The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

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Though I understood how people might be put off by having to remember such willfully obscure utility names like cat and grep, I continued to be puzzled at why they resented typing. Then I realized I could connect the complaint with the scores of “intellectual elite” (as my manager described them) in UNIX shops. The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn’t seem so mysterious, and pointed the way to a deeper issue: in a world increasingly dominated by image culture (TV, movies, .jpg files), UNIX remains rooted in the culture of the word.

UNIX programmers express themselves in a rich vocabulary of system utilities and command-line arguments, along with a flexible, varied grammar and syntax. For UNIX enthusiasts, the language becomes second nature. Once, I overheard a conversation in a Palo Alto restaurant: “there used to be a shrimp-and-pasta plate here under ten bucks. Let me see… cat menu | grep shrimp | test -lt $10…” though not syntactically correct (and less-than-scintillating conversation), a diner from an NT shop probably couldn’t have expressed himself as casually.

Source: The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature

Read the whole piece.

McCain Campaign Manager: ‘This Election is Not About Issues’

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That’s a real quote folks. Parse it carefully. Take it for what it is – a rare moment of revealing honesty.

Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain’s presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.

“This election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

Source: Washington Post: The Fix: McCain Manager: ‘This Election is Not About Issues’

McCain choose Palin to reinforce the false idea that the GOP is the ‘regular people party’. (Is either party the ‘regular people party’ anymore?)

It’s human nature that drives us to choose leaders that remind us of ourselves in someway. Who we can relate to or hopefully relate to.

McCain is exploiting this, in the most craven, reckless way I have yet seen in my short life.

We need to stop looking at our leader’s personal lives to find things we can relate to or denounce and we need to cast light on our leaders policies and how they effect us.

But will that happen for this election? Will we rise to the challenge?

BTW – did ya know that Mayor Palin wanted to ban books (via rc3.org) that disagreed with her religious views?

Or that she slashed funding that helped teenage moms in need?

Or that she’s proud of her daughter’s decision to keep her baby? (Note that word – decision – shouldn’t everyone have that right?)

There is more than enough on the face of the issues to wage a good conversation over who is best to represent and lead the country.

Nikki Sixx on National Recovery Month

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“Here we are a year later and [I’m thinking], ‘What can I talk about, what can I say that will make people that are in recovery want to stand up and support Recovery Month?'” he says. “A friend of mine said, ‘You know, the fact that you did a really honest book and it changed people’s lives, that’s something to talk about.’ It’s a year later and the book is still selling, and it’s still changing people’s lives.”

Discussing the wisdom he’s gleaned from his own recovery efforts, Sixx he’s noticed preaching to addicts that they need to stop usually doesn’t help. The “Diaries” song “Accidents Can Happen” relates to how relapse is part of recovery.

“What I used to be told [was], ‘What the f*ck’s wrong with you? Why can’t you do like everybody else? Why can’t you stop? Why can’t you act right?'” he recalls, saying “Accidents Can Happen” attempts to convey that “We all fall off the wagon. It’s only one day, it’s not the rest of your life. Pick yourself up and go again. And I think if someone had told me that at times in my life, it would have been a lot better than being ripped apart.

The purpose of “Diaries” was to deliver a message to the masses. When it comes to his personal life, Sixx tries to show by example that sobriety is cool.

Source: sleezrox.com: Nikki Sixx on Nation Recover Month.

BTW – “Accidents Can Happen” is a terrific, terrific song. Better than anything Motley Crue has released in years. Downright powerful.

I love the smell of Web mobs in the morning

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It’s been an interesting week and a half in American politics, but today, the Web is going to take a special role, the blogosphere in particular, and in an a real ugly way.

There are pictures floating around of some MySpace pages, with titles and comments that are easily misunderstood not given appropriate context.

And based upon our biases we will automatically believe what we want to believe about them.

While we all take special delight in exposing hypocrisy, as we should as it reveals much about character, sometimes things go way, way too far. And I have a feeling this is about to.

We’re all flawed human beings and the sooner we each recognize that, and be understanding towards that, the better this world will be. From all sides of the political isle.

I think Obama’s speech last week was a bit of an inspiration. And this is an expression of that.

Database Normalization Heresy

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I was Jeff Atwood-ed or Coding Horror-er-ed!

Jeff Atwood linked to an older piece of mine, on some of the lessons we learned, scaling Cofax at Philly.com, to illustrate that database normalization shouldn’t be a religion.

For the record, as I mentioned in my post, we created a set of denormalized tables, however, I should have talked some more about how we kept the original normalized tables. We kept them as our ‘one source of truth’ and took the I/O hit on updates to refresh the flattened tables to optimize database reads. We did this as Dare Obasanjo suggests – as an absolute last resort after optimizing indexes and queries first.

As mentioned at High Scalability and at Joe Gregorio’s, the conversation ‘angered the RDBMS True Believers’.

Jeff’s post was a good one because it challenged orthodoxy, stirred the pot, and brought forth good conversation.

Thanks to Coding Horror for the link. I’m honored.