Author: Bill Karwin
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Is This Legal?
A user recently asked a question about GPL compatibility with his company’s commercial software offerings: I work for a software / design firm and I recently found out that our “in house” CMS is actually [based on software] licensed under the GPL Ver 2. I would like to know if it is ethical / legal…
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Learn to Program in 21 Days
A user recently asked: Has anyone “learned how to program in 21 days?” I’m not a fan of these learn how to program in X amount of days books. Some even boast, learn how to program in 24 hours. This is a joke and an insult to me as a software engineer who went through…
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Best. Perl Script. Ever.
A user recently asked: What has been your best programming experience so far? The most successful program I’ve ever written was this Perl script: map(($r=$_,map(($y=$r-$_/3,$l[24-$r] .=(‘ ‘,’@’)[$y**2-20*$y+($_**2)/3<0]),(0..30)),),(0..24)); print join(“\n”, map(reverse($_).$_, @l)), “\n”; I wrote this for a woman I was dating in 2001. Writing a Perl script for my girlfriend is not as geeky as…
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The Next-Gen Databases
A user recently asked: I’m learning traditional Relational Databases (with PostgreSQL) and doing some research I’ve come across some new types of databases. CouchDB, Drizzle, and Scalaris to name a few, what is going to be the next database technologies to deal with? SQL is a language for querying and manipulating relational databases. SQL is…
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Verifying a Company Uses Best Practices
A user recently asked how to use the Joel Test in an interview, to confirm that a software company practices what they preach with regard to professional software development habits: I’ve got an interview with a company that claims to score a 12 on the Joel Test. […] What are some ways of determining if…
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Do I really need version control?
A user recently asked: I read all over the internet (various sites and blogs) about version control. How great it is and how all developer NEED to use it because is a god bless. Here is the question: do I really need this? … I usually work alone (freelancer) and I had no client that…
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SQL Antipatterns Tutorial at the MySQL Conf & Expo 2009
My tutorial proposal was accepted, so I’ll be speaking April 20 at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 in Santa Clara. My tutorial is “SQL Antipatterns Strike Back.” SQL Antipatterns are frequent blunders committed by software developers, both novice and expert. I gave a similar tutorial last year, and I think it was well-received. I’m…
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Enough is enough, PlanetMySQL
Lately planetmysql.com has shown an increasing amount of commercial promotion for Sun products. Many recent articles included in this supposedly MySQL-related feed aggregator have nothing to do with MySQL. Now I see an article included in the feed from ComputerWorld, about database researcher David Dewitt getting a job at Microsoft. Not only is this non-MySQL-related…
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Building MySQL from Bazaar
I wanted to try using MySQL source from its new VCS, Bazaar, and I saw Daniel Fischer’s extremely helpful post “Getting started with Bazaar for MySQL code“. Thanks Daniel! Downloading using Bazaar is indeed slow, as Daniel warns. I am constrained to 1MBps ADSL, and the intial download took quite a bit of time. I…
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ActiveRecord does not suck
I’ve been reading a few blog postings such as Kore Nordmann’s ActiveRecord sucks and Mike Seth’s ActiveRecord sucks, but Kore Nordmann is wrong. ActiveRecord is fine. It is a tool that does just what it’s designed to do. What sucks is when developers try to make it do other things than what it’s intended to do. I…