OpenBSD 5.1 preorders are now up on the site. And minix 3.2 was also released recently. Here are some reflections on why microkernels don’t matter. I’m not saying microkernels are worse, or slow, or anything like that; they just aren’t that much better. There’s a somewhat long two part argument coming up. One part is that microkernel reliability is overstated, the second part is that the value of reliability is itself overrated.
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I didn’t know about the Shakespeare play before learning of the movie, but it sounded interesting. It’s a modern adaptation, updating the setting to the present day. Such adaptions may not please everyone, but it works. Really well, in fact.
Prescient is the wrong word, but it’s the first impression I had watching Coriolanus campaign for consul. Timeless, maybe. The modern update helps drive this home; a period setting would have allowed the viewer to dismiss the story as not here, not now. His campaign goes about as well as I imagine my presidential campaign would go. I don’t know if the timing of the movie to coincide with the primary campaigns is deliberate, but it’s apt.
My first kindle fire, back in November, lived for about two hours. Then I updated it to software version 6.1 and it was forever after frozen at the startup logo screen. Amazon kindly sent me a second fire that survived the update, which I had been using more or less happily for the past month. More happily because I can view pretty pictures and movies with it, less happily because the interface was super slow and unresponsive. About a million reviewers have said much the same.
Today, that second kindle fire apparently tried to update itself to version 6.2. Tried and failed, or as some people like to say, tried and died. Same symptoms as the first go round, frozen at the startup logo. Supposedly, this was the update that fixed the UI response issues, but I’ll never know. This time it’s going back for a return, no replacement. Maybe I’ll try again in a year, but if I need to get a new device every time there’s a software update I’ll pass.
Technical interviews are always hard to get right, for the interviewer no less than the interviewee. Too simple and the question fails to weed out the people you don’t want. Too hard and you end up selecting for people that lucked out and heard the question or a variant before. There’s no solution, thankfully, or we couldn’t endlessly debate the problem.
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Every couple days I get an email from some group because I found my way onto their mailing list. The message body: “Our system has detected that your e-mail reader does not support HTML and you are therefore unable to view the content of this e-mail.” Thanks for trying, maybe? Really, the message just infuriates me far more than typical content free text emails because I know your system hasn’t detected shit. Maybe you should upgrade to a system that detects I don’t want your email.
We have gmail at school and sometimes I forget to sign out when I’m done reading email. I usually get a reminder pretty quickly though because it doesn’t take long at all for something to break. Like news search. I search for something and click on the top news link. Then google tells me “Oh hi, your account doesn’t have news turned on so this page is unavailable.” Gee, thanks, maybe you could have figured that all out before providing said unavailable page as the top search result?
Anyway, the fix is as retarded as the problem. Logout and do the search as nobody at all. Then news is turned back on. Apparently we pay more for less.
Sooner or later, every database is going to need a schema change, usually to coincide with a software upgrade. Sometimes it’s simple, just adding a little more data. Sometimes it’s not so simple and things go wrong and you need to make them right. Here’s my current best idea how to go about minimizing pain, assuming we have some software version X that we’re upgrading to version X+1, and that the installer or upgrade tool will need to upgrade the database from schema Y to schema Y+1. I’ve used plans like this pretty successfully, but came back to the idea after thinking about the statistical component of the problem more recently.
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As allowed and/or required by the C standard, OpenBSD provides integer types in a variety of sizes. Usually you don’t need to know the exact size of a type, but it’s helpful to know. Portable code, of course, should not rely on these assumptions. There is also endianness, but that’s different.
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Here’s an analogy I’ve been contemplating for explaining the unknown unknowns concept. In particular, the assumption that one’s own experience is complete. They’re like a kid who thinks he’s a deep sea diver because his ears popped when he swam to the bottom of the deep end. The analogy is particularly suited to How bad can it be? types of conversations.
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I leave the give away Acer at home, figuring I would have no need for it and a week later find myself at the store buying another laptop. I had originally figured the T60 would be a good machine for doing all my classwork, but slowly lost interest in that idea after thinking about carrying it to class. It’s a little heavy and cumbersome, true, but I think the real deterrent is that I like it too much and didn’t want to force it out onto the mean streets.
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