kujawa's comments

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Joel Spolsky: Lunch

This works a lot better if you're actually friends with most of your coworkers. Then it's pretty awesome.

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Success, and Farming vs. Mining

I come from Montana, and I hate this dichotomy.

The fundamental law of resources in this world is: if you can't farm it, you must mine it. They're a yin and yang. I come from Montana, a state which basically has only two industries: farming and mining. When you live that close to the land, it becomes very apparent who the actual producers are.

Everything else is wanking. Productive wanking, but wanking nonetheless. The welder is nothing without the miner. Without the farmer, he can't even eat. Me, as a software engineer, I'm so far removed from those who are actually producing things that what I do is as ephemeral as the wind. I change states on a magnetic disk all day. I lift weights, run, and have a stand-up desk so my body doesn't decay while I do this ludicrously minimal amount of work each day, but because I know how to shape those bits in a certain way, society values me much more than the guy who feeds me, or the guy who mines the rare earths that make my job possible.

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Learning Ruby and Rails, where would you start?

After doing Rails for about 4 years, and Django for about 2 months (but I've been doing python for 10 years now) ... save yourself some pain and learn Django instead, if you can at all help it.

Ruby's documentation culture is hair-tearingly frustrating. Half a paragraph, 3 examples covering the barest functionality of your module, and pages of badly-interfaced mechanically-extracted documentation made me want to punch the monitor several times a day. Oh, but it's got a pretty web-2.0tard design-minded web site, and of course gitardhub, which is especially a joy if it goes down during a deploy.

Think I'm exaggerating?

http://code.macournoyer.com/thin/doc/files/README.html

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: On the 100x Price Rise of a Formerly Generic Drug

Well, it is different in that the propellant doesn't work as good and so the inhalers tend to fucking clog.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Not that I would ever suggest that the EPA and environmentalists prefer their CFC purity to be 100% at the expense of asthmatics.

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Work has started on the next generation of Apache web server

Well gee. It's been a while since I've used Digital UNIX, Irix, SCO, or VMS.

Because they've become totally irrelevant.

Seems like a waste of resources when there are more pressing things to do than worry about the 5 people who (a) use VMS and (b) demand a bleeding-edge Apache.

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Why didn't the Romans have hot air balloons?

"Research into stem cell therapies, cloning, and gene therapy technology have also been greatly slowed by psychosocial concerns."

Dear humanity: you are simply too dumb to have nice things.

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: 120hz Television "Smoothing" Must Die

This dude is ranting about the wrong thing. There are parts of Avatar and Transformers, etc, that look like you're running a game on an overloaded computer.

The problem here isn't televisions running at a high rate. The problem is film adhering to the bleeding edge of what was possible 100 years ago. 24fps is not adequate to handle lots of motion.

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Help wanted — jobless need not apply

That's funny. Just about every HR person I've ever worked with has (a) been convinced that they're Doing The Most Important Job In The World and (b) completely incompetent and unable to deal with geeks.

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: What Stupid Things Do Smart People Do?

I use emacs and vi every day.

There's no better python environment than a properly-configured emacs.

(I use TextMate, too, but only when I'm doing something disgusting like Rails.)

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Teeth LEDs

I think JWZ put it best when he said "Dear Japanese people ..."

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Why HN was slow and how Rtm fixed it

Read C10K? Both select() and poll() have this problem internally. You have to use one of the more advanced techniques available if you really want to scale. epoll(), kqueue() or friends.

kujawa | 15 years ago | on: Oracle Says New HP CEO Stole Technology

I really don't think I've ever seen a company that doesn't give a shit about its public reputation as much as Oracle. Maybe Blackwater.

"We don't have to care, we're the database vendor."

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