How LaunchBar and 1Password Reduce Annoying Redundnacy

Not by preference, but recently I’ve had to spend some time fighting with SQL Server, and that lowest common denominator piece of IT software, the Wizard. You’ve probably had to deal with some stupid thing like this, too. It’s irritating and annoying, but it’s often the easiest way to figure out how to get something to work. Through the Wizard there are a bunch of different options, and you can iterate through them relatively easily, and then test to see if you got the right combination, and then script or document or whatever so you can reproduce your setup.

Published at September 23, 2010 ·  3 min read

Please Stop This Thing, I Want to Get Off: Living the Merry-Go-Round of FAIL

There’s this pattern of application failure I’ve ended up dealing with a lot over the years. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Our scene opens with a multi-tiered client-server application, let’s say, for the purpose of argument, that it’s a web app. There are web servers in the front, usually with some sort of load balancer in front of them, then maybe a middle tier application server (SOAP, J2EE, that kind of thing), and some kind of shared state/storage at the back, let’s call it a SQL database.

Published at September 16, 2010 ·  5 min read

The Rules - At Least As I See Them (Well, the First Two)

Since I’ve been dealing with computers, I’ve developed some rules of thumb. The first rule seems obvious, although I’m constantly surprised by the people that break it. It is:Rule 1: Never run a command on a computer that affects the communications path through which you are connected to that machine.This is slightly more complicated than it sounds - especially when configuring routing protocols in routers. You change things such that you lose your routes from where you are to that machine, and it’s time for Plan B.

Published at September 13, 2010 ·  3 min read