Wandering Thoughts archives

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.)

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.)

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.)