Michael Alan Dorman – Page 30

Five days without an update…

Five fairly busy days, too.

Finished building a diagram for the the data model for one of my clients. Did some more tweaking on my dia-to-sql XSL stylesheet to get things working. I think I’m starting to really _like_ XSL. What’s next, scheme? Intercal? Brainfuck?

I _should_ package up my stylesheet for public consumption, though–I understand that the next version of Dia is going to have an XSLT plugin, which would mean you could go directly from the diagram to SQL without an intervening processing step.

Now I’ve got to start getting the legacy data pulled out of the existing database and into the new one. That’s going to be a nightmare–the old database format is poorly normalized, and ages of poor programming have contributed to there being a lot of crapulous data in it. I am only looking forward to it in the sense that it will give me lots of hours to bill.

Agile Software Development with SCRUM, Schwaber, Beedle

I started reading ??Agile Software Development with SCRUM??. I think I read a fair number of software-development-oriented books, at least compared to many of my peers, and although some of the writing in this book is _horrid_ (section 1.3.1 is the most buzzword-heavy thing I’ve read in ages, and it doesn’t need to be) and the images are badly done, the actual content is certainly intriguing.

In short (and I’m not suggesting that this is earth-shatteringly brilliant or new insight, it’s just someone actually discussing stuff of which most of us probably have an inarticulate sense) the message so far (I’m only on chapter 2) seems to be: requrements will never be complete, consistent or static, so keep your targets short-term so you can achieve them and then reorient yourself to the new priority.

Yes, commercial software development has discovered at least the “often” part of “release early and often”.

Oh, and the moment I looked at the table of contents I knew it was done in “TeX”:http://tug.org/. Free software wins again.

“Boycott Amazon.com!”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0130676349

In real news…

I found that the refactored code was very amenable to modifying the block/pass list processing to do two consecutive passes, first with any domain settings, then with any user settings.

So sue me…

One of the little pleasures I find in doing this blog is the fact that I’ve decided on using exclusively textual names for the files. This means that each time I go to do a new entry, I have to come up with a unique filename for it. I’m sure some day it’ll get boring, but not yet.

In what will no doubt be the first of many messages with this name…

So I look at the stats this morning, like I do most every morning, and I see that hiwaayoffice.net has been seeing incredibly high volume–more than two messages per minute, which is enormously more than they normally do. _Enormously_. And the message size was pretty frigging huge, too.

As usualy when things involve HiWAAY, I called dad. I asked to know if he knew of someone trying to beat up on our machines, etc. He asked who it was, so I did a couple of quick queries on the log file, and found out it was his address that was getting all the mail.

After some investigation, we discovered it was problem with his email being over quota, and that address being on the list of people to be notified if someone goes over quota. Oops.

I laughed long and hard, though.

Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers, Ed Sikov

There’s nothing upbeat to say about this book.

Don’t get me wrong–it’s a fine book, very readable, presumably accurate, but from page one, this is a portrait of a talented but very disturbed human being. He gets fame, fortune, artistic recognition, he even gets the girl(s), but he doesn’t ever seem happy, and he dies at age 54.

“Boycott Amazon.com!”:http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=0786866640

Well, that was a productive day

Generally, Saturday is my day Away From The Machine. Some Saturdays I don’t even log in–no email, no web surfing, nothing.

Unusually, though, I did some work today, and mighty productive it was, too.

One of the things we need to get a handle on for “AnteSpam”:http://antespam.com/ is building (and maintaining) a corpus of messages. Having a good corpus gives us what we need to build a good Bayes database, which will hopefully keep us nice and accurate, and it will also allow us to contribute some to the SpamAssassin development by running mass-checks and generally giving input on how well things are working.

At the moment we just grab random messages that come through the system and someone has to go in and classify those–which is tough, because what might be spam to me is someone else’s precious newsletter. I end up deleting a lot of messages that I think are probably spam, but might not be–and it’s better to be conservative.

Better, though, is the new capability I implemented. In addition to the random messages, it’s now possible to send messages to some special addresses, and those will be picked up and put in the corpus appropriately marked (but not as verified–we don’t want anyone to be able to screw us up by hitting us with a bunch of spam marked as ham or anything).

Combined with some options to let people submit mail to the corpus when they see good or bad messages in their sideline folder, this could work out really well. I, personally, get thousands of messages each day, good and bad, that I can bounce into these addresses–instant training ground.

I’m pretty stoked.

A relatively unproductive day

I hate to say it–especially where prospective employers might see it–but my version of productivity is kind of…nonstandard.

That is, I have a tendency to sit around play guitar, read email, etc. for a long time, then sit down, crank out in a few minutes something that might take someone else hours to do, and then move on to other activites.

The sad fact is that this frustrates me, perhaps more than anyone else–I mean, from the perspective of my employers, who aren’t actually sitting and watching what I do, I am still terribly productive. I get more stuff done than a lot of other people, in a shorter billable time. That’s great for customers, but tough on the bottom line sometimes.

But it’s also tough on me, in part because I’m not in an office environment–I don’t really have anyone to chat with or go to lunch with, no meetings to go to, or any of those other general wastes of you have you’re in an office.

So even though I’m actually being just as productive as I likely would in an office setting, I always feel less productive. It’s tough.

OK, I was wrong.

So I ended up getting back into the swing of things, and ended up making some fairly significant revisions to the code for the main daemon at the heart of “AnteSpam”:http://antespam.com/. No really groundbreaking changes to the core functionality, but some optimizations, and some cleanup of the code. It may be a little more accessible now.

How does one do it?

So some super-gigantic catastrophe severed some huge wad of fiber somewhere in my general area, and I find myself without high-speed connectivity.

Even ignoring the fact that I was all stoked yesterday to start on a project that was going to involve doing a lot of programming on another system, it’s frustrating as hell to have to slow down to dialup speeds.

More frustrating, though, is the fact that what I *really* would like to do is have multiple connections–DSL, cable, backup dial-up–that all converge into one box, and which intelligently fails over (or multipaths). You can do this with a Linux box–and it’s not like I’ve not run a Linux box as my gateway before–but finding a Linux box that is as quiet as my Linksys box would be virtually impossible. And now that I’ve got things this quiet in here, I’m loathe to go back to the perpetually screaming fans situation.

No good database modellers in Linux

I’m not usually much of a “visual” guy. I’d rather read a text description of most stuff than look at pictures.

The one great exception to this is when it comes to modelling large databases–say, more than 10 tables. At that point, staring at line after line of SQL simply doesn’t cut it–I can’t discern the problems at a glance, there’s lots of paging around, etc.

For the moment I use the UML mode of “Dia”:http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/, which is an OK tool, plus a custom XSL stylesheet for coverting the Dia’s output into SQL. It works OK–you do get a diagram out of it, and you can coerce it to produce decent SQL–but it’s just not…fluid. There’s a lot of fiddly stuff that requires very careful work, and supporting things like foreign key references always requires more work than it should. This makes creating the diagram that much more work and frustration.

We’re growing

When you talk actual numbers it sounds pitiful in a way, but “AnteSpam”:http://antespam.com/ is growing consistently, if not super-fast. We’re up to 18 paying domains, and there are reportedly several “ready to land” any moment now.

If I ever felt for a moment that this wouldn’t sell because it didn’t provide value to the customers, I need only look at the stats to see that we’ve got domains that get three spam mails for every good mail. Amazing.

Well, it’s up and running

I guess I’ve decided to really try and keep a blog.

Of course, one of the things that has worked against me doing so up to this point has been that there always seemed to be “web forms”:http://advogato.org/ or “proprietary software”:http://userland.com. Nothing that would work pretty-much transparently with “good old Emacs”:http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html.

Hopefully “Blosxom”:http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/ will change that.