And You Thought Linux Wasn't User Friendly?

Been playing with Plan 9 From Bell Labs.

Man is that counter-intuitive. Unix was all about minimalism. BSD and Linux still are, at the kernel level anyway (let's not talk about GUI wars for a moment.)

Plan 9 is even more extreme. Think of a bare X server (no window manager, etc.) and you're close.

No title bars, nothing even vaguely like 'help' or even 'intuitive icons' (or icons of any kind.)

Getting kind of used to it, but I'll never do anything serious, I think. More's the pity.

Take a look for yourself.

Another no-content link post

This is turning into an extremely low-volume geek version of InstaPundit.

Here's an interesting take on "Are threads still a menace?"

Which is itself something of a riff on this other thread-menace post from about ten years ago.

Quote of the Day

The quote for today:

Hobbyists regularly perform unexpected feats of grand but dubious utility: "I wouldn't have thought it was possible to deep-fry kool-aid, but there it is. I'm still trying to figure out if I should sing your praises or set you on fire." They set out to do one thing, and accomplish three others instead.

From http://www.landley.net/

Yet another rant

The fun thing about computers is there is a nearly infinite number of things about them to complain about, and an uncountable number of people who do, usually in the most scatalogical terms.

To wit, this guy.

News You Can Abuse

Kindle Fire review "for those who plan to void the warranty"

Snark of the day

I told my wife I'd downloaded the Blogger app, so I can now blog (slowly) from my iPod.

She smiled and said something vaguely supportive.

I said "All I need now is something to say." I paused, then said, "Oh, wait, it's a blog. That's optional."

She said, "You should blog that.."

I Love The Sound Of Napalm In The Morning

This is just plain subversive

I Don't Want To Get Off On A Rant Here

Not when there are so many others much more qualified, and frankly *better* at it.

Like Jamie, or Stevey, or Rob, all of whom I have enjoyed over the years. (Jamie doesn't Rant nearly as much as he used to, his blog is all about his nightclub now.)

Besides, two rant posts in a row would be gratuitous.

Objects In The Rear View Mirror

Not sure this will ever go anywhere, just like probably 75% of the blogs that launch, but here it is, my own little corner of crankiness.

Let's open the bidding with a link: Steve Yegge posted an essay about noobs vs. old-timers that I found rather interesting

I've noticed the same trends Steve comments on, plus a few that he touches on briefly if at all. The one I want to mention is the tendency to worship at the Temple Of Structure, a Procrustean tendency to cut all systems to match the Pattern Of The Gods.

At work, (no, I'm not naming names), we have folks who do this. It is Received Wisdom that all projects have a Data Access Layer, a Business Logic Layer, a Service Layer, and an Application Layer, if not more. This is not in itself foolish, by any means, except when you apply it to even the most trivial systems, which can plausibly be described by, say, three classes.

In such a case the "teenagers" of the type that Steve describes create a copy of each class, one for each layer which does absolutely nothing except call the next lower layer in the stack.

This is in contrast to the 'real' model, where you model a database table in the DAL (say, ACCOUNT_HEADER, TRANSACTION_MASTER, and TRANSACTION_LINE) then load them into actual journal entries and T-accounts in the BLL, then prompt the user for the variable parts of various stereotyped transactions (like an Accounts Payable system.)

Attempts to point this out have been dismissed.

(And don't get me started on the 'one non-punctuation token per line' style that drives me absolutely insane as the type of old-fart that Steve describes in his article.)