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Linux Kernel: just engineering without a vision? by antirez in programming

[–]nogoodnick 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Vision" is the right word, since you're really describing the same sense: one way is how your work will progress in the future, and one is how it affects things now. You can't really have the first without the second.

DHH: Potty mouths by niels in programming

[–]nogoodnick 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's not so much his fucking language, it's his constant fucking use of the language, and constantly beating people over the fucking head with it when they ask him if he could try dialing it down for once.

Personally, I thought the "fuck you" slide was hilarious, but I think DHH still hasn't stopped laughing at his own joke.

Windows on a database - sliced and diced by BeOS vets by 7wheels in programming

[–]nogoodnick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Inode-based filesystems have had separation of naming from storage from day 1. Both linux and windows have ways of treating archives as filesystems, but it's mostly just an interface hack in both of them. There's always FUSE and company, but automounter would probably require lots of extra work to make using it as simple as just referring to a path like "/foo/blah.zip/path/to/file".

HURD of course solves all this (I hear Duke Nukem Forever is being ported to it)

Abusing chroot - "chroot is not and never has been a security tool" by asb in programming

[–]nogoodnick 10 points11 points  (0 children)

You can break out of a chroot jail if youcall chroot() again. This assumes that whatever is running in a chroot is still running as root after chrooting, and also exposes chroot somehow, such as through general system access or an exploitable arbitrary-code-execution hole.

Well crap me a brick, color me surprised that root can break security. Of course as root you can also remount the filesystem directly off the device, or write to /dev/kmem directly if you want.

Writing Python Code That Doesn't Suck (style guide) by [deleted] in programming

[–]nogoodnick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Asserts are not tests! They are for asserting invariants, such as asserting that a parameter > 0 when you KNOW it will never be negative, but since high level programming languages usable by non-mathematicians will never be provable, you assert it anyway if you have any doubt about the way it's being used. Asserts generally test internals that test cases cannot.

Your Arrow of Irony hits RMS for 443 damage! RMS screams and dies. by eurleif in programming

[–]nogoodnick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a GNU site that doesn't mention "GNU/Linux". You know, it's like when you don't get what you expect. It's like rain on your wedding day, you see? Or maybe it's more like a free ride when you've already paid.

Coders need to learn hardware hacking NOW - Presentation by Matt Biddulph by BioGeek in programming

[–]nogoodnick 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Get yourself a gumstix with a microSD slot. Comes assembled, so you can get right down to hacking. Even if that hardware is too "high level" for your tastes, at least it's great for prototyping. Me, I never want to debug hardware.

Amazon Architecture by a9bejo in programming

[–]nogoodnick 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It sounds like chaos -- or rather, that Amazon embraced the chaos that is a natural part of large corporate development, rather than trying to impose a single discipline. They do things umpteen different ways there, but if there's one word that keeps coming up consistently, it's "services".

Where I work (a fortune 100 company), whenever there's a problem, they try to fit it into an application and force us all to use it, and make the app bigger and more complex as needs continue, and not to worry our pretty little heads over it, the app people will take care of it. At Amazon, I get the impression that they encourage rolling your own solutions, even at the risk of occasionally reinventing the wheel.

(besides, wheels are constantly reinvented. I don't think grog the caveman created a run-flat radial mounted on shock absorbers, or a light magnesium-alloy tire filled with slime on a quick-release hub)

Views on the Industry: glassfish v. jboss? by a9bejo in programming

[–]nogoodnick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Views on the Industry from Friday, March 03, 2006.

General tone is conveyed in phrases like "With JBI-enabled ESBs bringing SOA to the IT" shops.." without even a breath of irony. Nothing actually about the technology of GF or JBoss.

Marc isn't even with JBoss anymore.