Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Finally, my blog has a new theme. I liked the old one, but it was getting a bit… old. And the serif-font-on-a-translucent-background-image was never a great idea. I didn’t have time for a complete redesign, so I settled on the excellent Mandigo theme by onehertz. The header image is my own — the view from…
I need a new laptop. My current machine, a rebranded ASUS that I bought on the cheap a few years ago, has developed a crack in the screen hinge, so it’s only a matter of time. I have to admit, I’m sorely tempted by the Macbook Air. It’s a beautiful machine — sleek, light, even…
I dropped by the Java Users’ Group meeting last week since Rich Hickey was there to talk about Clojure. I expected a bit of carping from the Java guys, and at first they were all “efficiency this” and “security that.” But by mid-way through the talk I think they were getting it. A few even…
Cool fact: All valid JSON is also valid YAML. So any YAML parser can also parse JSON. Long live the mighty list/map data structure!
Paul Graham writes, “Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. … And what US city has a stronger claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits.” Harsh but true. I’ve never been to Cambridge, and never lived in any city…
I just did my first test-run of a Hadoop cluster on Amazon EC2. It’s not as tricky as it appears, although I ran into some snags, which I’ll document here. I also found these pages helpful: EC2 on Hadoop Wiki and manAmplified. First, make sure the EC2 API tools are installed and on your path.…
Back in February, in a slightly plaintive post, the W3 sysadmins asked that people stop hammering their servers with requests for XHTML DTDs. Everyone said yes, this is a stupid problem that wouldn’t have happened if a) the XML spec were less dumb, or b) XML libraries were less dumb. After that post, I spent…
Paul Johnson, in the U.K., wrote a piece about how there is no known “process” for programming. At some point, all the theory and methodology goes out the window and someone has to sit down, think about the problem, and write some code. I’m sure I won’t be the only one to suggest this, but…
The things I don’t know about Java… could fill a book. Here’s a new one, from the Hadoop sources: public ArrayWritable(Class valueClass) { // … } public ArrayWritable(Class valueClass, Writable[] values) { this(valueClass); this.values = values; } The second constructor uses the syntax this(arg) to call a different constructor, then follows with initialization code of…
Joel Spolsky complains that architecture astronauts are taking over at big, rich companies like Google and Microsoft, pushing out elaborate architectural systems that don’t solve actual problems. He’s right in that smart, technical people like to take on any large, abstract problem that is, as he puts it, “a fun programming exercise that you’re doing…