The Comms Room - 2011-08-03 (page 1 of 3)

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12:03 AM

They're called mimsy borogroves.

@BenPilbrow the operations masters are the DC's that hold the different FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operations) Roles

12:36 AM

@Holocryptic That's what I eventually figured out, though the way in which this one particular individual used it "System" might be a better fit.

12:50 AM

@ScottPack hrm. Terms are such silly things. I say we call everything "snozzberries" and figure out what's being talked about by context alone.

Wil Wheaton makes my day

5 hours later…

6:14 AM

G'day

6:28 AM

hi anybody familiar with web hosting in india?

I'm the only person awake here at the moment so I guess not

is there any hard and fast rule that your servers should be located close to ur target audience?

Anarko_Bizounours

7:16 AM

howdy

@lovesh Well, it's better to ask on the main site. But there is a little answer : For a web site, the location is not really a problem. You can access the website all around the world, the main point of having the server located near the target audiance is just that you can hire native from the target country and have them managing the website for the region. But other than that, it's pretty irelephant to have a server in each country the website target.

7:54 AM

@Anarko_Bizounours hi i m located i india but have heard that having the hosting with a us based company is better than a indian company. any advice?

Anarko_Bizounours

well, like I said, the only advantage in having a webserver in a region than another is just for local maintain. After the real thing is the network quality over the country. I live in europe and the network is good there, so I can't really says about US nor india.

Like I already said, try asking this out on the main site, you'll get better and more answer.

8:27 AM

howdy

Anarko_Bizounours

hi

Howdy howdy howdy I'm sheriff Woody

Anarko_Bizounours

... well, no.

don't be sheriff Woody...

know your meme. Hentai woody

?

Anarko_Bizounours

knowyourmeme.com/memes/…

8:48 AM

some dude's just asked me to post a guide to changing his DNS servers...

@Anarko_Bizounours hadn't seen that one

@Chopper3 tell him how to do it on a Mac

NEWS JUST IN: I WIN, VMWare licencing U-turn announcement due later today - booyah!

6

C3??

me, sorry

better

:D

8:55 AM

seriously though, they're changing their terms due to 'customer pressure' :)

wow

do you know what they are planning ?

yep

but you can't say till later ?

how much does your bill go up by ?

basically the vram/licence ratio goes up

about £72m over three years

rather than £150m ?

8:59 AM

138

@Chopper3 My brain caught up, I understand C3 now =P

sorry

No need to apologise, I was caught up in thinking about some unit tests. I should finish what I'm thinking before switching tabs

talking of tabs, chrome 13 came out last night, it pre-caches links, so clicking links is instantaneous - mad to see really

Anarko_Bizounours

@Chopper3 Seriously? Awesome!

10:12 AM

I need to recommend we move away from Exchange for our smtp server. I spend more time fixing exchange issues on a server with no users than I ever have done on the main business exchange server.

1 hour later…

11:36 AM

hi

I am having a problem with settting up apc

You should search the main site, and ask a question if you can't find an existing answer

The chat room is not for support purposes, just... well.... chat purposes :-)

Anarko_Bizounours

Ben Pilbrow 1 - Anush 0

BOOM!

Bart Silverstrim

11:56 AM

Remember folks, if it's important, make backups... serverfault.com/questions/297029/…

Oh fsck... Another Paddington?

Anarko_Bizounours

@BartSilverstrim he's doomed!

@BartSilverstrim Ok, that's pretty good. I got a chuckle from your/Chopper's gravatar.

Bart Silverstrim

@Jscott: :-)

Strange...according to VISITORS web log analyzer we're getting about 23% of our web traffic between midnight and one in the morning? Either bots are busy at that hour or something is generating web traffic hits that are false.

Anarko_Bizounours

@jscott nice toshop xD

12:07 PM

@BartSilverstrim: One of the nice things about G analytics or other JS powered analytic trackers that that bots usually won't run JS code

Anarko_Bizounours

@BartSilverstrim You're speaking of the web log analyzer at your office or the web log of stackexchange?

Bart Silverstrim

@KyleBrandt: I'm someone who likes looking at logs and stats and such to get a feel for when something isn't quite right...I'm debating if it's worth the time to go through my logs for specific hits and drill down to what's causing that spike, or if it's an anomaly with VISITORS. I have a few analyzers running on that server to help verify things but there's other things that should be addressed for office work that others would say needs priority... :-/

I likes pretty graphs and charts but dislikes 99% of powerpoints out there. Go figure.

@BartSilverstrim see my vmw post from up there?

Bart Silverstrim

That spike in the VISITORS analysis just doesn't seem right.

@Chopper3 RE: change in licensing? Yeah, that's great! Wonder when they're going public with it.

@BartSilverstrim time's based on GMT though, i.e. middle of the US day

@BartSilverstrim later today, refused to be interviewed about it

12:11 PM

@BartSilverstrim: Are the in splunk? Just group by user agent and count for the spike period

Anarko_Bizounours

@Chopper3 so it's pretty logical, since a lot of europeen goe to the web site/log

Bart Silverstrim

No splunk here. :-(

@BartSilverstrim: Oh, I was thinking you were chopper

Bart Silverstrim

@Anarko_Bizounours Office web server.

@kyleBrandt: That comes later, after the clones have negated him.

Anarko_Bizounours

@BartSilverstrim well seem to be a lot of people going to your office website from US

Bart Silverstrim

12:13 PM

Interesting. I don't normally go by gravatar for identifying people, but their names. Other people identify by gravatar apparently. Interesting how different people work.

@Anarko: well...we are in the US.

Anarko_Bizounours

I'm lost.... Going back to my caverne eating row meat!

Bart Silverstrim

Once I can usurp @Chopper3's minions then I am the master...muahaha!

Wonder if next April Fool's we'll all get Paddington-enabled gravatars.

@BartSilverstrim: Well I have raised a meta question on this important issue

Bart Silverstrim

Which important issue?

12:15 PM

:-)

Bart Silverstrim

I think last April 1st I said something about changing everyone's gravatars to unicorns with rainbows or something.

You brought TomTom into this?!

Can I set up a DNS record (I'm thinking CNAME) to allow accessing Google Apps email (imap.googlemail.com) from imap.mydomain.com ?

Bart Silverstrim

AWStats isn't showing that same spike at that time. Must be VISITORS is counting something goofy in the logs.

Anarko_Bizounours

@BartSilverstrim would be fun!

@BartSilverstrim: Just parse out the UA for that time period, and pass it to sort and then uniq -c

Bart Silverstrim

12:30 PM

@KyleBrandt: I was looking at the pretty charts first to see if they matched :-)

Has anyone ever literally killed two birds with one stone? I've had a couple trapped in a box for the last 30 minutes and while I've maimed them they're not even close to being dead yet?

Anarko_Bizounours

@Chopper3 Run over the bow with your car.

@Chopper3 I killed two birds with one motorcycle. It was a mess.

Anarko_Bizounours

Or use a bigger stone

Believe that VMWare announcement is going to be at 2pm PST btw

Bart Silverstrim

12:38 PM

Wonder what their blogbots will say to backpedal previously defending the action, if anything.

:)

@Chopper3 Can we have I love Chopper3 T-Shirts printed when its announced? (Mainly so I can wear one when I find a paddington ride =P)

Anarko_Bizounours

I've been hit once by a pigeon while being on my mountain bike.... HATE YOU STUPID BIRD! Crashed on a car!

@AnarkoBizounours I suffered a similar issue, pigeon hit my front wheel and I went over the bike

Bart Silverstrim

Um...isn't "bird" a British slang term for an attractive woman?

Anarko_Bizounours

12:43 PM

@ITHedgeHog Stupid bird right! over the bike, my god hate when that happen!

Bart Silverstrim

...

@BartSilverstrim in the 70's maybe

Bart Silverstrim

Ah, okay. For a minute it gave whole new meaning to just what you had in the box.

@Chopper3 What's this I see about the vmware licensing?

big changes to the proposed new licencing model - 'following customer consultation' :)

12:53 PM

Well done, sir

only part of the picture, but a loud one :)

@Chopper3: As long as someone gets fired

I want to see some punishment

thing was the original plan was a board thing, their sales and marketing people thought it was a bad idea

so the board may change but they do that anyway

Bart Silverstrim

1:31 PM

I'm surprised at the paddington question in Meta. I figured it would be booed, hissed, and downvoted into oblivion.

user image

I just laughed way way way too hard at that.

@BartSilverstrim Kyle asked it, though. He's exempt from general booing and hissing

Bart Silverstrim

Oh...

Nobody is immune

-51

A: Can we have the ability to rescind a close vote before it closes?

declining -- you can always cast a reopen vote if the post gets closed. Also note that all close votes automatically expire after two days. (and for that matter reopen votes, or any other vote that attempts to reach a threshold -- otherwise, over an absurdly long period of time, say 10 years, e...

There are biases though :-P

Bart Silverstrim

I picture StackOverflow as a noisy school cafeteria with food being flung all over. SF is our kingdom. Meta is where angry people vent and beat each other with LARTs, and like it. SuperUser is a dark back alley that scares me.

3

SU is just a really long short bus

6

Bart Silverstrim

1:40 PM

Now that's something I just laughed too hard at.

1:50 PM

@KyleBrandt Well that's something a lot of people want. Nobody cares about m.SF

@ChrisS: Sorry don't follow you, what do a lot of people want?

@KyleBrandt The ability to retract close votes if the question is edited.

We can retract a downvote, but not a close vote.... wtf?

Oh okay I understand

I thought the m.SF thought and that one were connected, so I was confused

No, I upvoted your Q on mSF.. Nobody wants a clueless employee running around SF. =]

Bart Silverstrim

2:11 PM

When did Evan become Chopper?

:-)

This is a pretty interesting question, but it isn't really SA related at all. Thoughts?

0

Q: Is the XP VMM a bottleneck on a multi core machine?

I have a dual Xeon hex core machine running an IO intensive application. (WinXP 32) I am seeing a hardware driver (1/2 user mode, 1/2 kernel, streaming data) that is using 6k delta page faults per second. When other applications load or allocate large amounts of memory the driver's hardware buffe...

windows-xp performance cpu io

@MarkM Oh I may even have an answer for that… I looked into something similar for a client.

@MarkM Yeah, it's tough calling that one SU as it probably won't get the same eyeballs.

I mean, it certainly belongs on SU, but he won't get an answer and the community here is probably better equipped to answer it.

Shit… if the problem is what I think it is I'm under NDA.

hahah

haha

2:20 PM

Rare question that gets an upvote and a close vote :)

Nothing wrong with answering it here, so it has the answer it deserves when it gets to SU,

@MarkM that dude may have bumped his post but he did add bounty just now so I'm leaving it ok

@Chopper3 ok. I saw that he did it twice today so it ticked me off a bit, but I understand with the bounty thing

me too, but let's see how it plays

day started dry in rep-land but getting better by the minute :)

2:43 PM

Howdy folks

Bart Silverstrim

Hi @Jacob.

@BartSilverstrim durr WTF? (gravatar?)

Bart Silverstrim

7

Q: Paddington Bear Avatar

Many of our top users seem to have avatars with a picture of themselves in a car with what appears to me to be Paddington Bear: So what is the story behind this?

@Chopper3 do you have that episode saved somewhere?

episode?

2:49 PM

@Chopper3 of that T.V show you went on?

it was like 1977, we didn't own a VCR

Liar. It was last week. Admit it.

@Chopper3 You work for BT, search for it?

hehe

It was on a tv-show called 'The Multicoloured Swap Shop'

hi anybody familiar with web hosting in india?

2:50 PM

I don't work for them, I'm an outside consultant, and why would they have TV shows?

apart from the thousands of ones I have direct control of of course (bit dim of me to say that in my last post)

@lovesh I should imagine it will be 'discount'

Bart Silverstrim

The truth, as related by ex-Blue Peter editor Richard Marson on the archive television forum The Mausoleum Club in 2006, is that almost every edition of Swap Shop was recorded in full every week onto two 90-minute Quad tapes. These tapes were held by the BBC until the late 1980s, at which time the Deputy Head of Children's Television, Roy Thompson, allowed many of them to be wiped and sold to Australia as recycled stock.

@lovesh Nope; the hosts in the US are <$5/mo, any cheaper and I'd have extreme doubts about their resiliency and ability to serve.

Bart Silverstrim

As a consequence of this action, many of the clips used in the retrospective It Started With Swap Shop and as extras on some DVD releases of other BBC shows had to be taken from domestic video recordings that had survived in private hands.

...that show?

@Chopper3 no

@Holocryptic you floating around?

@lovesh Why did you ask if you already know.

2:57 PM

Well.... that was hackish. I had to share a USB attached printer from the client, then add it via the share in the TS in order to do local printing through Terminal Services.

@BartSilverstrim ha, didn't know that

@Jacob i dont get u?

@Jacob How fortuitous. Yes I am.

@Holocryptic By someoff chance is your wireless provider Ntelos? I need to get a data profile from someone to drop on my Sprint Mifi?

well my exact ques is shud i be hosting in India if my target audience is in india? is location of servers so important?

Bart Silverstrim

2:58 PM

@chopper3: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Coloured_Swap_Shop

@lovesh No, host in a European DC, much more reliable.

@Jacob Negative. Sorry

@lovesh Location is of some importance; but as Jacob said, reliability is more important than speed to most people.

@lovesh well there's a cost implication of location and a latency/bandwidth one - I'd be happier to have my inda-focussed servers in either the middle-east or japan/singapore myself - purely because I need resilience more than value - your opinion will differ of course

DAMN YOU CDMA AND YOUR PITA DIFFICULTY To Swap carriers.

@Chopper3 I don't know Euro-Asia net topography as well as the states but Japan/singapore seems a good bet also.

3:07 PM

any suggestions for good hosting providers in middle east?

Bart Silverstrim

Hmm. Anyone play with Amazon S3 hosting?

@BartSilverstrim Storage? yes

Bart Silverstrim

What's their cloud architecture?

@BartSilverstrim it varies a lot

Bart Silverstrim

I was just asked about moving content from one hosting company to S3, wondered if I'd want to help move the content. I'm not familiar with Amazon's interface, but didn't think it should be that hard to figure out.

3:11 PM

@BartSilverstrim It's easy to figure out rather

Bart Silverstrim

I'd be happy to help them out. Maybe learn something new in the process :-)

Looks like S3 is just their storage platform, but they offer an Elastic Cloud to host VM's...all part of their cloudy stuff, from the looks of it.

@BartSilverstrim yeah

Our webservers are with EC2

Bart Silverstrim

@Jacob: so you have VM's that migrate around their cloud that you can log into and manage.

but our install and update files are S3 along with other static stuff

@BartSilverstrim more or less

Bart Silverstrim

Meaning S3 is like a virtual storage space that can be referred to off your cloudified VM.

3:15 PM

@BartSilverstrim right, you can pull via FTP,HTTP,or even bit torrent

We pull HTTP from S3

Bart Silverstrim

Ah. Your VM's web server has links referring to your storage in S3 for content. Cloudy == convoluted?

cloudy == abstracted?

Hmm.

@BartSilverstrim not all content. We use S3 like a CDN.(loosely defined)

Why do all sales monkeys feel the need to use the term "secret sauce"?

@Holocryptic lolz

@Holocryptic It's so damn tasty

Bart Silverstrim

3:21 PM

If I get stuck then I'll just see if I can find @Jacob to school me on Amazon storage :-)

There is no "why" when taking about them

or talking, even

ooo, here comes the "value proposition"

and the "pain"

noooooooooooooooooooooooooo, this is not right @Chopper3 is speaking like @BartSilverstrim

those are both "solution selling" terms

Bart Silverstrim

Key skill for system administration work...knowing how to find the answer, not necessarily knowing the answer.

6

3:24 PM

@Holocryptic Someone tried to sell me a password management solution; I replied " you realize who I work for right?"

Bart Silverstrim

@Iain...um...well...do not accuse me of speaking like that simpering dolt! I'll dispatch my minions on your arse immediately!

...tally ho! With crumpets! And...other British stuff...

@BartSilverstrim The British spell it Arse :P Sorry, try again

you should totally read lnk.nu/amazon.com/1qnh . It'll help you understand why salesboys are the assholes they are

@Jacob if you said that to me ( and Iknow the who) I still wouldn't get it

@Holocryptic Managers like these simply key words because they more easily convey a common meaning. Not everyone is attune to your particular industry's needs, and perhaps the given solution fails to address all the facets of your institutions, though it may play a role in creating a solution. Given this, and the fact that some people do not even have a proper high school education, a common vernacular is required to communicate in a timely fashion and without demeaning the prospective client.

3:26 PM

@Iain I work for Thycotic, we make Secret Server. It holds teh important stuffz.

I refer the honourable gentleman to my previous comment

Afternoon all.

Thus were born "buzz words". Their arbitrary meaning also allows unscrupulous people to use them in situations where they don't have an actual solution, or it's still a work in progress; leading to much confusion and loathing. We tend to hate them for these reasons; sales people tend to love them; and managers don't care as long as it works.

or an understanding of the solution

or the problem

@wfaulk until the solution causes the problem (the VA EC2 outage)

3:30 PM

@ChrisS Your logic flies in the face of my ranting

If Sales people took the time to actually understand the unique and intricate problems you face, find a solution, make it fit, before so much as pitching something to you, the final product would have to be outrageously priced to cover the costs of the discovery and customization man-hours (and that price would include hours for products pitched to other businesses which didn't actually buy their 'customized' software).

(man, that was all scatterbrained; what I get for talking on the phone and typing at the same time)

@ChrisS heh. I'm listening to a Shavlik demo. It's funny because the sales engineer is going through the same stuff I used to when I was a demo dolly

Why name the title engineer?

It worries me that people can't work this kind of thing out themselves; serverfault.com/questions/297149/1mb-360gb-mo/297155#297155

@Jacob That's just what they're called. Ostensibly a sales engineer designs solutions and help with implementation on a per client basis.

Bart Silverstrim

3:42 PM

@Chopper3: I think it was poorly worded/explained on the vendor's side.

agree but still

Bart Silverstrim

Although it should just say you get 360 gig bandwidth per month.

@BartSilverstrim It should say you get 360GB transfer per month... Unless you're actually limited to 1Mbps, which would be rather odd unless it's a colo plan.

@BartSilverstrim the standard format is your link and how much bandwidth you get

IE

100Mbits port with 5000GB transfer

ROAR!

Bart Silverstrim

3:50 PM

Ah. So it's listed on their site properly, he was just asking about it through being unfamiliar with it.

@voretaq7 flees

@Holocryptic AHHHH! It is Godzilla! We must run for our lives! no... wait... he's just going to the bar. Carry on about your normal day, Japan.

@voretaq7 Godzirra

@ChrisS Have you heard of Shavlik? Interesting stuff, even with the anxious sales engineer.

4:07 PM

Nope.. Looking it up now.

Looks like a System Center competitor.

I think they were bought by MSFT

They have a SCCM plugin that allows for 3rd party app updates via WSUS

Shavlik was bought by VMWare

Looked pretty slick

WSUS 3.x already allows for 3rd party updates; it's just a complete PITA to add them.

Bart Silverstrim

@Jacob: Holy crap is it as easy as this site makes it sound? labnol.org/internet/web-hosting-with-amazon-s3/18742

4:09 PM

But I knew you used SCCM so I figured I'd throw it your way to let you know about or get your thoughts on it

System Center Updates Publisher --> SCUPdates

I'll take a look... We use SCCM because we're a MS Partner, get it free (along with a crap tonne of other MS products).

In the demo they made it look pretty easy. But that's the whole point of the demo, so I'll take it with a grain of salt, but still...

@BartSilverstrim for static stuff yes

Bart Silverstrim

It doesn't handle dynamic sites from the sounds of it.

I'll assume to do that you'd need to purchase a VM from the EC structure.

Then host dynamic content on the VM and point to your S3 storage URI's for static content.

Kyle - that auditor questions got 'unlocked' again somehow

4:19 PM

@Chopper3 Jeff did it serverfault.com/posts/293217/revisions

ah

dunno why though - everything (and more) that can be said has been

Bart Silverstrim

Wha? serverfault.com/questions/297175/site-dam-slow-help-me

I just clicked on that

bit haven't read it yet - should I bother ?

@BartSilverstrim Its dam slow, what don't you get?

Bart Silverstrim

4:24 PM

the site dam is slow, or the site's dam slow?

Open the flood gate...that might help.

Three cheers for the guy who's pissed off the Software Development Manager >.<

Bart Silverstrim

How did you do that?

4:43 PM

@Iain The answer posted is the correct one, give the guy some free rep for being smarter than the dude asking the question.

Q: "Hey you guys! I wrote a PHP script that sucks in other websites. It worked great when I was the only one using it but now it's slow and my bandwidth bill is astronomical. What kind of server should I buy to make it better?"

A: "The kind you can get over on StackOverflow. The brand name is 'Decent Software Developer'."

3

Bart Silverstrim

@ITHedgeHog must be having a time-out in the corner.

@Chopper3: I think it is supposed to be protected and not locked

I wonder if SO talks about shady programmers, and grips about "Everyone thinks they're a programmer if they can get QBasic to say Hello World"; just like we gripe about shady server configurations and people who think setting up a server/software is easy.

@KyleBrandt but were were getting lots of 101-rep users posting 'me too's

as protecting doesn't stop that

/me shrugs off responsibility on this one -- (@Zypher has the top answer, he can deal wit it :-) )

4:48 PM

@Chopper3 Perhaps if it required you to solve a hard math problem like the Google anti-drunken-email thing?

?

"Please complete this 30-piece Towers of Hanoi puzzle before you may add your answer/comment."

tbh I'm only hanging around to nurse-in another very important 15 rep and then I'm out of here, got SO much to do tonight it's not funny

Please demonstrate an implementation of 3 sorting algorithms using logic gates in 3 minutes or less

Bart Silverstrim

I call this "random sorting"...

4:50 PM

Unrelated: I live in the Town of Hempstead. All of our town crap has "ToH" printed on it.
Every time I get mail from the town I have flashbacks to being the TA for introduction to algorithms and explaining recursion to the mental deficients we called freshmen.

@BartSilverstrim: I'm afraid you would back yourself into a corner there, since they would probably be expecting an implementation of bozo sort

@voretaq7 1,073,741,823 moves... That might take a while.

@KyleBrandt Could be worse. "Build a machine to play tic-tac-toe. You may use D latches and AND, OR and NOT gates." (Actual final exam question from computer architecture)

@ChrisS It ran for a whole semester before the server it was on had to be rebooted for maintenance. I didn't think to have it print % completion.

Bart Silverstrim

@KyleBrandt Just means I need a faster machine.

(most of my students' versions died a horrible painful lingering death at the hands of "Moar heap? YOU NO CAN HAS!", which lead into the discussion of memory management)

4:54 PM

You wrote a program that simulated Towers of Hanoi?

@ChrisS hasn't everyone?

Nope

I thought that and fibonacci are the classic recursive algorithms you inflict on freshmen (fibonacci demonstrates the principle, Hanoi demonstrates why it's sometimes ugly)

Not sure why it would take much memory either... Seems like a 3 by X array would do nicely ( where X is the number of discs)

The prof we had made them create objects. Poorly implemented recursive object creation quickly allocates more RAM than you want to give it. Plus the stack gets pretty deep.

4:56 PM

We did bubble sort for our first recursive algorithm. That's a good one to demonstrate O(n) issues.

Even a structure in a double linked list shouldn't take up too much RAM; I suppose I'm looking at this from the prospective of someone who knows C somewhat well.

@ChrisS Bubble sort is O(MyFuckingGodHowMuchLongerIsThisGoingToTake)

@voretaq7 Well for 10 items it's darn quick. Then you throw 100 at it and it takes 10,000 times longer.

The Nubby SysAdmin: Announcing a New SysAdmin Tool Repository

posted on August 01, 2011 by Wesley David

How many of us have toiled away on a home-brewed script to solve some seemingly esoteric problem? Or perhaps it’s a completely mundane and repetitive task that we’re automating. After pounding out line after line you are left with one of two thoughts (or both, as is my case): Surely someone has had this problem [...]

We were still learning loops at that point and hadn't got to pointers; so Quick Sort was later in the class.

it doesn't - unless you make them instantiate peg objects, with ring objects, and the students are sloppy about calling destructors in c++.
I implemented mine with just boring modified stacks.

4:59 PM

We never got to anything fancy like hash tables and garbage collection.

@voretaq7 I hated C++, I still don't like it much to this day...

one student actually had the sense to make the peg/ring objects globals - I fought with the professor to pass him for the assignment on the grounds that it was just as correct as making a puzzle object that contained peg and ring objects to keep the memory footprint down

But I can see where forgetting to deallocate memory might be an issue. Seems like an overly complex way to solve it though. continuously creating and destroying all those objects.

I dislike C++ object oriented programming. If you treat it like C with some funky trimmings and steer clear of the badly-implemented OO crap it's a fine language.

but that kinda defeats the purpose of the ++ bit

There are times when I think I'd like to teach intro classes like that; I'm sure I could do better than my teacher (though he was entirely decent). But then I remember the "dumb" kids of the class, and shudder at the though of having to help them.

I used to write on peoples monitors with dry erase markers

draw big circle Your problem is in this block of code. Fix it. And INDENT!

5:03 PM

@ChrisS was it you asking about >16-disk vdisks on MSA2000's the other day? if so I just spotted one of our dev guys has a G3 and that's not changed with that model - thought you should know.

my other mantra was "Read what the compiler told you. You did? Good, next step is understand what the compiler told you."

The levels of Programming Enlightenment:
1) Neophyte: You wrote some code.
2) Novitiate: You got an error or warning from your compiler
3) Acolyte: You understood what the compiler was telling you
4) Priest: You were able to satisfy the compiler's demands
5) High Priest: You were able to satisfy the compiler's demands without creating NEW errors/warnings
6) Demigod: You can point out and fix items that lead to a long chain of warnings/errros
7) Minor Deity: You understand the preprocessor and bend it to your will

2

@Chopper3 Yep. That's what I thought. Thank you!

Bart Silverstrim

The question is what is more important to teach; the process of programming, or the language?

@BartSilverstrim Neither.

I'd argue that you can teach programming effectively with scheme and Lambda Calculus, then give anyone worth their pay a book on the syntax of $_LANGUGE and 1-3 months to get up to speed

Bart Silverstrim

@Voretaq7: wouldn't that be the process of programming?

Thinking how to break down the problem into logical units and moving into implementation from there?

5:15 PM

@BartSilverstrim mmh, I guess

just found some new oompa-loompa has been going around updating loads of VMs to 64GB of allocated memory because I said that they only use what they ask for - these are not the same bloody thing - what a muppet

@voretaq7 My prof would fail any assignment that didn't strictly use an indentation style. He'd let us pick from K&R, Allman, KNF, White, or GNU; but it had to follow one of them.

I think of it more as basic concepts - I don't really think you can "teach" the process of breaking down an elephantine problem into small, programmable bits

Bart Silverstrim

@ChrisS: ouch.

@ChrisS Was he nice like I was and handed out copies of the indent manpage?

5:17 PM

@voretaq7 Those there the styles that our book went over... So the book had examples.

Bart Silverstrim

@Voretaq7: I'm not a programmer by any stretch, but when I have done programming tasks it struck me that the best programmers were the ones that could pseudocode the problem and visualize the workflow before doing anything in the language that seemed to do better.

@voretaq7 That was always the kicker with the "dumb" students... They just didn't have any ability to see the finish line and figure out each step to get there...

@ChrisS but what's wrong with f(x){x=++x/32*5+4;x=x/x;x=x%3;x++;return(x);) ?

Bart Silverstrim

Further supported that idea when I see blog posts about picking up any language in a short time and programmers who can't do elementary programming problems.

@BartSilverstrim that applies to any engineering profession (including sysadmins :)

Bart Silverstrim

5:19 PM

@Voretaq7 well they don't have a monopoly on that :-)

My biggest frustration was I knew what I wanted the damn thing to do I just had to figure out how to say it to the compiler!

@voretaq7 ReAdAbIlItY

There's a big difference between picking up a language and proficiency though. I'm still relatively proficient in C (I can bend it to my will if I must), but I'll probably never get there with python, ruby, etc. even though I can hack out stuff if I have to.

@ChrisS BlAsPhEmEr!

also LuNcH!

Lunch was an hour and a half ago

@BartSilverstrim I went home lol

Hi, where can I start learning about managing an unmanaged centos server

5:35 PM

amazon.com/dp/0131480057

bah, didn't expect the amazon spam

@Anush tinyurl.com/5wjfnt

@Zoredache add some text, and it goes away

We need the revenues to feeds the hamsters

I wanted it to bring up the info. Just didn't didn't expect such a long summary.

@KyleBrandt More pixels, more revenue?

Just got my epic badge :)

5:38 PM

@Chopper3 Nice, grats!

Gratz

Also, server fault is mentioned in that book as a resource

Server Fault Blog: It Must be True

Posted by Kyle Brandt on August 20th, 2010

My teachers in grade school hammered at least one lesson into me:

Since I was such a good student I remember this little aphorism exactly as it was stated even to this day. This is great news for Server Fault as it was mentioned in the 4th Edition of the Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook as one of the most significant resources of UNIX and Linux information on the web. I already felt this was the case myself, but it is good to know that it must be true.

Thank you Zordache for pointing this out in the Server Fault chat room. …

Bart Silverstrim

@Chopper3 /me claps :-)

but isn't the #1 best selling book a carpet of lies?

Bart Silverstrim

Depends on whether it's stain-resistant.

5:43 PM

@Chopper3 So how long until Legendary?

@Anush, you can also, read highly voted questions on serverfault.com. There is lots of useful information that you can learn there. There is one answer that links off to a lot of good questions. serverfault.com/questions/9766/…

@jscott been on the board just over 2 years, so another 4 I guess :)

@KyleBrandt Code blocks don't come through.... Interesting.

Pandora has a "New Look" - They're not quite pulling a Netflix, but I'm not crazy about the new style... Everything is scattered around the screen where it used to be nice and compact.... WTF is wrong with UI designers these days? Are they all braindead? Did all the good ones retire and we're stuck with the idiots?

@ChrisS Please ask your question on the appropriate site: ux.SE

:)

Damn, they've got a site for everything these days.

I really don't think that's a good topic for a Q&A site offhand; seems like something that you either intuitively recognize or don't.

At least they made the Play/Pause button larger.... That was probably my #1 complaint about the old site.

5:59 PM

3

Q: What kind of database/DBA questions does the SF community want to keep?

It is likely that dba.stackexchange.com will be leaving beta in the near future. While the site has been in beta, questions have been migrated "only for exceptional circumstances", but that will change once the site is launched. Obviously questions should only be migrated if the SF community wou...

discussion migration

It made the notify bar but it deserves more popularity than that

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