Massless

I am a hill of work. The downturn surprises me.

One project down. The new version of the massive supply chain B2B app I've been working on has been released. I can breathe again. So now... 3 to go. And then maybe I can update any of my neglected open source projects...

Rather than lazily relying on anecdotal experience for a post, I'm instead going to lazily rely on linking to the interesting-ness of other people. So, here's (whew!) a body of links I've been meaning to archive in Massless. Some will be old news for you. And most are Very Geek.

(For the non-geeks, here's a link to movie I saw a piece of on KQED that particularly caughy my eye. Created in 1999, Weeki Wachee Girls is a 70s-tinged coming of age thing about two girls and the girl who comes between them. What little I saw seemed worth seeing.)

The links:

The database socket is deserializing: How to tell if your developers are lying to you. "Managing technical individuals requires more than just people skills - you have to do your homework, too. When you put forth some effort, your team will come around to help you."

What We're Doing When We Blog. "... as the Web has matured, we've developed our own native format for writing online, a format that moves beyond the page paradigm: The weblog, with its smaller, more concise, unit of measurement; and the post, which utilizes the medium to its best advantage by proffering frequent updates and richly hyperlinked text."

Geek Culture Considered Harmful to Perl. "Real people don't need to call their colleagues 'fuckhead'."

The interview. "Today I had an interview with the Microsoft Corporation for the Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) position. Now the nerd in all of you are wondering: 'What did they ask you?' Well I'll tell."

Interviewing PHP's Creator, Rasmus Lerdorf. "The simple parser slowly grew to include conditional tags, then loop tags, functions, etc. At no point did I think I was writing a scripting language. I was simply adding a little bit of functionality to the macro replacement parser. I was still writing all my real business logic in C."

Retrieving Data as XML from SQL Server. "... assuming we have the appropriate security permissions, we can use any browser to query our database using a simple URL based query (such as: http://www.myserver.com/myVirtual?SQL=select +*+ from + products + for + xml + auto). This then returns our results as an XML based recordset."

Is SQL a standard anymore? "... while database manufacturers claim to be within the parameters of the ANSI standard for RDMSs, there is no way to swap out one database for another without integration considerations, even on an application programming level."

What is Well-Commented Code? [filtered slashdot post] "... In any situation where I see the need for code commentary, I try first to find a way to make the code clearer. If the source code is sufficiently clear, comments are unnecessary. This also avoids the risk that the comments will diverge from the code - making claims that were once true, but no longer reflect the code's actual logic."

How to select DISTINCT items from XML via XSLT. "I am sure W3 or Microsoft will come up with a function called DISTINCT like: select = "DISTINCT(/publish/book/year)", but until then, 'preceding-sibling' is not the bad solution."

Five tips for configuring Apache. "We will examine the following strategies: tuning of Apache's accept() serialization, threading with Apache 2.0, SSL session caching with mod_ssl, optimizing the keep-alive timeout values, and examining server load to be able to tune the amount of requests the server can handle."

Are you faster in OS 9 or OS X? "It's very much dependent on the user's knowledge -- if you don't understand the interface and bring expectations that are inhibiting your ability to understand it, then it might seem difficult to you."

A Weekend With Leuschke.org I: An Evening at Everest. "The script is Elvish, although the language is that of Mordor, which I will not speak here. In the common tongue, it says 'If you fuck with me one more time, I'm going to stick my foot so far up your ass that part of my ass will be in your ass' My friend, this is the Cue of Mohr. It can be no other."

EmptyBottle.org [massless: I just wanted to point out how pretty this site looked in Mozilla 1.*]