Lots of people have heard of the the house of the Winchester Widow — a 160-room house that was continuously under constructions and included such wonderful amenities as stairways to nowhere.
BoingBoing! points to her British counterpart: Joseph Williamson. Williamson hired people to build a number of tunnels under his property. Tunnels that lead nowhere. Winchester left no blueprints for her house — Williamson left no maps for his tunnels.
The private family mailing list that I run has been indexed by Google. Oops! So, I fixed the problem and then did a search on Google to see what I could find. Lot’s of Hershbergers!
Most interesting is this account of a barn burning during the Civil War:
This incident stemmed from an episode at the Henry Pendleton Hershberger home “late on a Sunday afternoon,” in October 1864.
Federal troops had been making the rounds in burning barns and mills and were closing in on the Hershberger family. The barn at the Kendrick farm and Willow Grove Mill were already on fire. Elizabeth Hershberger and six of her children watched terrified from the porch of the home anticipating the same for their barn. The husband had taken flight to the Blue Ridge to prevent the capture of a seventeen year-old son.
I took a risk earlier this year and went with XFS for the filesystem on everbody.org. I chose it because it was very mature, portable, and supported quotas in the metadata. Other filesystems use special files to support journaling or quotas, but this seemed too fragile to me.
There was a risk, though, since XFS hadn’t been merged with the main kernel tree. The risk was that it would later be unsupported. The latest summary of changes for 2.5 indicates that XFS has been merged with the main tree! I was afraid it wouldn’t make it.
Jonathon Delacour asked asked people to name the one adjective in the Lord’s Prayer. That led me to AKMA’s new weblog where he pontificated on “Hollowed”. Now, maybe I’m missing the mark entirely, but I thought “Holy” was just fine as a replacement, but he doesn’t even suggest that. Anyway, AKMA pointed to Dave Roger’s “It Matters What You Believe” of which I must quote a piece:
It does matter what you believe. Social organisms don’t have principles. Countries, corporations, even churches, don’t have principles. People can, and usually believe they do; but often they don’t understand what that means, so effectively, they don’t. We’re all too willing to modify or ignore our principles for the sake of attention, under social pressure (which is a negative, coercive form of attention), or in the face of fear.
Mark Pilgram is turning 30 just a few months before me. He measures his self-worth by how many people link to him and what they say. Which is what I would probably do if people linked to me. But, they don’t, so I have to find some other means of measuring my self-worth.
What is it? I’m trying to make it “Is life enjoyable?” because if I’m enjoying life than something must be right. But I still have this drive for perfection that I inherited from my dad that has been reinforced by being the first child. And then I’m a chronic under-achiever. What am I supposed to do with that? An underachieving perfectionist — if I were chronically depressed, who could blame me?
I’m still enjoying life.
Here is a presentation on why Yahoo! chose to go with PHP as a the server-side scripting language. I found it interesting that their own benchmarks apparently show mod_perl is better than PHP every time. And their reasoning makes sense. Except:
Why not Perl?
- Pros
- FreeBSD support and performance is great
- huge CPAN library
- we already use it for offline processing
Cons
- There’s More Than One Way To Do It (TMTOWTDI)
- poor sandboxing, easy to screw up server
- wasn’t designed as web scripting language
They got the “Pros” right. But they mis-stepped on two of the “Cons”.
Worse, by using PHP instead of Java or Perl, they’ve guaranteed two sets of code: PHP for online and Perl for offline. The presentation indicates that duplicate processing is done off-line.
I would’ve also recommended they look at AxKit since it allows much better separation of data and logic than PHP will let you have. PHP allows too much spaghetti and it is easy to get confused about where the data is and the code is. Or when code is really data.
Oh, I should add that PHP is no where close to being lisp, but Perl is pretty far along the curve.
David McCusker is in the midst of disaster recovery after being laid off last week. I’ve really enjoyed his site (well, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed his detailed specs) since he seems to have encountered situations in life. Although I’m not a professional programmer, the things we like to think and talk about are just so similar that I can’t help but identify with him. Everything from tree disasters to loss to power to work and money to balancing family life with coding fun.
Because I identify with him so strongly (even on the point of being laid off [though that was in the heady pre-bust days]), I am completely sympathetic with his search for a new source of income. Although I know it would be a disaster financially, I’ve often joked with Alexis “I hope I get fired so I can have more time to work on X.” The reality is that I would have to find some source of income to pay for the house and food and what-not, but in my imagination, I’m a super-consultant who works 20 hours a week and earns twice the money I get right now.
Ok, right…
But I know that David’s reality of not having savings and being out of work isn’t as wonderful as my fantasy, so I wish him luck.
The computer industry can no longer afford the luxury of technical myopia. IT professionals need to learn how to locate answers on the Web. Support vendors have to stop relying solely on pat answers in their own infobase and learn how to search for answers. It’s time to apply 21st-century solutions to 21st-century problems.
From InfoWorld.
I’m hoping I can get some people I work with convinced of this. They are hesitant to adopt Free Software because the perception is that there is no support. In fact, the support is better than almost any support found commercially. You just have to know how to find it.
Why are people scared of looking for support? Fundamentally, I think people want to have things given to them. They will work in their domain, but they have a restricted sense of what their domain is — they don’t feel comfortable with finding answers on Google because they have learned to lean too much on the knowledge of their support vendor.
Via slashdot, this academic paper about postmodern computer science. They even take time to validate Perl as a a postmodern programming language.
Finally, it is interesting to consider Java vs. C#. Both are arguably postmodern languages, although less so than Perl, and with stronger streaks of modernism, especially in the one-language rhetoric surrounding Java, matched by the CLR rhetoric surrounding C#. There are no significant technical differences between the two languages — both with C syntax, somewhat moderated by the Pascal tradition, with a ersatz-Smalltalk object model and a handful of Modula-3 thrown in for concurrency and modularity. The key reason these languages are postmodern is that they cannot be considered against technical criteria: comparing them is like comparing Pepsi and Coke: you don’t drink the cola — you drink the advertising.