Phasor Burn

Are you working on a distributed application or client-server system that spans across the internet, across different timezones, branch offices, numerous different companies even?

Have you heard about the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing? You should have.  There is a brief description of them on James Gosling’s blog as well as at Wikipedia.

Some time ago I found that chapter 17 of the “Software Architecture” book had decent explanations for each of the fallacies and could be used to help hammer the point home to those who just-dont-get-it.

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I’ve been following off and on the progress of Puppet, a system administators configuration management tool. It certainly does look way more promising than CFEngine (which I last touched in 2000. Boy what a pain in the ass that tool was.)

Unfortunately, I do not like to put any kind of software in place that is undergoing rapid change. I get enough of that at my job where I am constantly putting in the build-of-the-day into production simply because of the sheer number of critical bugs or business-enabling feature enhancements that are needed PDQ, RFN.

Rapid change in software that needs to be stable just creates pain for the sysadmins, nevermind users (who are the whole point of providing working systems anyways). Users who are generally angsty over any kind of perceived change in their universe that would require them to stop and think for a moment about anything other than their business processes that they need to accomplish as part of their job. Not that I blame them, much. They could learn to be a bit more flexible but that’s another rant.

Good news is, there does seem to be light at the end of the tunnel for my being able to try out Puppet at work. It appears that the perpetrator of Puppet will be doing a commercial installation of this tool sometime this quarter and as part of that will have a 1.0 release available at that time.

Goody.. so now all I have to do is wait for 1.0 to come out and then a few weeks after tha for all the early adoptors waiting for the magic 1.0 to do their task - find the nasty bugs that only new users can find. (Sorry Luke!) Unless all those early adopters read this or think similarily

Oh wait. I’m doing a trackback to the original blog posting. doh!

Here’s to Puppet 1.0.5, whenever it arrives. Cheers!

Party’s over but this is just the wake up call that Apple needed anyways. Let’s see how they handle this one. Should be a simple enough patch, look for it in the next few days I’ll bet…

I’m still not going to buy Symantec “Security Hole” AntiVirus but maybe I’ll look into ClamXav.

I switched to a Mac almost a year ago. Prior to that I was a SuSE Linux guy for years. I only begrudingly use Windows in any shape or form. Mostly in VMWare or VirtualPC the last few years.

Anyways… Mac’s are great but they are still computers designed by people, running operating systems that are great but still designed by… people. People who aren’t perfect. While I haven’t had anywhere near the kind of trouble the guy in the video below seems to have had, there is a glimmer of truth to what he’s saying. It is still better than anything Microsoft has come up with to date, imo.

Of course the main system he’s beating up in the clip is an older machine which leads me to believe he was maybe running OS X from the early days when it wasn’t quite as solid as Panther and Tiger seemed to be for me.

Another one from google video

Click on image to start video