What. A. Pain. In. The. Arse.

Just as even Windows developers are waking up and smelling the coffee where the iPad’s concerned, it’s plain how badly that most PC manufacturers miss the boat. It took me two hours to boot a new Compaq laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium, to click through all of the ‘user experience aids’ that you have to accept or decline before you can even get to the desktop, and then to install updates, reboot several times, and install Firefox and an antivirus application. And this is a dual core machine with 2 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, a DVD-RW, and a 15″ screen. $329 new from Best Buy, for the record.

It’s a sign of how spoiled Apple people are that we bitch, moan, piss, whine, and complain to all comers that we have to plug the iPad into a USB port before we can use it.

I’ll probably be posting reviews separately as I try each one for a week or two, but here’s my personal list of organization and note-taking software that I want to try…

• Together
• Circuis Ponies Notebook
• MacJournal, seems focused mostly on blogging and groupware.
• Curio
• EverNote – I have tried Evernote in the past and liked it — until I hit a place where I didn’t have internet coverage on the iPhone and it crashed pretty hard. That was a deal killer and I haven’t tried it again.
• SoHo Notes
• Scrivener – More towards writers, but a lot of what I do is writing.

I have been a long-time user of OmniOutliner, but it doesn’t quite make the cut in my mind because of it’s very hierarchical outline form. I usually think in trees, not outlines — which are almost the same, but when the thoughts branch like a tree an outline can quickly become unwieldy.

Worth noting that Journaler used to be around, but it’s development was discontinued in Sept 2009.

I’ll link reviews as I write them.

Here’s the first one: Whatever Happened to Programming @ The Reinvigorated Programmer, and here’s it’s second part: It May Not Be As Bad as All That.

Pay special attention to the addendum in that second article. The money quote for me was in the big pull from a comment by jdeitrich on HackerNews:

We talk about ‘flow’ quite a lot in software and I just have to wonder what’s happening to us all in that respect. Just like a conversation becomes stilted if the speakers keep having to refer to their phrasebooks and dictionaries, I wonder how much longer it will be possible to retain any sort of flowful state when writing software. Might the idea of mastery disappear forever under a constant torrent of new tools and technologies?

It’s the death of the hobbyist programmer. There’s a new framework release in Symfony or Zend Framework every time I re-surface a week or two later. Even with 10 years experience with programming, unit tests, and a decent level of comfort from the experience with 0.x versions and up of these frameworks, I spend all the time I *should* be coding with my nose in the docs updating code that’s been deprecated or migrated. Just keeping up in one framework can be a full time job.

How can anything get done like this?

The first step towards straightening out the new permissions structure is creating and/or changing the existing roles. Steph over at SillyBean has a good article on creating roles in the PHP code, and also mentions Justin Tallock’s Members Plugin, which automates a bunch of the things that she explains. Of course, there’s always the WordPress Documentation, and the reasoning behind the changes are in this WordPress Trac ticket.

Here’s a few examples.

MySQL

Theoretically, you could recover anything you needed from the binary log, as long as you’ve got a good starting point and a good ending point. (This, by the way, is a good reason to flush the binary logs and take a backup on a regular basis.) What if your binary log’s corrupted, though? You need to fall back to a full SQL backup … which you’re doing regularly, right?

If your binary log is corrupted, any mirrors you are using that are based on that binary log are corrupted as well.

Case in point: I had a client with a very active, very large database… north of 15GB in InnoDB. The binary log hit a bug and corrupted itself. The backups were being done from that mirror so that they didn’t interrupt the main machine’s processing, but they only kept a few days worth, so we couldn’t use those backups to restore. The most recent un-corrupted dump from the main machine had been taken three months before. Luckily, the client had done some application-level backups to an XML format, and we were able to (laboriously) restore from that. It cost about $3,000 because they didn’t want to degrade their forum’s performance for a half hour every night and pay for an extra TB or storage or so to keep more than a few days worth of upgrades.

Servers

Scenario: Hard drive gets corrupted or dies. You need to get the machine back up quickly. You have a snapshot of the machine … but your snapshot is on the same storage as that machine unless you back it up somewhere else.

On top of that, storage requirements have been growing rapidly for servers. Where a linux server take less than 1GB, Windows 2008R2 can take up 20GB with system files alone. (In fact, if you plan to have any data on that server, or keep any logs, we’d recommend going with 40GB minimum for your C: drive.) It’s important to back that up to something that’s not on the same system disks.

Better yet, take a hint from the application-level backups — and back up your registry, configuration files, and data separately from the snapshot. We tend to use RSync for this role and put it in a rolling-backup mode with the –link-dest option to ease recovery.

VMWare

Same principle as above. Snapshots are usually stored in the same datastore. Datastore goes bye-bye, so do your snapshots.

There’s some great products out there that can really help with this issue. The one we use is VEEAM Replication and Backup. It can be used to replicate a snapshot to another VMWare cluster, or back up the datastore files at a consistent snapshot point and then copy them elsewhere all in one step. We use a two-step process — we keep them locally on the backup server and also transmit them to another datacenter across campus.

When using VEEAM with Windows, make sure that VMWare Tools is installed and that you enable the VSS integration. (You’ll also need to make sure that the administrative share option on the system drives are enabled, and that the appropriate firewall ports are opened.) This ensures that you’ve got a transactionally consistent backup snapshot.

Practice, practice, practice

The only way to make sure that you can recover from a disaster is to test recovering from a disaster. At least once a year, we practice recovering from a worst-case scenario. That means bringing up a new machine from scratch, re-implementing all of the options and configurations, and then restoring the data. Despite that kind of restoration being something that should never happen, it does — and practice gives you insights into how to improve the processes and turns a recovery operation from an expensive nightmare that sets back all of your other processes into something that you can execute quickly and professionally.

Sun has some of the best ideas in the world. From a creativity point of view, they’re pretty amazing. From an implementation point of view, with some notable exceptions (ex: Fishworks), they’re pitiful. Sun couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse wearing a suit made of hundred dollar bills.

Half of Sun’s ideas were half-baked. (Either go fully baked, a’la Steve Jobs, or lay off whatever writes you make bad haiku, mmkay?) The x45xx line of servers is a wonderful idea and a wonderful form factor, and Sun overcame significant engineering challenges to develop it. Unfortunately, the first gen fell down hard under load and were practically unusable. The second gen is still suffering from some high replacement part and add-on costs that don’t justify the price in many cases. The integration of ZFS and SSDs as ZIL/L2ARC is wonderful, but there are a ton of technical problems that customers keep running into and Sun keeps refusing to acknowledge. It took three months to solve the problem I was having with SSDs and ZIL. I place the blame for the former on poor management controls, and the latter on excessive outsourcing of core competencies. Both are failures of management to execute the brilliant ideas that engineers come with.

It’s nice to see a company with a reputation for being able to execute and capitalize on new ideas come in. Oracle’s already started to cut, and all of the cuts I know of so far in my various interactions with the company have been well-justified. I’m really excited, from the point of view of someone with several relationships with the company, to see what comes of this merger.