Whoa! Via @codinghorror

Then I remembered  that I upgraded the hard drive on my MacBook to 250GB, mostly because I knew at some point I was going to install Windows on a separate partition and install BootCamp to get all of the hardware drivers working. Now seemed like a good a time as any.

Installation of Windows 7 is a bit complicated, though. It seems as if Windows 7 isn’t directly supported. You need to install Vista first, then Windows 7. In fact, these are  the steps I followed:

Burn necessary disks

The first thing I needed to do was burn Vista x86 and Windows 7 x86 disc images. This didn’t take too long as I have an MSDN subscription and broadband.

Run Boot Camp Assistant

Boot Camp Assistant is a program built into OS X. It’s installed when you install the OS and gets updated periodically whether you care or not. As you probably know, it partitions your drive and gets it ready to receive a copy of Windows.

Reboot, install Vista

Hopefully the last time I need to install Vista. At some point, say I boot camp my Mac Pro, I’ll try and skip this step and go directly to Windows 7. For now, this is what I did. Vista installation worked like a charm.

Install Boot Camp Software

Boot Camp Software is installed under Windows from the Mac OS X install DVD. For my Snow Leopard disk, it installs version 3.0 of Boot Camp. After the install, all of the MacBook’s devices came alive. I downloaded Boot Camp 3.1 from the Apple Website and installed that, which was recommended.

Install Windows 7

The Vista to Windows 7 upgrade is pretty seamless. It worked on my work PC and I expected to have no problems here. Unfortunately, out of the box, the upgrade failed. Apple had a fix for it and when I applied that, the Windows 7 install started to proceed as normal. Then, I ran into an issue where the version of Windows 7 I was using could not be used to upgrade my version of Vista. Ug. So, I opted to install Windows 7 from scratch. This is why I mentioned above  that if I did this again I would go directly to Windows 7. The install ran fine and Windows 7 is now running on my MacBook, all drivers seem to be working.

Install Visual Studio 2010 RC

Now, I can actually continue where I left off on the train, finishing my .NET twiddling on a native, Aero Glass-enabled, Windows 7 install on my MacBook.

Yay!

Antonio has always done Flag football, perhaps for the last 3-4 years. All of his friends do it and he always has a blast. Before this year, though, it was impossible to get him to watch a full football game. All my adult life, getting into football has been a challenge because none of my local friends were into it and my kids were too young. Now? No joke, Antonio has seen more full football games t han I have in my life, many times over. Sometime this fall, he got the bug and was a voracious consumer of nfl.com videos. He watched the highlights of every game, every matchup, each week. In December, he hit me  up for a two-month membership on nfl.com to gain access to the nfl archives. So, for the past 3 months, he’s been watching every game from the 2008 and 2009 seasons with no commercial interruption. What games? What team does he follow? Well, he’s a die-hard Jets fan but he doesn’t discriminate on watching games. He simply watches them all. Couple this fanaticism with his preternatural memory and you have a nine-year old boy who can name the starting players on every team in the NFL. He also knows their numbers. It’s scary.

Skiing was awesome this year. I spent years being too lazy to take the family on ski trips, opting instead for solo trips with my buddies at Hunter, Stratton a few times, and once in Vancouver. About four years ago, I went to visit my dad and I took Giovanni and Antonio for a lesson. I think Marco maybe was 2 and Sera wasn’t born yet. They had a 1-hour lesson since I was too naive to put them in a full-day so I could get a good day of skiing out of it. Anyway, years went by and I finally decided it was time. The  long story, told quickly, they all did awesome! In the three-weekend crash-course, I loaded them up with plenty of half and full-day lessons and plenty of time with Daddy on the trail. On the first weekend I took all three boys out together and that was a pain in the ass. They all went at different speeds and directions and I had a hard time managing them. By the end of the third weekend, I took all three out and it was a dream. They helped each other, stuck together, and we had a blast! Sera was in day-care for the last weekend and skied twice, but I didn’t get to see her ski. Next year, I’ll take her out on the bunny hill and see how she does. All of  the boys did fantastic, but Giovanni was a natural. I can’t believe how good he got in three weekends. On the last day of skiing, I accidentally took him on a short black diamond and I got really worried for him. But he just slid over the moguls with no  fear. Kids, with their lower center of gravities (or whatever) aren’t partaking in the same sport that adults are. The mountain isn’t as scary, and they don’t seem to get hurt when they wipe out. I guess this makes sense since my kids can jump in the air and land on their knees without a second thought. For most adults, that’s gimpy time.

Sera turned 4 on February 17 and we had family over for our usual Codignotto Brunch. She’s growing up and has shot up in height in the past six months. She’s also smart as a lick… and tough! Of course, she’s growing up with three older brothers.

Throughout December, January, and February, Marco joined wrestling and religiously attended each week. He loved it. I was thrilled he was starting a sport I had done in Junior high (though I was too heavy to be competitive) and for which my Dad was a Long Island Champ, my brother a Nassau County Champ, and my cousin a national champ. In Marco’s first tournament, he lost to a tough wrestler, mainly because he didn’t know how to wrestle. He had no experience and didn’t have a repeatable way to get another kid on his back. You can view the video here. But a few months later and plenty of hours on the mat, Marco learned what to do. On Saturday, he faced three opponents. Two he pinned and one he won by points. That video is here. I must have watched it 20 times already! He completely dominated the other kids. I was so exciting to watch.

March is here. This is when I officially start training for my Triathlon season. Two sprint tris and one olympic. Plus, I’m participating i n a 150 mile relay race. I need to run 3 legs of about 4-6 miles each, over a 24-hour period with 11 teammates. Wish me luck!

2 + 3 = 10
7 + 2 = 63
6 + 5 = 66
8 + 4 = 96

Then:

9 + 7 = what?

“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that
resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.
Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings,
photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations,
architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds,
bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things
to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do
this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.
Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.
And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate
it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember
what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take
things from — it’s where you take them to.”

– Jim Jarmusch

via Pleasure and Pain

Cheap photoshop job on my part, click for the original.

Create a macro, I called mine MoveToRead. It looks like this:

Sub MoveToRead()
    On Error Resume Next

    Dim objNS As Outlook.NameSpace
    Dim objInbox As Outlook.MAPIFolder
    Dim objFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder
    Dim objItem As Object

    Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
    Set objInbox = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)
    Set objFolder = objInbox.Folders("Read")

    If objFolder Is Nothing Then
        MsgBox "This folder doesn't exist!", vbOKOnly + vbExclamation, "INVALID FOLDER"
    End If

    For Each objItem In Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection
        objItem.Move objFolder
    Next
End Sub

The script may need to be modified to suit your needs. For instance, “Read” might not be the folder where you want to send your e-mails. Also, I originally used Outlook.mailItem for objItem instead of Object, but I found that meeting invites wouldn’t get moved. As long as the item has a Move method,using Object assures it will get called. On Error Resume Next assures you won’t get a nasty dialog if you try this on an object that can’t be moved (though I can’t think of any).

To invoke the macro, I found that I couldn’t just assign a global key, at least not the key I wanted: Alt+S. To do this, I had to create a menu item called &Send to Read and use the standard Windows menu-invoke-via-keyboard mechanism to call the Macro via Alt+S. I picked Alt+S specifically because I can move items to read with my left hand as I use  the mouse with m y right. This makes things very quick.

Enjoy!

For some reason, my web meanderings today took me to a Wikipedia article on the Twin Paradox. What always confused me was to think what images each would see if the twin on earth had a telescope trained on the spaceship and vice versa for the twin on the spaceship. Well this Minkowski diagram explains the whole thing. Wow.

Read the whole article if you were still unclear on the whole Twin Paradox thing.

• In terms of implementation effort, Mercurial has a clear advantage due to its efficient HTTP transport protocol.
• In terms of features, Git is more powerful, but this tends to be offset by it being more complicated to use.

I’ve adopted Git for my own personal use, though have recently learned that there is a whole family of distributed version control systems. After reading this article, it made a lot of sense for Google to adopt Mercurial, but left me satisfied that Git is a better tool for my personal use. Still, it probably makes sense to spend a little time with Mercurial and a few of the other systems because you never know when a little bit of knowledge can help you out of a bind.

This still worked like crap.

So, I went and changed every one of my machines to use custom DNS, changing network settings from 192.168.1.1 to 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4. Viola, DNS lookup is now instantaneous. This has already made a HUGE impact on the user experience. The speedup is really kind of miraculous and I’m frustrated that I even had to deal with it.

I made sure to change  the DNS config on both the wired/wireless connections for my laptop, too.

If you have similar problems, try the Google Public DNS Servers. The extra configuration might be worth it.

The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better
than a C, the idea must be feasible.

- A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.

Then it hit me. Create a Google Document and e-mail that. At first, this didn’t seem like it would work because the e-mail option under “Share” said, “Email as attachment…”. But when you click on that there is an option to simply paste document into your message.

Viola!

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/

After a few months, I started to understand those under-the-hood concepts. Once I did, suddenly everything made sense. I could understand the manual pages and perform all sorts of source control tasks. Everything that seemed so cryptic and obscure now was perfectly clear.

The conclusion I draw from this is that you can only really use Git if you understand how Git works. Merely memorizing which commands you should run at what times will work in the short run, but it’s only a matter of time before you get stuck or, worse, break something.

I’m still at the memorize the commands phase, but getting there.

Working with Perforce as a remote repository functions in a similar way to using svn or cvs as a remote repository. And, for that matterm semantics are pretty much the same when git itself is the remote repository (such as github.org). I’ll assume you’re already familiar with Perforce and the directions that follow are specific to Linux, work on the Mac, and I imagine minor tweaks would be necessary for Windows.

Start off with your default p4 depot on your local drive. When working in git, you won’t be working in that folder on your OS mount. Rather, you’ll work in a clone repository.

On my linux box, my depot is at ~/sandbox/nick. My perforce client-spec is defined as: //depot/sandbox/nick/… //nick-machine06/sandbox/nick/… . Next, the command I will show you will also import revision history from Perforce. To do this, you need to create a clone of this repository that git will interact with. Simple:

[nick@machine06 ~]$ git p4 clone //depot/sandbox/nick@all sandbox.git

I believe the @all instructs the git-p4 commant to import all history for the imported files. This command creates a new directory on my root alongside my p4 depot:

~/sandbox (p4 depot)
~/sandbox.git #git's repository

When making changes via git, you work in ~/sandbox.git and submit to ~/sandbox. Here is a set of operations that edit a file and submit to the master branch:

vi ~/sandbox/nick/python/delempty.py
# make a change
# save the file
# notice I didn't "open" the file for edit. It's just a file, edit it. Git will detect changes when you submit.
git commit -a
# this will commit change to git repository

Then, the git p4 command submits the latest batch of changes to Perforce. It opens the files for editing in the P4 depot, creates a changelist, and submits.

git p4 submit

This will push it to perforce. It knows to do this because the “remote repository” (~/sandbox) is known to this git repository as it’s configured in hidden config files. Same works for cvs, subversion, and other git remote repositories.

Much of what I wrote here was learned from a thread over at kerneltrap.org. A colleague at work helped me work out the remaining bits. Thanks Dan! At some point, I’ll write about how developers can submit batches of code seamlessly using git and reviewers can view them in a lightweight branch. Of course, I need to figure all that out first!

Generalizations always lead to pitfalls, so I’ll leave aside any sweeping statement about how artists used to be smart or any nostalgia for how it used to be. Having said that, this clip – which, for reference, is a snippet from a much longer YouTube clip that this dirty hipster highly recommends watching – provokes me to thought about the role of artists in a culture. Morrison was a smart dude, a reflective and insightful cat. While there certainly are countless intelligent people involved in popular music, those who most often receive the aim of the spotlight are, well, not. Anyway, check out this clip and perhaps just have a quick think about what you look for in an artist, and why it is a particular song may or may not move you. Personally, anything that is unconsciously stupid is just that: stupid. And, this dirty hipster finds stupidity irritating. Don’t you? -DFH

Previously, I had synchronized code using git between my desktop and laptop, but neither machine is an ideal master repository because:

• My laptop often has the firewall enabled
• My desktop goes to sleep often
• Both machines use DHCP and every now and then the IP changes and I don’t want to bother with static IP’s
• etc.

So, my web server has shell access. I created a new user, created a new master repository, and synchronized my laptop and desktop to this repository. I imagine some of you have had experience with git and some haven’t. For those of you with no experience, git is a version control system just like CVS, Subversion, Perforce, et al.

What’s unique about git is that it’s fast, easy to use, and works on a distributed model so powerful it’s silly. The git website has this to say:

Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server.Branching and merging are fast and easy to do.

Git is used for version control of files, much like tools such as Mercurial, Bazaar, Subversion, CVS, Perforce, andVisual SourceSafe.

So, what that says is that when you create a repository from scratch, or you clone it from some remote repository (another one of your machines or a central server), the repository you create is a full repository and can serve as a master for other-sub-repositories.

Also, branching with git is ridiculously fast and easy. You can clone your entire tree instantly and start working on little experiments. Files are identified in a hidden database and all files are hashed. Hashes are compared for various operations and this makes git very fast. As far as I know, you don’t check in files, you checkin file contents.

I have my bash prompt setup so that when I’m in a branch, it shows up in my prompt. Say I have a git repot in ~/src.projects. When I’m working in the “master” branch, my prompt looks  like this:

disven: ~/src.projects (master) $

If I create a new branch, say for some experiments, I execute these commands:

git stash assumes I want to save away changes I made to master without checking them in and I want experimental to be created from a clean master branch. Notice creating a branch and switching to it are trivial. If I want to forget about my changes, I just do this:

disven: ~/src.projects (experimental) $ git checkout master
Switched to branch ‘master’
disven: ~/src.projects (master) $ git branch -D experimental
Deleted branch experimental (was 729d6b3).

I just got it back l ast night and the repair is perfect. In fact, they replaced my whole keyboard and casing around the keyboard. It feels like a new laptop, so cool! Apple is in my good graces.

Then, somewhat simultaneously, my iPhone gives me this strange error code 23. I read online that the iPhone is bricked. I bring the phone in and indeed, the phone needs to be replaced. But, since we only had a 1-year warranty and that expired 155 days before my visit, I was SOL. Apple sucks, bastards. The phone is less than a year old since it was replaced (under warranty) last Spring. I think between my wife’s iPhone and my iPhone, we had it replaced no questions asked 3 times in 1.5 years.Do they really make phones that crappy? The error 23 seems so stupid since the device, aside for the error, seems to work perfectly fine!

So, I’m out of an iPhone and will likely cancel my AT&T contract (which will cost  me $80 penalty). In a month or two, I’ll make that up in money saved by not having to pay for the plan. Then,  in the spring, I can assess whether I really  miss the little dog or my crappy work Blackjack 2 is enough for me.

In the end, expect a lot less twittering. Time to break out my Gen 3 iPod.

-n

via handy_man

via BA

Orphan uses pure horror film craftsmanship to make a series of hoary old cliches almost unbearably suspenseful. This is the most committed, downright unpleasant child-from-hell movie imaginable. It makes The Good Son play like Polyanna. Isabelle Fuhrman’s Esther would kick Macauley Culkin’s ass.

So, I googled and found the most popular PDF viewer, Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac.

My only problem with it is that there aren’t too many keyboard shortcuts that I can detect. In Acrobat, I like the ability to start zooming and panning by hitting keys with my left hand and manipulating with the right. I could not find any documentation on the project site and I searched the source code and couldn’t find any mention of keyboard shortcuts. So, I’ll probably suggest this to the author. Would be a fun project to contribute to the project by adding them myself… but my Objective-C skills are very weak. Something on my to-do list.

By the way, searching the source code is a cool feature of code hosted on code.google.com. Too bad it uses svn and not git. Although searching github is not so easy/good.

If you’re interested in viewing PDF’s in-line and you’re on a Mac, go and get the plugin. If you know of another way to do this, let me know by leaving a comment!

November weekends were filled with football, the NFL kind and the Antonio kind. Another season of Flag football has come and gone and Antonio officially got the bug. He relished every game he played and he watches every Jets game on TV. But he doesn’t stop there. He spends his free time on NFL.com, watching the week’s highlights, looking at player statistics, and soaking it all in like a 9-year old sponge is apt to do. I waited a while for one of my sons to sit down and watch an entire game with me. Giovanni really wanted nothing to do with it, but Antonio, yes. So now, I have a partner in crime and I can sit and watch football and spend time with my son with no guilt.

I did a lot of traveling and an UNBELIEVABLE amount of partying. It was awesome!

The week of the 11/12/13, my company had it’s first annual Tech Con, which is a technology convention for the people and by the people. We did it ourselves and cross-trained the heck out of each other. It was awesome and a reason to celebrate. Then, on Friday the 13th, I went to Brighton Beach Brooklyn and spent the night at a Russian Night Club. The food was incredible and far beyond anything I’ve ever seen, short of a Greek Night Club which is easily as insane. Hats off to the folks from Russia at my job who set that up. Oh, but that same weekend was not over, no. I attended the Long Island Beer Festival with four buddies. I’ve gone to this before. It’s beer. It’s 50 vendors of beer. Each vendor serves 2-4 fresh brews. You approach this 2-3 ounces at a time with a mini beer glass. I didn’t know my name by the end of it.

Oh, but November didn’t stop there. The very next week saw me on a place to San Francisco where I attended QCon. Had some good times there with Brett, Koson, Gursel, Matt, and Gregory. Saw a lot of talented speakers sing. Drank some good beer. Ate some great Thai food. Enjoyed the San Francisco suburbs. QCon inspired a new sense of excitement in me with respect to improving my craft. Lots more on this in future posts.

Oh, but November didn’t stop there. Marco started wrestling! Wrestling in my hometown is big. My father was a Long Island Champ, this was before there were state championships. His name is on the high school mat. My brother Tom was a Nassau County champion. My cousin Joey a national champ. Then there is Marco. Some of you know my little Marco and know he’s full of spunk. He can literally overpower his brot her Antonio. Giovanni has too much size, but Marco often puts him down because Giovanni is too busy laughing as Marco thrashes him around. Marco loves wrestling so far and I hear our coach is the best on Long Island. I have high hopes Marco will do well. Bu what really matters is that he enjoys what he does. I hope to teach him humility for the inevitable match when he’l get his ass kicked, so that he’ll keep on going…

The greatest test of courage on the earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.
– R. G. Ingersoll

Thanksgiving week saw me spend time with my cousins at Thanksgiving. That was a fantastic time. The kids had a great day. We played football and tag in the backward and it was lots of fun.

In the evening, I went to a local bar with my high school friend Francis and his brother Dennis. We watched the Giants eviscerate themselves on the field. I was hoping they would win, but have no real love for them. Friday I went out with my brothers and my cousin to Huntington, where we bar-hopped and had a great time. Saturday and Sunday were spent at home. My Christmas tree is up. Lights are up on the house. Kids are excited, as am I.

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy holiday season to come!

No embedding, sorry. Try this link. Seriously, try it… you’ll like it. You trust me after all these years, right?

Did you every create those fancy borders using ascii dashes and equals? That’s one of my favorite things to do in a text editor.  I hold my index finger and middle finger over the pair and randomly punch each one until I get about 80 of them… every border comes out unique this way. It’s awesome, you should try it. Really. I’ll wait. Pretry cool, huh? Well, the keynote by Oracle’s Dave Chappel wasn’t nearly as exciting as creating dash-equal borders. These are some of the tweet’s I issued:

It might be hard to believe, but the Oracle keynote is not good on my laptop battery as I’m surfing wildly. #qcon

That was true, I burned through 25% of my battery. If you think that was clever, you should have seen my next tweet. Golly, this was the most clever one of them all!

Oracle’s cloud strategy is more confusing than writing “Hello, World” in malbolge. #qcon

How many of  you knew what malbolge is? Seriously? Show of hands? I don’t believe you. Well, if you did then I am impressed. Consider this malbolge program:

What that program does is print “Hello World!” to the console, with no newline I might add. I mean, it’s pretty clear what it does… right? Google malbolge, I guarantee it will wast 10 minutes of your time as you digest that material. Freaky. Was I talking about the Oracle cloud strategy? I tweeted how confused I was and someone actually sent me a link (via Twitter) explaining Oracle’s strategy. Thanks Rex! Here it is:Oracle Keynote Cloud Expo 11-04-09

The presentation is seriously need of de-corporatizing as there is way too much going on. IMHO, its rubbish. In a nutshell, Oracle is offering options… private or public clouds, your choice. They will sell you the infrastructure either way.  Well, actually,  they partner with Amazon’s EC2 service for the public offering, which will run Oracle’s software stack underneath. To me—and I must admit I have no actual programming/implementation experience with a true cloud infrastructure—this is a less clear message than Microsoft provides with Azure. Azure sounds so much sexier. Being in the cloud with Azure sounds sexy. Being in the cloud with Oracle sounds kind of boring. Why were there no sessions on Azure at #qcon? That sucks.

Did you see the cool em-dashes? On Windows, you can create em-dashes a few ways. The first way is to hold down the alt key and type 0151. That’s crap. Most “Microsoft” applications will allow you to hit Ctrl-Alt-Numpad hyphen, which is more intuitive. On the Mac the finger contortion is shift+option+dash (next to the zero, up top). Yep, you got it. That works in most Mac software. Try it!

I’m in the long process of reading Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. My friend John lent this to me and I must admit it’s a goddamn chore to get through. But, every now and then it makes me think, hard. And I get smarter! In this book, Dougy often challenges the reader to “Try it” to make sure the concepts gel. So, seriously, try the em-dash thing. Do you know when to use an em-dash? Do I?

Wait, did I get distracted again?

-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=–=-===—=–===–=–=-=-=-=–=-=
Eric Evans
=-===-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=—=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

IMHO, Eric was best speaker at #qcon. I spoke to him afterwards and he said that this talk was new an mostly unrehearsed. In contrast to his first talk, which he’s done dozens of times. Nevertheless, it sounded good to me. Eric has been to my office a few times. Always a pleasure to hang out with him.

Eric challenges: modeling is not an up-front investment that pays off. It helps you get there in the first place. He also challenges the old agile adage: “The simplest thing that could possible work” is often interpreted as “quickest thing that could possibly work.” Eric says that it would be better stated as, “what is the most concise, clear, and most easily understood way to do this”… His point was to do that requires real work. It’s so sad that so many projects have failed because people did simple—and stupid—things. Oh, and don’t let me make you believe I’m not a victim of this from time to time.

Another notable quote: “Typical UML is not a good representation of the model as it is a visual representation of the program. A model, in contrast, is a collection of assumptions, rules, and choices that led you to write the program that way.” Well said, Eric.

Eric asks, how then do you reconcile Agile and Domain-Driven Design? Tech can distract us. Feature-orientation can fragment our model. Upfront analysis locks in ignorance. (If you’re thinking things are seeming a bit “disjointed”, then realize that I’m reformatting my notes… and sometimes I lose context!)

Consider this statement:

Need tools that let
us express models
without getting bogged
down in technical detail

vs.

Need tools that let
less skilled developers to use
parts made by smarter people

What Eric is saying here is really a criticism on elaborate libraries and frameworks that get created to dumb down the intricacies of a system so that “less skilled” developers can be productive. The problem is that visual programming and “compiled UML” are simply bad concepts. It seems pretty obvious. If you abstract away all the details, the “less skilled” developers will never get a real sense of  the system. They will work at an abtract level and ultimately fail to achieve mastery. Like, ever. To be truthful, language is our fundamental abstraction tool. What you talk about the domain reflects the model. Here is where DDD and Agile start to diverge. In agile, you get the right answer and that is enough (green bar!). In DDD, we want to get to the right answer for the right reason. Precious. Eric then said, to many laughs:

The way I work things is not like a waterfall, but more like a whirlpool… if we insist on violent water metaphors. #qcon

Eric then presented a specific process he and his people at Domain Language use with their clients to incorporate exploratory modeling and design into an Agile process. He called it “Whirlpool” and said that it wasn’t quite ready for prime-time, but I’ll keep a lookout and write more about it later. I don’t have the whirlpool graphic he showed, but I’ll try and get a hold of it.

Some more EE gems:

• You are not done until you have three bad ideas.
• If your model runs into one special case after another. Test the model with a new scenario.
• We will always get our predictions of the future wrong,  but this does not make predicting the future a senseless endeavor. We just have to learn not to take our predictions too seriously. #qcon

Great presentation.

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M – Dynamic Language Grammar – Amanda Laucher and Don Box
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M is a language unto itself, it’s not the Lex and Yacc model where you have a spec and you spit out C on the other end.  You can build a SQL database with M. You can use M to generate ORM layers. You can dynamically validate data in your own programs. The cool thing about M is that it’s dynamic. It’s also a CLR language so it inter-operates with all of your code (assuming you target the CLR!). It allows you to define DSL’s and validate them at runtime, nay, traverse them, violate them, and do whatever you like. All in all, seems very powerful and the audience seemed to “get it” toward the end.

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Skeptical View of Language Workbenches – Glenn Vanderburg
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This talk was a bit of a rant. Glenn fully admitted this from the start and acknowledged this to his audience, who obviously were developers of language workbenches (I think the developer of Intentional Software was in the audience). Here are more or less my raw notes:

• AspectJ-Bring meta-object concepts, instead of building it into the language like CLOS, you bolt it onto the language.
• CLOS, deep meta-programming within the language was a bad idea?
• DSL’s, internal ones, in Ruby community, have been flowering. Ruby has simple syntax… so it’s generally pretty easy to create a SAL directly within the Ruby grammar

Compared to AspectJ, which is an Arcane, complicated sub-language… only a few people understood it well enough to use effectively. Language Workbenches, overestimating programmers. You need to deal with a problem sideways using language workbenches. This is my favorite quote from the con!

There is a reason why Jedi Knights build their own lightsabers. Programmers should not use a tool that seems like magic to them. @glv #qcon

How awesome is THAT! Jedi knight references!

Eric Evans in one of his talks says, “language is our fundamental abstraction tool,” and EE seems to support Glenn’s skeptical outlook.

The counter-argument for Language Workbenches is described very well by Martin Fowler in his ‘05 treatise on the topic, Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages? In this essay, Martin describes language workbenches as systems that allow you to modify the compiled form of your code, not the text, not the machine code, but the model in-between. While I’m not a fan of visual languages, compiled UML, or the 4GL insanity of the 90’s, there is something interesting here and something future-predicting about how programmers will be programming in 20 years.

My personal prediction will see the rise of functional languages and machine intelligence (not self-awareness, yet!) and the job of the programmer will be to input “requirements” or logic rules via natural language, and the computer will generate all possible programs that can solve the problem presented. The programmer will then cull out and filter the solution that exactly fits and move on to the next problem. But this is just me talking. What do I know?

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Amazon S3: Architecting for Resiliency in the Face of Failures – Jason McHugh
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This talk was about Amazon’s Simple Storage Service and how it’s resilient to failures, like large-scale failures… like datacenter dying failures.

I don’t have too much to say about this talk. It was the last session of the last day and I was getting a bit tired. Kind of like I’m tired after writing three posts in my qcon experience!

Anyway, Amazon S3 has a goal of 99.9% uptime. I was surprised to hear this since I thought enterprise-class uptime wass 5 9’s (99.999%). Anyway, Jason went over the main reasons for failure and exhaustively went through the resolutions for each:

• Human error
• Acts of Nature
• Entropy
• Beyond Scale

I didn’t write down all of the resolutions, butyou can download the slides from the qcon website.

There was a lot of talk about Amazon’s gossip protocol. Amazon S3 uses a gossip protocol to quickly spread server state information throughout the system. This allows Amazon S3 to quickly route around failed or unreachable servers, among other things. Last year, gossip got out of control due to an error… bringing down the service infrastructure. Check out the statement. You can also check out Amazon’s service dashboard, and even subscribe to an RSS feed for it.

I did some quick Googling and couldn’t find much about the protocol, but I did read an interesting passage for a thesis titled, On the Correctness of Gossip-Based Membership Protocols:

The importance of scalability and fault-tolerance in modern distributed systems has led to considerable research in multi-cast gossip protocols. In a gossip protocol, each node forwards messages to a small set of “gossip partners” chosen at random from the entire group membership; traditional strong reliability guarantees are traded for probabilistic guaranties, potentially yielding greater scalability and fault tolerance. Nodes only stores a small random subset of the membership as maintaining complete membership views at each node is expensive. These protocols are subtle, and while they have been the subject of much simulation and analysis, formal proofs of key properties – in particular the probability of network partitioning – have remained elusive.

Jason admitted that the Gossip protocol doesn’t always work at scale and offered a link to the ElasticVapor blog which had some interesting things to say, including this statement:

One such example provided by wikipedia is in a network with 25,000 machines, it’s usage can find the best match after about 30 rounds of gossip: 15 to spread the search string and 15 more to discover the best match. A gossip exchange could occur as often as once every tenth of a second without imposing undue load, hence this form of network search could search a big data center in about 3 seconds.

Jason also recommended that once you have all of your fault tolerance scenarios implemented, you should turn off a datacenter—literally pull the plug—once a quarter. Make sure you don’t do this before you’re ready, however, as there may be some downtime ;-)

In conclusion…

Hope you weren’t waiting for more analysis on these topics. Hey, I ‘m just jotting down my notes. You can watch videos of a handful of these presentations and get the slides to most of them a the qconsf09 website.

I do hope you had a good time and congratulations for getting to this point! Looking forward to qcon next year and hope to see you there!