links: Chronological entries

Link: When the "best tool for the job"... isn't.

When the "best tool for the job" isn't argues that what we might think is the best tool for the job isn't. (I'm not going to mangle its ideas by trying to summarize it more than that.)

This is an issue that I sometimes feel moderately acutely, since I use X Windows in preference to something like OS X, while the general view is that Apples are the machines for people who want both Unix and a decent user experience (and there's a certain population that questions the sanity and wisdom of Unix people who aren't interested in that migration).

(From the Voidspace Techie Blog, via Planet Python.)

Link: Ten Risks of PKI

Ten Risks of PKI: What You're Not Being Told About Public Key Infrastructure is a paper by Carl Ellison and Bruce Schneier. These aren't technical risks, at least not directly, and it makes for interesting reading. (And after you're done reading your printed copy of the PDF you can leave it out in a strategic spot for other people to run across.)

(From this comp.lang.python article by Edward Elliot, which I ran across through the Daily Python URL.)

(2 comments.)

Link: Linguistic blindness illustrated

If you can answer this, you are not paying attention is a nice illustration and discussion of the importance of thinking about what you're writing in prompts and questions in software. Also interesting is a followup entry on why everyone is so against using 'yes' and 'no' for answers in dialog boxes.

(From Daring Fireball.)

Link: non-errors in English

Non-Errors is a nice catalog of things that aren't English usage errors, even though a lot of people tend to think that they are. Since I do any number of them I find this reassuring, and it's amusing to see just how old some of these perfectly proper usages turn out to be.

(From Daring Fireball.)

Link: 'Document Centric'

Document Centric is about the disconnect between relational databases and regular users, and why people keep stuffing data into spreadsheets and the like instead of 'real' databases.

(They do. Joel Spolsky has written about the Excel team's surprise at finding this out about how real users used Excel.)

(From Carlos de la Guardia.)

Link: The virtual furniture police

The Virtual Furniture Police is ultimately an unflattering view of how IT departments too often attempt to have a great deal of control over user desktops. The opening paragraph summarizes things nicely:

This is a review, of sorts, of the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Then a segue to explain how typical corporate IT policies contravene some of the excellent advice in this book.

And the title is lovely; I think I have a new catchphrase.

(From a comment here.)

(2 comments.)

Link: The Unix Heritage Society

The Unix Heritage Society has a nice statement of its aims on its front page, but let me skip straight to the neat bits: complete source code for early Unix versions, such as V7 and V6. You can browse things online, or get your own personal mirror. For a long time, having this sort of thing was a Unix geek dream, and now I have my own (legal!) copy of it all.

One of the neat things I like doing with TUHS is browsing to see the original full versions of such famous Unix bits as the 'you are not expected to understand this' kernel source comment. Here it is in full, from the swtch() routine in /usr/sys/ken/slp.c in the Sixth Edition:

 /*
  * If the new process paused because it was
  * swapped out, set the stack level to the last call
  * to savu(u_ssav).  This means that the return
  * which is executed immediately after the call to aretu
  * actually returns from the last routine which did
  * the savu.
  *
  * You are not expected to understand this.
  */

While I'm in the area, I'd be remiss if I didn't link to the Wikipedia entry on Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code. This is a famous work for old Unix geeks, and the Wikipedia entry even has links to a PDF version.

(TUHS also has links to PDP-11 simulators and disk images, so you can actually run V7 et al. Maybe even faster than it ran on a real PDP-11/70, back in the days.)

(2 comments.)

Link: a Unix sysadmin rosetta stone

Rosetta Stone for Unix is a very handy cross-index of various commands and tasks across various Unix variants. The index of tasks is especially handy as a quick 'how do I do this on X' pointer. It's available in several formats, and as a bonus you get some helpful links as well.

(Since I was just using this today to figure out how to do various things on Solaris, I figured I should finally get around to mentioning it.)

(From a Slashdot comment.)

Link: Classic Mistakes Enumerated

Classic Mistakes Enumerated is an exerpt from the book Rapid Development by Steve McConnell; it runs through 36 familiar classic development mistakes that people make over and over again. Brooks's Law makes an appearance, of course.

(From Bill de hÓra.)

Link: Why overtime is bad for everyone

The really interesting bit of Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons for me can be summed up in the lead-in:

There's a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It's the single most expensive way there is to get the work done.

The article elaborates this, and makes for interesting reading. In the same area is Hours of Work in U.S. History, if one wants another set of data.

(Unfortunately I have lost where I got the first link from.)

(2 comments.)