Year: 2008 (Page 48 of 52)

Upon arriving to work this morning, sitting in my Inbox was the following email from a one Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools:

Hi there,

I hope this email finds you well.

It gives me great pleasure to inform you that IndexTools has positively agreed to be acquired by Yahoo! today. We firmly believe that our technology platform combined with Yahoo!’s extensive offering of on-line marketing services will provide our partners and clients with an unsurpassed marketing tool set.

So how does this affect you?

We would ask you to give us the opportunity to present this in more detail on Tuesday 15th April 2008. In the meantime, it is very much business as usual! Please be assured that, for the time being, our services will continue as normal and there will be no disruptions to your account.

We appreciate that you’ll have many questions and we look forward to providing you with answers to these early next week.

Until then, have a good week and look forward to speaking to you soon.

Kind regards

Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools

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As the company Rails evangelist one of my challenges has been working out a consistent and understandable deployment strategy. One of the biggest challenges is that I may not have access to the root user acct. Additionally we are generally required to stay within the Etch distro, going with Lenny (testing) requires special approval. A final challenge is that compilers are not allowed on the production server.

The “Ruby gem problem” is the result of not having access to the root user acct. On development servers Ruby gems are easily managed using the root acct with the “gem” command. But without root on the production server, how do get our gems installed? Well, you might think we can just request the owner of the root acct to install gems, but not so fast – the gem command does not place files in accordance with the Linux FHS (see http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html). And furthermore, the manager of the server has no interest in keeping track of Ruby gems and managing them seperately. If it’s not related to “apt”, you’ve got some explaining to do. Continue reading

The visitor pattern from the GoF is frequently overlooked by programmers who are used to object oriented programming. However, in some cases, it is significantly cleaner and easier to use than an overridden function. Unfortunately, it’s easier to misuse as well, and, when it is used poorly, it can be a real mess.

I was going to tell you about my static analysis project and how I’m using the visitor pattern there. Then I took a glance at the wikipedia article on the visitor pattern. It’s clearly written by a OOP fanatic who’s never seen the alternatives, so I’m going to contrast my implementation of visitor with the one there.

The contrast is useful because wikipedia’s implementation is written using object oriented principles. Part of my goal with this post is to explain about OO alternatives. My implementation is written using compile time polymorphism rather than runtime polymorphism. As we’ll see, this is significantly prettier and more flexible than runtime polymorphism. Continue reading

Dear readers,

We’re delighted to say that comments for our blog site are now reopened. We hope it was not as frustrating for you as it was for our PC-Doctor authors, who appreciate and look forward to your comments. However, it was one of those instances where the actions of one person had negative consequences for many.

Our technical review of the blog also gave us an opportunity to revamp it in a fashion that we think is much cleaner and easier to read and use. For example, we’ve shortened our list of topics to four that we think are most pertinent: hardware, software, grab bag and hot topics. Let us know if you like it.

As part of the changeover, we now ask that you register (a quick and painless process) before posting comments. And no, it’s not about harvesting your emails – it’s about keeping the site and the content professional without direct moderation.
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Other than that, the two Big Rules still apply: no profanity and no slander or libel. Everything else is pretty much fair game.

So, blog on! Share knowledge. Be civil. Have fun.

Cheers,
Doug V

Object oriented programming is extremely popular these days. It’s so popular that some people aren’t even aware of alternatives to it. The reason its popular is clear: OOP works well a lot of the time. Traditional object oriented programming styles have some significant disadvantages in some circumstances, however. Some of the alternatives are worth looking into when those disadvantages become awkward.

As part of the static analysis project that I’m working on, I’m trying to use alternatives wherever I can. In part, this is because the advantages are substantial for the project I’m working on, but I’m also curious how far it can go and what will happen when I push it too far.

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