Now @ TextDrive

I finally decided, after a botched update of plesk, that I would no longer have my own dedicated server. It’s too much work for no profit, and only existed as a legacy of my consulting days. So, I bit the bullet and transferred everything over to TextDrive. It was simple and painless. There were a few permissions issues with getting my Maildirs all moved over, but it was a success! The server at ServerBeach is gone now, so if my site wasn’t working for you yesterday or today, then the DNS was really slow to propogate into your neck of the woods. I’ve also made a semi-significant change in that the blog URL has changed from blog.neror.com to neror.com. I’ve put a permanent redirect over at blog.neror.com, so if you have a decent RSS reader, it’ll know to change.

That being said, TextDrive had a significant change of their own today (two days after I signed up). They’ve merged with/been acquired by (notice the difference in the wording of the blog post and the press release) Joyent. Joyent’s stuff seems pretty cool, and I’m looking forward to using their webmail client. I hope TextDrive can keep its community feel, though. That’s what I really like about it. There was definitely a bonus, though. They’ve upped the disk space quota from 2GiB to 3GiB. Still, the best part is that I don’t have to worry about the server at all. What a relief! Oh, everything’s a lot faster, too. 😀

New Theme!

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I finally upgraded to the latest WordPress, and all of the security holes in my blog are now filled. After doing this I realized the the blog was a little boring. Not just the content (there’s not much I can do about me being boring), but also the theme. So, I wasted a little time at work installing and tweaking a new theme. This one is the winner of the WordPress theme competition, and it was the one I liked the most. It was also one of the few I could use without having to mess with the image sizes in my moblog posts.

I did a little (very little) tweaking of the layout, and I learned a lot about wordpress themes and pages. I must admit, I was considering a switch to drupal, which I’ve used on a couple of side projects recently. Drupal is probably the best PHP CMS out there, but I like WordPress’ simplicity. I’m only using it to do one thing, so I don’t need all of the power and flexibility of drupal. Plus I already had WordPress all set up how I liked it, and the idea of having to migrate data from WP to drupal made me cringe.

Let me know what you think. I think the site looks a lot better now. Oh, I also have a Contact Form and an Archives section now. What fun!

3-0. It hurts

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The White Sox were able to beat the best and the worst that the Astros sent out against them last night. I think they’ve scored on every pitcher on the team except Brandon Backe. He’s pitching tonight, though. I don’t know what Garner was thinking, but Zeke Astacio has consistently been one of the worst pitchers in the NL all season. He shouldn’t have even been on the roster. Luke Scott could probably have done a better job. You don’t walk in a run in the 14th inning of a World Series game, Zeke. You just don’t.

It’s not all Zeke’s fault, though. Roy Oswalt fell apart in the 5th, and the Astros bats went completely silent after the 4th aside from the tying hit in the 8th. The White Sox pitchers walked 9 Astros between the 8th and 14th. We had men in scoring position in every inning from the 8th on. We left 15 guys on base, and got only 1 hit in 47 at bats after we went up 4-0 in the 4th. In a lot of ways, this game was a lot like the 18 inning one we played against the Braves in the NLDS. Except, the White Sox are a much better team.

There’s a whole lot more bitching to do, but I have no energy. The game ended at 1:20 AM, just 19 minutes short of 6 hours, and the flu shot I got in the morning had a little too much flu in it. So, that’s all for now.

UPDATE: This article sums up how I feel about old Crap Iron. I thought I was the only one who noticed. I’ve been getting into arguments with people about his managing “style” all season. Maybe someone higher up will take notice.

Worst Programming Article Ever Written?

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So, I ran across this article during a long session of blog and article reading today: Exploring Strange Languages – Programming on Linux. I found it on the wonderful blog Lambda The Ultimate. I’m not going to say much about the article, the title and its content more then speak for themselves. To give you the gist of this very content thin article, this is the introduction:

While most developers use popular languages such as C, C++ and Java to create solutions on Linux, others are using somewhat obscure or strange languages to create Linux solutions. This article will look at providing Linux solutions using such programming languages as Python, Perl, PHP, and Ruby.

Novell obviously does not monitor the articles that employees post to its “Cool Solutions” wiki. This article is an embarrassment. That this guy is a software engineer at Novell is a very scary proposition. Doesn’t Miguel work there? I feel like I should say more, but I have been rendered completely speechless.

FUD, FUD, and more FUD

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This article over at Patrick Peak’s blog really pissed me off today, and I wasn’t even in a cranky mood. I thought I’d post my reply here since it’s longer than most of my posts anyway. 🙂 Here it is:

You’re kidding me, right? Dave and Jamis, you guys went too easy on Patrick. This was, obviously, a cloaked, underhanded put down of ruby/rails developers, or just non-Java developers in general. Passive-aggressive, anyone? I had to read the post and comments 5 times, just to make sure that I’m not blowing this out of proportion. Sometimes, I’m embarassed to say I’m a Java developer.

Do you mean to tell me that if you don’t have ANT and you’re not using Java that you can’t properly develop and deploy a webapp? Come on! Everyone, at least everyone who knows what they’re doing, keeps completely separate development and production environments. The requirements (configuration, hardware, security, etc.) for each type of environment are completely different no matter what platform you’re developing for, and it’s very difficult to not separate them. Most developers keep various other environments for testing and/or staging as well, and they use build tools, version control, and scripts to tie everything together.

Heck, it’s even the same for desktop apps. Do you know of anyone who’d ship a binary to customers with debug symbols in it and assertions turned on? Not anyone who’s software is worth paying for. Build tools, development environments, and deployment strategies are not some bright new ideas dreamed up by the Java community. They’re common, everyday tools that all (well, most) professional developers have been using for longer than Java has been around. To assume that you have to be a Java developer using ANT to understand these concepts is not only naive, it’s plain conceited.

Basically, it all comes down to whether or not you know how to properly manage your project, your sorce code, and your deployments. The process is portable to any language and any platform. “Write once, run anywhere.” 😉

Update: As usual, I can’t say it as well as Dave. He always says what’s in my head so much better than I can. I guess that’s why he writes books and I don’t!