Month: January 2009

Fixing advanced search performance in RT3

It’s been bugging me for a while now that advanced search is extremely slow in our RT3. I thought it was something related to the famous Perl bug, but apparently it wasn’t. Then I was I waiting for Fedora 10 to come out, so that we’d upgrade our RT3 installation to version 3.8. And that didn’t solve the problem either. Finally, we got bored and annoyed enough by this problem to actually do soemthing about it. The solution was, as often, just a Google search away. Here is the quote from this discussion:

Faulty rights on a specific queue caused the owner list to be quite long, which RT didn’t like. (By mistake someone had given the own ticket right on the queue to all unprivileged users)

I went through all the queues to check the rights, and there it was – a test queue had “Own Ticket” assigned to “Everyone”. Immediately, after remove this access levels things got back to normal.

Corporate slavery

I’ve heard an excellent phrase today – “corporate slavery“. The moment I read, it made all the sense in the world. A brief and clear description of something, straight to the point. Here is how I heard it on Twitter:

Corporate slavery begins Thursday

But aparently the term is in use for a few years. Here is an excellent photo set on Flickr. And here is a gaping void back of a business card.

Perfect.

Software engineering is like cooking

During the last few month I’ve been explaining software engineering to management types quite a bit. Most of the “bosses” that I talked to weren’t technical at all, so I was trying to stay away from famous concepts, examples, and terminology as much as I could. Of course, that required some sort of substitute for concepts, examples, and terminology. I’ve tried analogies from different unrelated areas, and was surprised as how good cooking was fitting the purpose.

Before I go any further, I have to say that I am not a cook and that I don’t know much about cooking. But. I know just about the same as any other average human being. Which, sort of, moves me into the same category with my targets, or “bosses”, as I called them before.

Here are a few examples that worked well.

Continue reading Software engineering is like cooking

W.

I went to see a totally other movie today, but somehow the schedules got all messed up and I ended up watching “W.“. I haven’t seen any trailers or posters for the film, except at the time of buing the ticket. And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t very pleased with the thought of watching more about George W. Bush – one man who has been on the screens way more than he deserves. However, the alternative was a really bad remake of a really bad sci-fi movie of the 1950s, so I went for it.

And that turned out to be a good decision. “W.” is one of those movies with the coolest cast, however very under-promoted due to not so popular ideas or angles. “W.” was directed by Oliver Stone – one of the best directors to bring a controversial and unpopular discussion to the table. Roles were played by Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Scott Glenn, Jeffrey Wright, and a few other people that you will no doubt recognize.

What I liked the most about the movie was how the good and the bad were shown. There was a whole range of characters, some of who were shown good with a few bad mistakes behind their belts, and some of who were bad with some good deeds done. And while the film was mostly about George W. Bush, each and every character was given enough time and development. Overall, it’s a really nice look at good and bad, morale and ethics, tough decisions, historical judgements, and rewards.

One other thing that I liked was how similar were the characters in the movie to their real prototypes. Not being an American, not living in the USA, not following the political scene closely, and havinga really bad memory for names, I was amazed with how fast I could recognize the characters. Often I even had to look closer to see if the character was played by the actor or if any real documentary footage was used. That, of course, is a combination of actors’ work with make-up, costume design, and camera operators. In the end – an excellent result.

I’d rate this film as 7 out of 10. Recommended to anyone who is interested in today’s world and an alternative look on how and why things ended up being as they are.

Programming religions

I’m slowly catching up with the news stream and all the jokes of the last few weeks. “If programming languages were religions” is a nice one. Here is PHP, which I spent the most time with now:

PHP would be Cafeteria Christianity – Fights with Java for the web market. It draws a few concepts from C and Java, but only those that it really likes. Maybe it’s not as coherent as other languages, but at least it leaves you with much more freedom and ostensibly keeps the core idea of the whole thing. Also, the whole concept of “goto hell” was abandoned.

And here is Perl, which is my favourite programming language so far:

Perl would be Voodoo – An incomprehensible series of arcane incantations that involve the blood of goats and permanently corrupt your soul. Often used when your boss requires you to do an urgent task at 21:00 on friday night.

Check the rest of them for fun and profit.