joestrickler

Log critical/connectivity errors to a local disk.

I smoke; most of my family smokes, around half of my acquaintances. As best as I can tell:

External messages (warnings, PSAs) have a negligible effect on people who already smoke. The psycho/physiological considerations are much more a factor than how graphic a warning message is.

Instead, they should be doing this study on people who don't smoke. The real goal is prevention.

Personally, I'm a programmer so I don't worry about warnings anyway, only errors.

The Python LDAP and psycopg2 libraries are my biggest culprits.

My point is not that it's impossible to run 2.6; but setting it up requires a level of sophistication with Python/*nix that I can't put on the shoulders of my organization, yet.

If I were working with a couple of smart hackers, this would be a non-issue. But my feeling is my organization is like a lot of others, where anything that's not a tagged, stable "sudo apt-get install" away is not going to fly.

Too wordy. The second the words "that page doesn't exist" roll across the brain, most users are gone to the next thing.

404 requires three short sentences: Couldn't find that page. It's been reported to our developers. Here's a link that'll maybe get you closer to where you're going.

Sorry, no. I do most of my work in Python and would love to see quick Py3k adoption. But 2.3 was released 29-Jul-2003 and is still the baseline for portable code. Pythonistas are just as much a victim to the forces against migration as PHP and "other language" coders.

Just for kicks, try getting a stable webapp stack running on 2.6. I'm still not near ready to put that into production (and I run tiny, tiny websites).

Would have passed over it if not for your comment.

Read, worthwhile, archived. Thanks.

My comment was aimed at HNers, who graciously post the link directly to the print version from time to time. Just wanted to encourage this :).

+1 for print version.

Print version == less size per paragraph in bytes and visual overhead. This is especially good for mobile browsing, and I can't think of one instance where I would have missed something in the "web" version.

One step at a time. In big companies "glacial" is the standard speed of evolution.

Think about how hard it is to port code you wrote to another platform. Now think about porting flimsy code that relies on a set of interactions in an opaque system not functioning as you'd expect.

I wasn't advocating actually behaving like that. My whole point was: it's a joke.

As for the "posting in public": http://politedissent.com/archives/603

edit: Added the link.

It's frustrated comedy. I'm sure doctors have a "10 things we want our patients to know" inside joke about us, too.

Now why won't my boss let me put this on the support page? :)

Technical writing is boring. But having an artsy trendy programming guide as part of a set of introductory materials is a way to "take a break" mentally without having to go off-topic.

(At least, that's why they appeal to me...)

I don't understand why MySQL has 9 different storage engines.

Would someone mind quickly posting the benefits of that architecture as opposed to focusing on one 'storage engine' and making it really good?

It's not. I spent a week setting up and learning to checkout, update, add files, and commit. The only workflow change is an occasional trip to the shell to commit, but this is usually at the very tail of a session where it doesn't break flow anyway.

Then (if you put in on a public server, of course) your work is accessible from anywhere. Run into a friend at Starbucks and want to show him the module you wrote today? Just get into the shell and checkout your repository.

Not only that, it's a perfect record of your project. Occasionally I need to assess the status of the project vis-a-vis some point in the past (for myself when strategizing, for my boss when he needs a report, etc). Being able to look at the commit logs saves time and produces better reports (commit logs don't forget).

So even if you use only the most basic features, you still get an immense benefit from using a VCS. And the hours it's saved me in trivial tasks made it well worth the week it took to hammer down.