Lazyweb

Dear readers, I have a couple of things you could help me with..

1) Do you know a cheap and usable alternative to godaddy.com? A service with even cheaper domain prices (it’s $10/year for a domain) and a reasonable user interface?

2) I am still planning my switch to Mac – I am still using my Windows desktop and latptop at home and a Ubuntu desktop at work. Ubuntu is great for web dev, but at home I do need to connect to a lot of various peripherals that are basically unsupported in Ubuntu. Also, I like the pretty. Anyway, I am thinking of buying a G5 tower on eBay for about $1000. Hardware-wise it’s a dual processor machine similar to my dual Xeon Dell, but it was only $500 on eBay.. So, is this the best way of getting into Macing on the cheap? I don’t want to buy a Mac Mini because it cost an arm and a leg to add a second monitor.

3) I already mentioned this, but does anybody know a good Linux sysadmin with Apache/MySQL administration skills who’s looking for a job (preferably with some php coding skills)? Let me know, k?

Dreamblog: Dream Caused by Server Support Calling me Over MySQL Crash a Second Before Awakening

I had a couple of fun nights with server support people fixing and troubleshooting database crashes. One positive aspect of being woken up at 4 in the morning is the dreams brought on by sudden awakening. I had two memorable ones: one that directly relates to the server issues, and another probably cause by reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

In the first dream I heard by parents bickering with my grandfather. I immediately realized that I was dreaming as my grandfather is very dead. I was glad that I finally achieved lucid dreaming, and also glad to see my grandfather whom I miss terribly. I cried “Gramps!” and ran to him. I was hoping that like that Pooka in Donnie Darko my grandfather had a message for me. I asked him how he was, and he said that he was all right. I woke up then and saw my parents, who apparently heard my scream and shook me awake. Of course I was in another dream layer, as I don’t live with my parents since getting married. My grandfather looked healthy and was cheerful enough as a member of “manipulated dead”.  Hopefully we are not in a Tangent Universe, unless that server that keeps crashing is the Artifact…

The second dream is a bit easier to analyze. I was  standing at a fishing at a pier right near my job. I was a bit worried that my boss might see me fishing and decide that I was slacking, but my wife told me to go ahead and enjoy myself – it was still 4AM and I did put in a lot of overtime lately. She found a guy who agreed to rent me a fishing rod.  It wasn’t as good as mine (the one with the Van Staal Reel), but was usable. Except as soon as I stepped up to the rail, it was swarmed with people who proceeded to cast right in front of me. This was exactly like resource starvation in the database: a few people managed to cast their lines, but so many people casting so close to each other just end up in a lot of tangled line and cursing…

Related: my other dream about my grandfather (it was in ’02, he was still alive then), another similarly recursive dream I had as well as the rest of my dreamblogging (it’s not even boring, I promise). I am glad that I wrote down all of those dreams, rereading them is pretty interesting now.

If you know a good sysadmin with MySQL experience who’s looking for a job, please let me know (my contact information is here).

Developer Life, Yo

These days there are a lot of documentary shows on TV about various professions. I am somewhat addicted to them – I watched whole seasons of shows about hairdressers, crab fishermen, lobster fishermen, tattoo artists in Florida, tattoo artists in Nevada (but not the one about tattoo artists in LA), restaurateurs ice road truck drivers, custom motorcycle builders, custom car builderscorrectional officers and inmates, and the Philadelphia meter maids.

My own profession is mostly untelevisable. Mostly. Well, maybe some TV network might make a show out of Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks With Geeks. I also think that there could be a tiny market for a heavily edited “looking over the shoulder” video on the code writing habits of colorful  alpha geeks like Linus Torvalds, Donald Knuth, Brad Fitzpatrick, Dries Buytaert, and maybe even  JWZ. I’d buy that for a dollar.

I found that there are two occupations that are unexpectedly similar to that of a software developer: prison inmate and line cook. Both of these are heavily male dominated, involve a disproportionate amount of minorities and are very stressful.

I recognized offices in which I worked all my life in prison layouts.  The common criminals usually live in a common area in the center of the prison. This is exactly like a common area of an office, except with bunk beds instead of desks. Some actually have semi-private cubicles. Inmates organize into gangs, just like departments. Gang leaders are usually placed into single or double cells that line the perimeter of the common area to cut down on the communication between them and their reports.  Even there you have to be a manager to score an office.

Restaurants are a lot like developer shops. You have your front of the house: waiters (sales people),  hosts and managers, food runners (analysts). And then you have your back of the house: chefs (architects and lead developers), line cooks (developers) and  prep cooks (producers). There’s no good equivalent for dishwashers in a typical developer shop.

People often assume that a chef primarily cooks and a lead developer primarily codes. Do you know the title of Julia Child’s awesome show? Well, she was neither French nor a chef. Chefs do surprisingly little cooking, they are more like conductors in  orchestras. They create menus,  divvy up the tasks, check quality, train and supervise cooks.  Best chefs, just like the best lead developers do find time to cook, but still spend more time organizing, tasting and researching.

Der Kunst Der Headline II

For those of you not familiar with the game, here’s the deal. See, where I live we have two things: very arrogant horny politicians and a certain 25 cent newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton that is famous for its obnoxious headlines (“Headless Body in a Topless Bar” being an unsurpassed classic of a genre). 

Whenever our politicians get caught – and they get caught with surprising regularity, I always try to guess what the headline in NYP is going to be the next day.

My last try I was way off target: thy went with boring “I Quit”. This time I’m banking on “Dirty Tricks Guv Caught With a Trick”. What do you think the headline is going to be?

In fact, I think Da Post Online should create a widget where you can try your hand in headline creation.