camera and takes pictures is an artist either.

In the end I am not sure it really matters whether what we do is considered art or not. What matters most is that it is something we enjoy doing.

How Hardware Storage Increases Have Changed Software

2010-08-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago I bought a 750gb external drive for around $100, including tax. Three days ago I saw an even better deal for the same size. The cheap cost of space is really quite astounding if you look back in time.

5 years ago... Well, my current computer, I am about to swap out this friday has 80gb

15 years ago... My work issued computer was a 486dx-32mhz with a 120mb drive. Whohooo, or as they say in the Bronx, "fuuugettaboutit"

I remember back in the late nineties building web content and worrying about what impact adding a 3k or 4k graphic would do. Today I am having a hard time keeping up with the fact I can add video, graphics, build gnarley dynamic apps and not have to sweat a major load about disk space. We can thank the invention of
perpendicular recording back in 2005 for these advances in disk space.

Further, memory is cheap as well. We can quadruple memory today for the same price we paid 3-4 years ago.

And, I do not want to forget the low level infrastructure developers for their advances and optimizations in webserver and rdbms software.

Development has always been a field dominated by young bucks. But unlike us old geezers, they can't remember back to the prehistoric era when we were dealing with portable storage media that maxed out at 1.44mb, A hard drive of 40mb was the norm. You were envied by others if you had 80mb. And 512kb of memory was standard (like 2gb is today).

I am not just waxing nostalgic here. What I am trying to say is that back in that era, the hardware we had forced us to make technical design decisions that were germane to eaking out performance in the applications we developed. And, as a footnote to this, my technological forefathers would chuckle at me and say "sonny, you don't know what lack of resources are. We programmed on punch cards and had to run and debug our programs when we could actually get a time slot on the mainframe that took up an area the size of your house and had 1/1000 of the resources that you get today on that there iPod of yers".

My point is that I grew up in an era when resources were at such a premium we had to seriously consider optimization in our application development. Even today I still develop with this mindset.
Today we can throw hardware at a problem.

But, I do think performance is a key issue an application developer needs to factor into their code. Okay, programming has changed for many of us. I remember having to design databases where a table packed everything into a row that was 2k or less. Writing apps in C one would need to write queues and stacks and ponder using the verb register for which variable. Declaring a pointer against a pool of memory that was the size of a thimble of water compared to todays 4-person hot tub.

But, still there are many things todays developer can do to optimize business apps. For one, minimize disk access. I see programs all the time that invoke multiple queries or stored procedures when only one is needed. Also, there is also nothing wrong with using integers as foreign keys in database design. Using quit loop functions once you have what you need can be a time saver.

A lot of optimization of course depends on matters like how many concurrent users your app will have to contend with. And, what is the intended use of the app is another prime consideration. There are many more.

I would be the first to admit that if you are writing an app that will only have a few users saving 10ms access time through varying your coding practices is not worth anyones time.

I remember many years ago a peer looking at a Perl program I had written and giving me an obtuse (in my opinion) way of doing the same thing. Well, first off, my program was a command line batch program that was going to be run maybe once a week at the most by one programmer on their pc (it was a code generator. I won't bore you with the details). But I was curious. So, I went back to my desk and created two scenarios. One coding my way, one the way I thought was obtuse, I ran them in loops executing 1 million times using a hi-res timer to benchmark performance. And, the dude was right-on, his was faster. By about 15 milliseconds total under my test scenario.

For my intended use it made zero sense to change the code to a coding convention that seemed very foreign to my way of thinking. Plus, I thought, hey the single end user of my app may not have time to go out and have a beer and get back fast enough with time savings like that. We must always be considering the needs of our customer.

On the other end of the spectrum, during the era when client server apps were in-vogue I saw some fat client apps written that would create and dump (errr...I mean deliver) 3-5mb of data to the client in one fell swoop, taking a couple of minutes to load. Hmmmm, I remember thinking the customer will really dig that. And, this story is from a time frame when 16mb was a standard physical memory footprint.

Today is such a cool time to be computing in. One can consider true multimedia solutions in their design and not have to worry about needing to sell the customer a cray to host the app. The emergence of mobile devices (even with their evil proprietary languages) is way cool as well. Streaming video still impresses me.

And, knowing within ten years that someone will figure out how to mainstream a monitor you can see in your glasses, and a virtual full sized keyboard to type on that can be tied to your handheld. I can just picture someone on the bus coming home from work (that would not BE ME!!!) madly typing away some flame email on a keyboard none of us can see. Man, I can't wait for that day :-)

Developing a Web Development Framework - Walking the Walk

2010-08-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

(Actual Written on 7/31/2010)

Software architecture and design is and has always been important to me. A big part of of this is implementation. It is easy to code a hack. We all do it. Time constraints, money, whatever the reason making a hack is easy to do.

After one does enough gigs they should come to a realization that doing the same work over and over again can be simplified or organized in a way that makes life easy, shortens the development cycle, is easy to manage and maintain. With my alchemy web development framework this is a realization I am trying to achieve.
My main design goal regarding implementation is really founded on two main objectives.

1. Be able to quickly implement alchemy anywhere.
2. Easily update an existing alchemy implementation without breaking anything.

Alchemy is in alpha, but is already becoming a monster. The application framework alone is seventy directories and over 550 files. To makes matters just as interesting I host the framework on different posix servers, but my development environment is Windows.

I have just created a Sourceforge project to manage the builds. Right now I have started to move the content and documentation into my developergeekresources.com site. I am having to implement alchemy there as well in order to offer up the variousd templates and toycode examples.

Ultimately I want the alchemy framework to replace my four active websites. Replacing an existing legacy site is easier said than done. I want to make adding new content to them even easier than it currently is.

If you cannot effectively use your own stuff why would you expect anyone else to use it? Right now what I have is still rugged in certain areas. The only way to really see if you are on the right path is to use your own stuff. Too often software has become a modern factory where people that are producing the software never have to use it. Most do not even have to implement it, so they can be totaly insensitive to that discipline as well. A buddy of mine likes to say "fish or cut bait". I like to rephrase it to say "cut bait, then go fishing".

I must admit I am so busy my inclination and nature is to just slam something in and get back to work. Not such a good strategy if you are trying to build an entire framework. You gotta always be thinking about shit like "what will that change do to all the existing stuff?" and "how is that going to be able to implemented in a way that is extensible a year from now to include all the cool new stuff myself or someone else has conjured up that I have yet to even think about or consider.

Open Source and Google

2010-08-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

The other day I was building a portion of an app that dynamically generated charts based on the results of a query. Worked like a champ in my local development environment where the server and the browsers I use both reside on my laptop.

Then I uploaded it to my test server and the chart did not update without having to refresh the browser. Of course, the browser was caching the image and even though the data was changing, the file name remained the same. What to do?

Get the end users to lower there expectations?
Call it a WAD and modify the requirements?
Read a manual until I went into a coma?

No

I Googled: php image not refreshing ...

... resulting in a link on page one that took me to the solution. (and for that, they deserve a link.)
http://forums.powweb.com/showthread.php?t=60177

Generally, I can find an answer to my questions through Google spending only five or ten minutes. One of the most profound and unheralded innovations in the discipline of computer science is the marriage of search engines and open source software.

Sure beats the days of being dead in the water for days or weeks, getting bounced around and listening to muzak on support lines, and then having to come up with convoluted workarounds because you could not find a solution.

Computer History - Computer Technology and Prices from 1992

2010-07-30T20:06:00.000-07:00

I was playing around with my 64gb iPod Touch and it struck me how far technology has come. I thumbed through an old "Computer Shopper" from November 1992 that I have saved. It brought back some fond memories from a time when I a) still had hair, b) was broke raising two young kids, c) used to salivate at all the cool new technology I could not afford.

For instance ...

You could buy a state of the art 486DX system for a mere $2895. To put that amount in perspective, that would be a little over $4500 in todays dollars.

I was still about six months away from upgrading my 286 PC with a 10mb (thats right, 10 megabyte) to a screaming 486sx Packard Bell with a 40mb drive. I recall keeping a spiral notebook adding up all the software on my 286 so I could keep track of how much space I had left for data. Back in those days hard drive space was scarce. One used their 5-1/4" or 3-1/2" floppy drive as the primary means of storing data. The 3-1/2 floppies were great as you could buy double density disks that held a whopping 1.44mb. Today I use a 4gb flash drive I paid $12 for.

I also recall marveling when I bought my 486sx in mid 1993 at how much the prices had come down. It only cost me $599 for the computer and a 40mb drive and 512k (yes that is kb not mb) of memory.

That was no small upgrade for me as it allowed me to start using Windows. On my 286 I used DR DOS as my operating system and a cool DOS task switcher named Deskview. I actually did have a copy of Windows 286 (bet most of you never heard of that version.) It did not hurt working down the street from Microsofts main campus in Redmond that back in the day only consisted of a few buildings.

Yesterday (July 29th, 2010) I bought a 750gb external travel drive for $99. Check out these prices for Seagate drives from November 1992...

A 245 megabyte drive cost $563 dollars! Too rich for my blood.

Hah! You can buy a low end laptop today for $563. Here is a Laptop wannabee from 1992...

Five grand for a 486 with 4mb or ram and a 120mb hard drive. This was a rockin' machine back in 1992.

In 1992 we were only a decade into the PC revolution. Thanks to Intel and Microsoft and IBM we had come a long way from the PC-AT and PC-XT era. I remember working on PC's in the 80's that had no hard drives. They would come with dual 5-1/4" floppy drives. In one drive you would put your software disk (like Word Perfect) and in the other floppy you would have your data disk. You could store 360k worth of data on these floppies. If you had a double-density drive and disk you got a massive 720k of storage.

CD ROM (RO standing for Read-only) was starting to be sold under the hearding multimedia in later 1992. You could buy a CD Rom Drive for a mere $350. You could store 650mb of data on them. If you wanted a CD Drive that you could write to it would cost you at least $10,000 and these drives were not available through retail. In fact, even CD ROM drives were not even standard equipment in high end PC's in 1992. I remember getting so stoked at 650mb of storage. "Wow", I thought, you could store a whole library on one disk. Now we carry devices in our pocket that allow us to make phone calls and can hold movies and our entire music library. We can watch movies and televsion streaming to our laptops across the internet.

I thought this would be an interesting post from an old technology geezer for some of you younger folks that are not old enough to remember the early days of the PC revolution.

Technology sure has come a long way in terms of what you get for the dollar.

What i was thinking was

2010-07-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

i need a place where i can spout off about software engineering stuff in general. i think the fact that my current world largely involves open source web and database development is besides the point. good, sound, pragmatic engineering should be the goal in any venue of development (hard or soft.)

i run two somewhat geeky sites
http://www.developergeekresources.com/ and http://www.sqlinfo.net/ .
i am also in the processes of introducing an open source development framework i have named alchemy to developergeekresources. this framework leverages jquery, uses Php on the backend. Inherently the dbms of choice is MySQL, but can be readily adopted for other dbms vendor. In fact, i have already used it myself against SQL Server, NonStop SQL-MP and a proprietary database named Enscribe that runs on H-P NonStop Servers (FKA Tandem).

The general point of the framework is to make development easier for me. It also attempts to put into practice some of my ideas regarding development. Since I am the main user (at present) of the framework I have a keen sense as to what is working and what is not working for me. I will try to be candid regarding this. i truly do not wish to come across wrong here, but i really have no plans of fame and fortune with any of this stuff. frankly, i am just too old for that sh*%. that it serves me well in my endeavors is enough for me. since this is all done using open source software it only make sense to make it avialable to others as well.

I will point you to content as it gets posted, but other than that i do not plan on putting much actual content here.

Instead i plan on using this as a general blog about things related to software engineering and design. Obviously the bent/slant will be web and open source related. i promise to keep the subject matter of a techie nature. i have been a student of computer science for a long time now so be forewarned. i have also seen some real whoppers in the past twenty-five years that might be worth a few laughs.