Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

The Slashdot Interview With Larry Wall

Slashdot runs the interview with Larry Wall, the creator of Perl programming language.  There is a wide variety of questions.  Some are technical – about Perl 6, comparison to other programming languages (Python, PHP), Perl in the browser, etc.  Some are more generic – what kind of tools Larry uses, and what are his thoughts on English being lingua franca of the computer world.  The answers are often funny, yet very insightful.

Web Development With Assembly

The other day I was joking with a colleague of mine about how much fun it would be to do the web development in Assembly.  All the usual stuff – pages would be super fast, and the whole subject makes it for some fun interview material, as the candidates mention Assembly pretty much on every CV.

WebDev with Assembly

And then I decided to do a quick Google search.  To my (not so great) surprise I got to hilarious this Reddit thread, which, among other things, links to MiniMagAsm, a web development framework written in Assembly.  It compiles into a native binary and can be executed as a CGI script.

I’m not going to use it any time soon, but I think it’s super cool, and way more than a simple “hello world” page that I was expecting to find.

SugarCRM cache directory – it is NOT a cache directory!

Here is a useful reminder from a few years back – “SugarCRM cache directory – it is NOT a cache directory!“.   Unlike most modern day web applications, which use cache/ folder for temporary files, which are safe to delete, SugarCRM keeps a bunch of stuff in there, which, if disappeared, would leave you in a very uncomfortable and confused stay.

Things have obviously improved over the years, but it’s still far from perfect.  And while we are on the subject of surprising issues with SugarCRM, make sure check my other post about working with encrypted values.  Basically, the summary is: backup, backup, backup!  If you want to sleep well at night, backup SugarCRM’s full file system (files, configurations, temporary files, caches, etc) and its database.  And never ever change anything.