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Programming — 2 Comments
27
May 14

Django’s Master/Slave terminology row

For those who’ve missed the original thread (oh, how much you’ve missed, not), it’s here.

For those wondering how you should think about this, it goes like this:

Can you stop using those terms please, they’re not nice.
What, seriously?
Yeah, seriously.
Oh. Okay, well we have these other terms that have been around for decades and are actually slightly better at describing the kind of systems we’re building these days. Cool?
Cool, thanks.
No worries.

For those wondering how it actually went and don’t want to waste your life reading the nonsense in the original thread:

Can you stop using those terms please, they’re not nice.
OH GOD THE WORLD IS ENDING YOU’RE SO STUPID THEY’RE JUST WORDS YOU’RE DELUSIONAL THIS IS RACIST THIS IS PC GONE MAD

Hmmm. Here’s a hint folks, there are hard things in distributed database design. Handling (and even detecting) split-brain scenarios to ensure data consistency even in the presence of partition failure. Dealing with latency issues and the performance penalties they cause. The whole CAP balance problem in fact and the the entire related debate around SQL/noSQL. And a wealth of other problems both big and small, related both to design and implementation. An entire industry of people spend their professional lives working on those hard problems and there still aren’t enough people to handle all the problems.

Whether to call a specific replication design “master/slave” or “active/passive” is just not on the list of hard problems. Honestly, it’s not. Someone has a genuine problem with the “master/slave” terminology, and many others have had the same problem with the same terminology for years? Quit whining, be a better person, use another terminology and get back to work.

Linux / Mobile / n900 / Python — 12 Comments
29
Apr 10

Python on the Nokia N900



One of the really attractive things about the N900 is the possibility of customising it. You see, I’m a bit of a geek at times. A nerd, if you will. And the idea of being able to tweak the way my phone works appeals to me, whether it be in fixing a bug I find in an app or out-and-out writing a new one for something the manufacturer hadn’t though of (and I think a lot of the iPhone’s appeal to geeks is represented by that too, app store policy issues aside). But that’s not an option on symbian. First off, well, programming for symbian is fairly horrible; and secondly, you’d need the source code to the app which most companies aren’t going to provide without a rather large chunk of change.

But the N900 runs linux and therefore it should be really easy to code for (if you’ve written code on linux before). And since Python is one of the easier ways to write an application, I wondered how long it would take me to get up and running with Python on the N900, from nothing installed through to getting “Hello, World” running. So here’s how it went. Continue reading →

PHP — No Comments
02
Nov 07

Reaching the limits of PHP

First off, I rather like PHP. PHP 5 at least, I think PHP 4 was – and remains – a dog’s dinner of a thing at best. But for 90% (at least) of webpages, PHP is a pretty decent solution. Retrieval of data from databases, display of that data, no worries. Minimal learning curve, support for high-level constructs like objects and exceptions, several frameworks available – PHP’s a damn good choice in the vast majority of cases.

Thing is, right now I’m trying to put together a bit of code to act as a proof of concept, and – more fool me – I tried to use PHP to do it, figuring I’d save some time. No such luck. Turns out, trying to create data in PHP is a lot harder than trying to manipulate or display it. Right now, I’m in the middle of implementing a recognition system using a variable order markov model approach, and just generating the PPM-C prefix trees is a total pain in the fundament. Even the basic data structure I’m using – a trie – has no standard implementation in PEAR or the SPL or anywhere else I could find. So first I have to write that. Then I have to write the code to do all the other stuff. I mean, granted, hoping to find a pre-written PPM library was a bit hopeful, but prefix trees are basic data structures (and yes, I eventually found some sample code for one, but I’m still having to kick that about a fair bit to get what I need from it). But there was other stuff that I tried and ran into problems with. For example, PEAR::Math_Matrix seems to be PHP4 only, and the PEAR version doesn’t want to even parse in PHP5, let alone let me look for determinents or jacobians or eigenvalues. Which put yet another crimp in my plans earlier this week.

Anyway, for the actual production version of this project, PHP’s obviously out and never was in the running. This piece of code has to run as fast as possible – so I’m looking at C++ or C or something of that nature. But for proof of concept, I was hoping PHP was the way to go. Nope. This horse does not do well on this course. I’m thinking it’s time to start playing a bit more with Python or Perl or something for this sort of thing in the future. Which isn’t horrible – better to have more strings to your bow if at all possible. But it does rather shoot the whole fanboy attitude in the PHP-vs-Ruby-vs-Python-vs-Whatever language wars. There’s simply no place for it in a professional environment, and it’s not of any real use anywhere else either.

Still gonna do that rifle club management system project in PHP with Symfony or Prado (if they get the menu component done and released in time) though.

(And someone needs to tell Sean Coates that Microsoft is still evil 🙂 )