Disqus - Latest Comments for Fire Fox

Re: Red Pandas

Fire Fox — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:56:28 -0000

I love the Red Panda who's standing... I've seen them in zoos many times and never saw one do that...

Re: The UpdatePanel is evil

Fire Fox — Sat, 03 May 2008 22:54:54 -0000

I've recently started working in C# and ASP.NET after years of using PHP, Perl, Java and Python on mostly UNIX platforms.

Honestly, I like ASP.NET a lot. The basic templating system, that lets you manipulate the ASP.NET document at the DOM level is fantastic.

The Web Controls, however, are retarded. They make ASP.NET seem like an advanced incarnation of 1990's web construction rather than the kind of modern framework application that good programmers are building in Ruby, PHP, Java and other languages -- it's like they're trying to compete with Cold Fusion, not the living languages that people are using now.

I 'd love to have something that works like Web Controls, but the viewstate concept just isn't compatible with the modern approach that people call MVC: real internet applications need the ability to display different 'views' based on form input and database results -- to carry information through a series of related forms. Viewstate is completely incompatible with that, not to mind the browser back button. Reliable applications keep ~most~ form state in hidden variables, or implement something that has the same semantics: there's a very limited amount of stuff that you can keep in session scope if you want to make apps that really work.

Perhaps Microsoft's MVC framework for ASP.NET will improve the situation, or perhaps somebody will make something that looks a lot like the web controls but that actually works.

Re: Crazy Talk: Reducing ORM Friction : Rob Conery

Fire Fox — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:15:28 -0000

Ugh. This is the worst case of "Visual Studio Syndrome" I've ever seen.

"Visual Studio Syndrome" is when people bang out a project quickly in visual studio, and then find it takes a few months to get the project working in a production environment. It's encouraged by a number of Microsoft tools that let you hit "F5" to run your project in a quirky development environment that has only a superficial resemblance to the environment that your product will run in.

Effective developers work in an environment that is as close to identical as the production environment as possible. It ought to be possible to build a copy of the development system for a new developer by following a checklist, and to build a new production system and move the data to it quickly. It ought to be possible to build a staging server that has a complete copy (or a big chunk) of the production system data so you can acceptance test changes before putting them into production.

You also need to consider the long-term evolution of the production system. There's going to be a day when you need to add a few new columns or a few tables to your database. It may be a few days, a few months or a few years after it goes into production, but it will happen if the system is successful. Your approach doesn't address the data migration issues, but sweeps them under the rug -- rather than solving the "two artifact" problem which is so deadly to ORM, it intensifies it.

Re: Thoughts on Ten Years of qmail Security

Fire Fox — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:58:37 -0000

qmail misses the point.

The real security problems with email are 'soft' security problems: spam, viruses, phishing and the like.

10 years ago you could set up qmail and walk away from it.

A few years later, there would be a virus outbreak and your /var partition would be out of space in an hour or two. Somebody would use your mail server as an open relay, so you couldn't get mail out to AOL users. Your users connecting via dial-up and DSL would find that they couldn't connect via port 25.

Around 2002, e-mail became a homeland security problem, and qmail didn't catch up. Dan Bernstein has the crazy idea that software is like a painting -- you finish it, get it perfect, and then it's done. He wouldn't maintain it, and he licensed it under terms that wouldn't let others maintain it.

Yes, you can install about 20 patches to get a qmail system that can survive today's environment, or you can use sendmail and postfix. Postfix has a similar architecture to qmail and has similar security and configurability benefits. Sendmail is a bear, but at least they keep it up to date, which you can't say for qmail.

Re: Thoughts on Ten Years of qmail Security

Fire Fox — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:32:40 -0000

Thomas,

"soft security" has everything to do with keeping my mail server safe and delivering messages. If a virus outbreak causes my /var/ partition to fill, that's a denial of service. If virus-infected computers are hammering my server so hard that the CPU is pegged or are making the head of my hard drive be in too many places at once, mail won't get delivered.

From my viewpoint as a sysadmin, it's all about how much time I spend dealing with exceptional events.

I got into qmail in the 90's. I loved the speed, the lack of buffer overflows, the modularity and the simplicity of configuration over sendmail.

I got out of qmail around the time netsky and mydoom turned up -- I switched to Postfix.

Was Postfix influenced by qmail? Yes! That's why I liked it so much. qmail ~was~ the best mail server of it's time when it first came out. If djb had kept maintaining it, or had allowed other people to maintain it, I might still be using qmail today.

Re: The Shadow of a Legacy

Fire Fox — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:05:24 -0000

I haven't been that impressed with backwards compatiblity in Windows: I remember seeing lots of remainder rack games from the Windows 95/98 era that wouldn't work on Win 2K or XP. Personally I really like Vista -- however, it's broken a lot of old software.

It seems that backward compatibility is a problematic around Windows. Windows users expect backwards compatiblity, but they never really get it. The promise of backwards compatibility is, I think, one of the reasons that Windows has a dominant market position. Business customers like the idea that OS upgrade aren't going to bust all their software, and so consumers.

Re: Minimizing Code Paths in Asychronous Code

Fire Fox — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:13:03 -0000

I've spent a lot of time in the last year working in GWT and Silverlight 2, both of which involve programming in a strictly typed OO language that uses XHR for communications: so you have the same issues with concurrency that you talk about in Javascript. I've been writing a series articles of patterns about how to write correct RIA's despite the fact that callbacks can run in a random order:

http://gen5.info/q/category/asynchronous-communications/

Re: YouTube Hits 100 Million Videos Per Day

Fire Fox — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 10:04:51 -0000

Youtube seemed a little unreliable last weekend; I notice that videos hang up and ultimately end early when the system is under heavy load. I wonder if they are running into scaling problems.

Does anyone know anything about Youtube's backend? Are they using the flash media server from Macromedia? They've got to have one heck of a storage system to support the random access workload they have

Re: 2008/01/27/voice-recognition-boom-to-come-me-thinks-not/

Fire Fox — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:23:14 -0000

Looking at the CS literature, I can say that the technology is going in the right direction. Researchers have built excellent speech recognition systems that run on small parallel clusters of commodity computers -- these could be economically ported to mobile devices with a little bit of codesign between hardware and software... I imagine a "perception engine" that's a bit like a GPU or the PS3 CPU.

There's also the issue that small devices are capable of doing more and more -- the tiny space for input becomes a big problem.

Voice input has been "the next big thing" for years -- there will be a year that it really hits, but will it be now?

Re: 2008/05/02/amazon-battles-ny-tax/

Fire Fox — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:19:41 -0000

As a New Yorker and a web developer, I'm concerned about the patchwork of laws that impact e-commerce.

I used to work for a company that built web sites for wineries from the Fingerlakes region. Most of the worst problems (selling to underage people) have been solved, but sellers need to know about laws at the federal, state and local level to stay legal.

It is unfair for local merchants that people don't pay taxes on online purchases. It's been suggested that people pay "use taxes" on online purchases at where they are domiciled, but that's a complicated solution for small merchants: the only winners would be big companies like Wal-Mart, Amazon and companies like PayChex.

It would be nice to see a simple and fair system of sales tax that treats online and brick and mortar vendors fairly and that doesn't put crazy paperwork burdens on small businesses. With Washington dominated by big business, this won't happen.

Re: 2008/09/30/experts-and-the-economy/

Fire Fox — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 07:48:14 -0000

Sounds to me like "the experts" are a crowd which is "too homogeneous, too centralized, too divided, too imitative, [and] too emotional."

To take an example, the television networks always trot out the same people to talk every Sunday morning. Even though about 10% of the population was strongly opposed to the Second Iraq War during the buildup, anti-war viewpoints were systematically censored from the mainstream media. The US could be in a stronger strategic position and a few thousands of our soldiers might still be alive if those voices had not been silenced.

For years, economist John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out that economics has a political function: justifying the status quo. I can't say I'm an "expert" on the economy, but here's what I know:

(1) Since 1980 or so, the financial services sector has grown in size explosively compared to the productive economy
(2) Since 1980 or so, corporate influences have dominated the government. People with other backgrounds have been entirely shut out.
(3) Since 1980 or so, Wall Street has always won in Washington over Main Street

Personally, I think the problem isn't a particular financial instrument, it's the fact that the financial system requires a continuous series of bubbles to keep moving. The financial system receives more money to "invest" than there are actual opportunities for productive investment. This forms a vicious circle of asset price inflation.

I think the American people are wising up, and realizing this is more than a short-term crisis, but it's a continuation of the pattern of Wall Street and Washington working over the rest of us. They wrote their Congressmen, and, for the first time in three decades, Congress listened.

Re: 2008/10/01/bailout-effect-tech-sector/

Fire Fox — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:21:19 -0000

Right On! For once I agree with somebody from the Cato Institute. It's taken us thirty years to get into this mess, it's going to take us more than a few days to get out.

Re: 2008/12/04/facebook-connect-identity-management/

Fire Fox — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:06:34 -0000

I've been developing a network of sites with community features.

Authentication and login is a huge can of worms. On one hand you're got all the spam and hackers, on the other hand you've got the whole problem of getting people to register. Because I've got a network of sites, I'd like the authentication to work across all of them, but I know that most users would have trouble understanding where the network stops and where it ends.

I've been thinking about facebook connect and about openid. In principle I like the idea about openid, but I don't think that most people care about or understand the idea of a centralized identity to be able to understand how to use openid. Facebook connect, on the other hand, is pretty simple. I mean, you either log in with your facebook account (often you don't need to type in any password) or you register on facebook. If somebody wanted to register on my site and they didn't already have an openid, they'd find choosing an openid provider is about as easy and worthwhile as selecting an alternative electricity provider.

In this case, users will find it empowering to have fewer choices.

So far as data portability and all that blah blah blah I think the only people who care are the people who read Mashable and TechCrunch. The other 99.99% don't even know what it is and don't care.