Why is software development so hard? It could be argued that software development is so hard because programming is so easy. Since this seems to be contradictory, I will explain what that means.

Whether or not most people realize it, the titles "developer" and "programmer" are not interchangeable. Nearly all of us (myself included) start out as programmers. We learn the programming languages, the syntax, the data structures, the program flow controls, and how to assemble these elements to produce useful components. A good programmer knows the languages, the object models, and the techniques that are capable of producing stable, working pieces of code. But a good programmer is not a software developer. Some people remain very good programmers without ever moving to software development.

To become a software developer takes a good programmer who breaks out of the "program" mindset. A program does a specific task very well, but most professional development projects must go beyond specific tasks. When a company or government agency starts a project it is very seldom a project to create a program. Instead, it is typically to create a solution. This is a very important distinction. A program is a software solution to a single, focused problem while a system is a collection of programs that satisfy a much broader class of problems.

For example, a project to transform data from a legacy system to XML results in a program while a project to make data across legacy systems available to a web-based front end is a system. The difference is that while the transformation program does a single job very well, the legacy to web system consists of many, many components, any of which at their core are a program.

From this view of program vs. system, it makes sense that a software developer is not the same as a programmer. While a programmer must be an expert in a very narrow domain of the overall problem (depth), a developer must have a solid understanding of both the depth and breadth of the problem. Not only must the developer know how to create programs, but he must also know how to assemble the many programs that perform the various tasks required to solve the larger problem.

Metaphor Crash: The difference between a developer and a programmer.

Business::US::USPS::WebTools::AddressStandardization - canonicalize a US address

Business::US::USPS::WebTools::AddressStandardization - canonicalize a US address - search.cpan.org

Improving Ext3 performance by placing the journal on a Flash Disk

Running a Linux Server on a HW RAID6 / LVM setup we are plagued by the fact that heavy activity on one file system will impact performance on all of them. If there is an active writer on one file system (especially meta data updates) then all other file systems will face extreme performance degradation. Especially read performance fell right through the floor. Response times become large and highly fluctuating.

The problem seems to even exist on simple single disk systems as is explained in this Ubuntu bug 131094.

...

So tonight, after I had connected that new disk to a spare SATA port I was ready to go.

...

Performance Impact

After running the setup for a few days, I draw the following conclusions:

*

The general slowness of all file access, caused by a single heavy write is reduced so much that it does not interfear with daily work anymore.
*

The hardlink backup (using rsync to keep a copy of the files, with hardlinks to those that have not changed) is about twice as fast.
*

The tape based backup (bacula, running at the same time as the hardlink backup) is about twice as fast as well.

In other words, having an external journal with a HW RAID setup is a MUST.

I don't know if this is legit, but it looks neat.

O+P Insights: Improving Ext3 performance with an external journal on an SSD Disk

Introduction

Handel is a quick and not-so-dirty ecommerce framework written in Perl. It consists of a set of core modules to do basic cart interactions and order processing via a plugin based pipeline.

While Handel is written to be web agnostic, it does support various different web based languages and framesworks including AxKit, Template Toolkit and Catalyst.

It was started for the conversion of an IIS/ASP based commerce site to Apache/ModPerl, but I decided that is might be useful to others so here it is on CPAN.

For the curious, Handel is German for commerce.

Handel Framework: Welcome

Here's a little Perl script that checks to see if a Web site is up. If it is not, it tries to get it up.

Basically, I couldn't really find a good way to manage a handful of sites running on Ligttpd and FastCGI. I had a shell script that would kill all the FastCGI processes and then restart them, but sometimes there were misfires...sometimes the data center would reboot and I would not realize one had misfired...etc.

Lighttpd/FastCGI are cool but... there is no management utility included, so having 10 sites on one box is a nightmare. This script helps restart them all.

server-site-status-check - Google Code

Knowledge is power. Import Genius provides access to the freshest import/export business intelligence-right down to the Bill of Lading.

Imagine having unfettered access to your overseas supplier's shipment data. You would know instantly if single-source agreements were being violated. Suppose you could receive a monthly, weekly, or daily report on your competitor's incoming containers. You would know their buying volume, and therefore their selling volume, and be better informed to make smart business decisions. All of this and more is possible with Import Genius. Call us today at (888) 843-0272 to learn more.

Interesting product from Stephen Levy's blog - realtime import data.

Products - ImportGenius.com : Competitive Intelligence Products for the Import Export Industry

A high-level shot of the Graphite Browser Web Interface

What is Graphite?

Graphite is a highly scalable real-time graphing system. As a user, you write an application that collects numeric time-series data that you are interested in graphing, and send it to Graphite's processing backend, carbon, which stores the data in Graphite's specialized database. The data can then be visualized through graphite's web interfaces.
Who should use Graphite?

Graphite is actually a bit of a niche application. Specifically, it is designed to handle numeric time-series data. For example, Graphite would be good at graphing stock prices because they are numbers that change over time. However Graphite is a complex system, and if you only have a few hundred distinct things you want to graph (stocks prices in the S&P 500) then Graphite is probably overkill. But if you need to graph a lot of different things (like dozens of performance metrics from thousands of servers) and you don't necessarily know the names of those things in advance (who wants to maintain such huge configuration?) then Graphite is for you.

Graphite: a highly scalable real-time graphing system

We're approaching the two-year anniversary of the first release in the 5.7x series of the Catalyst framework. I'm really proud of how 5.7x has gone -- it has given the project some much needed stability that was missing in the early goings. It still amuses me to look back at the changelog to watch it go from version 3.X (which is basically "Catalyst 1.0") to 5.X in the span of about two and a half months.

Although development was obviously very fast-paced then, with 14 releases since 5.7000 I wouldn't say we've stalled. Naturally, the bulk of the changes since then have been bug fixes. We've also increased the test suite from 1416 tests to 1805 (the old test suite actually ran most tests twice by default, but, by setting CAT_BENCH_ITERS=1, you will see the "1416" result).

A 5.71 dev release (5.7099_01) was recently shipped which includes a new method: go(). As marcus describes it, it "works like an internal redispatch to another action, while retaining the stash intact." I believe one more dev release will happen as I've recently checked in the long lost PathPrefix attribute.

5.71xx will be more of a short-lived series of releases to act as a buffer between 5.70XX and 5.8000. 5.8000 being the Moose conversion (see this interview for more information).

Catalyst 5.71 is nigh - Vox

You may have already heard that Chrysler is planning to provide in-car wireless internet access to its vehicles. If not, expect to hear more about it later this year when the requisite hardware becomes a sales-floor option, or next year when it becomes factory standard for some cars. null

Wow. American automotive innovation.

In car WiFi - Hack a Day

From: Jerry.Taylor
To: Johnny Hughes
Subject: Re: www.centos.org - Contact Us Form
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:15:17 -0600

I have four computers located at City Hall. All of these computers display
the same CentOS page when attempting to bring up Tuttle-ok.gov. Now if your
software is not causing this problem, how does it happen??? No one outside
this building has complained about this problem. This is a block of public
access to a city's website. Remove your software within the next 12 hours or
an official complaint to the FBI is being filed!

Third correspondence to this location.

Humorous thread in which the planet's dumbest man, mister Jerry Taylor, gets upset at the CentOS staff because his apache is misconfigured, and threatens to call the FBI unless they remove it.

www.centos.org - News - CentOS in the News - It's L-i-n-u-x, that is an Operating System