The Vista experience

After having crashed my P4P800E motherboard (a piece of crap), i decided to buy a new one (motherboard).

You see, building my own PC, i though that would be a piece of cake… Not quite.

First the power-supply went down. I though : “that’s a matter of 70 bucks”.

Then i realized the mobo was out of well. There came the hassles. I could not find the same mobo. Too old i was told.

Had to buy a new one. Guess what. They come with these new SATA connectors, and only one IDE connector for the CDROMs and diskette (yes, still here…).

My Windows XP system was on one of my IDE drives… Damned. Had to reinstall Windows…

So i boot up windows on the IDE, but hey, it does not recognize the new SATA drive. Yeah, SATA was kind of new 5 years ago when XP came up… To be more precise, strangely enough, it did recognize the 300GB drive as a 127 GB drive (i don’t like these numbers, 127… Don’t know why .

Fair enough i said, let’s format it. Windows then installs itself, reboot to complete the install, and then does not boot at all…

Probably a SATA issue again… After a lost day, i decided to go to my local computer store where i am being told that i’d better buy a new license of XP, or even better, Vista.

At this point, i was kinda mad at the idea to have to reinstall 50+ software installs…

So i fork 450 CHF to buy the crap.

I boot the Vista CD up, and the SATA drive is not recognized. Kind of funny to be asked where you want to install Vista with no drive available…

Back to the computer store again, where apparently, i don’t really know exactly, they tweaked the bios SATA configuration and installed Vista for me (they took a full day to do it, for 100 bucks…).

A couple of days later, there comes Vista…

I was very nervous at the idea of having to reconnect my Livebox, external drives, 2 printers, 5.1 system, 5 years old video camera, 5 years old fire-wire Fuji S2 Pro, the Panasonic DMC-FX 30 point and shoot, the G25 wheel, the joystick and old epson scanner but it went quite smooth overall, and i am quite pleased with the result.

I managed to have a blue screen though, after having connected 2 external drives transferring data to the SATAs while downloading from the web and switching users at the same time.

Would i go as far as recommend it ?. Yes. The linux developer that i am must acknowledge that as a user, it works quite well…

Seb.

Liberte cherie

Je viens de renouveler ma contribution volontaire a cette association.

Je vous encourage a les aider dans leur combat : http://www.liberte-cherie.com/

Ca nous fera avancer un peu plus collectivement.

Arretez de sanctioner le success

Je suis en train d’ecouter sur tf1.fr le face a la une de Segolene Royale.

Et oui, travaillant en moyenne 60h par semaine, je suis rentre trop tard pour le 20H00. Heureusement qu’Internet est la…

Je suis neanmoins sidere par certaines idees qui sont aujourd’hui relayees aux plus hautes spheres de notre Etat. Madame Royale propose de taxer differemment les entreprises qui reussisent de celles qui ne reussissent pas. Cette politique de sanction du succes est incomprehensible pour un esprit simple comme le mien.

Apres avoir cru que partager le travail en empechant les autres de travailler diminuerai le chomage de masse francais, nous continuons a taxe le succes. Certes, nous savions deja que le succes individuel est sanctionne. Pas question de gagner plus de 4000 euros par mois, sous peine d’etre taxe (precisemment) de riche…

Ce qui est nouveau cette annee est l’extension de ce concept de taxation du succes (qui a cree tant de misere a l’echelle individuelle, forcant bon nombre de francais a vivre en dehors de leur pays) a l’entreprise.

Voyons ce que cela va donner…

Software Development Best Practices

Francois Tonic, the editor in chief of Programmez   has asked me to write an article around the best software development practices.

I am architecturing the article around 8 key ideas:

1. The management culture
2. The need for a software development methodology
3.  A proper source code control management system
4. A modern integrated development environment
5. A continuous integration process
6. A proper bug and issue tracking system
7. A proper testing (unit and regression) environment
8. The developers’ culture

I am putting the last touch to the article, but can you think of a key best practive you could not live without ?.

Seb.

An MTU story

For the last couple of months, my PC behaved strangely. On some sites, but not all, i could not get the link i was requesting. It ended up in a connection reset message on FireFox (which was actually the case) and on a DNS error message in internet explorer (which was incorrect).

I lived with it. It mostly bothered me when accessing some (not all) emails from my yahoo account.

When my wife could not post her resume to some websites I finally decided to invest some time in finding what was wrong. It was a tricky problem, tricky enough to document the solution to the problem.

After reluctantly upgrading my PC to service pack 2 (always refused to do it, respectly the old saying “Don’t break something which is ain’t broken” – well, actually now it was broken – the behavior did not change. Same problem.

I then started to spy the TCP connection between my PC and the yahoo mail web server. I used Packetyzer, a tool based on ethereal that you can download from the site of networkchemistry.

The PC was sending HTTP requests to the internet but I noticed that the length of the TCP packet was exceeding 1500 bytes, which is beyond the usual MSS (Maximum Segment Size) of a TCP packet over an ethernet connection.
In addition to this, it had the “don’t fragment” bit set in the IP header. In simple english terms, this means my TCP/IP stack was trying to send a packet exceeding the capacity of the network interface. The interface had no choice but discard it. The packet never went out to the internet, was never received by the server. At some point, the server decided to reset the connection, effectively closing the ephemeral port.

Tricky isn’t it ?.

The problem was identified at this point, but not solved…

The fact that my TCP/IP stack was sending packets exceeding the MSS is a TCP/IP issue. My TCP config was at fault. Problem is that you do not find the level of detailed configuration in the useless TCP/IP GUIs Microsoft is offering, even with service pack 2 .

I had to download DrTCP (you can find it on the site of dslreports) and refix the MTU (Maximum Transfer Unit) of the TCP/IP stack to 1500…

It then all worked!.

The transparent promotion process

 

Every friday evening, we are enjoying talks around a set of beers in my company. Not the whole company, just our IT group. This helps fostering the team spirit of the development team and offers an opportunity to talk about professional and non-professional topics.

We briefly talked yesterday about what we internally call “Transparent Promotion Process”. We call transparent promotion process this idea putting the mecanisms in place to be in a position to:

• Not having to change a single line of code in order to promote an application from a test environment (during the User Acceptance Testing phase) to the production environment.
• Not having to change a single line of configuration to change as well.

While the first point is commonly accepted (you are deploying the code that has been tested), it is interesting to realize that the second point is often not considered important. We do consider this is important, since many problems in software do come from misconfiguration. I tend to consider configuration like code. After all, there is no reason why we should treat java/c/perl or C++ differently from a configuration files. Both are source of problems, both need to be tested with the same level of dilligence.

From this starting point, achieving promotion transparency require a couple of principles:

• Applications must pay particular attention to their environment
• Applications must be more flexible than before in handling configuration

My company has structured testing environments. We have test unix users, test databases and other test resources (applications servers and other services). The applications must be aware of these resources through configuration (you are not going to hard-code the the database server aren’t you ?). The key here is to ensure the specifics of the configuration are not hard coded in the configuration file. For example, the database server name is taken out of the environment, not coded in the configuration file. Java 5 now allows the JVM to read environment variables, making it easier to use a single configuration file for all the testing environments and the production environment.

Of course, the transparency has its limitations. Most technological stacks use their own configuration, in which case, there is nothing we can do but use one configuration file per testing environment or production, but the closer we can get from promotion transparency, the better confident we can be that properly tested functionality during a User Acceptance Testing phase will still work when promoted to production.

 

Wouldn’t it be cool to drop a war from one application server to an other and see the application automatically deployed automatically without a single configuration change ?.

FairUse

I have always complained about these protected DVDs. See, I buy my DVDs in the States, to be able to watch them in English. Problem is, my DVD player won’t play them. Bottom line, I buy a movie, and, as a consumer, I am some kind of punished for buying it. I don’t like it.

Same thing happens with all these music DRM (Digital Rights Management). I would be ready to buy the music I’d like to listen on iTune or some other store, but I don’t. Why ?. Because of the DRM. I am hearing I won’t be able to copy the file I would buy as many time I would want for example. After all, if I buy the thing, why I am forcibly restricted in its use ?. I could get the same file, unrestricted, with the same quality, for free through one mean or an other.

I just found out that finally, I may be able to buy legally the music I am listening thanks for FairUse4WM. I could legally buy the music, use the software illegally, and listen it, most likely illegally since it would be stripped from DRM.

At least, we’re improving, illegally :-).

Netvibes

I started using my.yahoo.com as my web browser home page. At the time, back in the late ninetees, i found the ability to get the kind of news you wanted along with your yahoo email pretty neat.

Then came google, which i liked better with its steamlined interface. Plus, gmail is better than yahoo’s. For example they provide a free pop server (you have to pay to get it from yahoo). It did not get me to switch from yahoo to gmail though, the hassle of changing the email adress taking precedence.

I discovered Netvibes last week. It is a site aggregating content from various other sites or blogs. It has the same streamlined interface as google but the kind of content you can aggregate and how it is presented is even better than google’s i think. Netvibes is now my home page. They just raised 15M$ and it is already one of the best Web 2.0 site i have seen.

Couldn’t hold it anymore…

That’s it. I cannot take it anymore…

After 2 years of temptation, i finally fell under it: I have started my own blob.

I guess it is not me, it’s the social pressure, the same kind of pressure encouraging you to get married, or have kids .

It is my friends fault: Jean-Christophe, Julien, Jeff, all these cutting-edged people. The more you read them,the more you fell “behind your time”…

Anyway, i mostly care about software engineering, so i guess that’s what i will be speaking about in this blob…