mike.mainguy

I've just spent some time setting up a bare Centos 7 image to support development stripping out as much as possible. While CoreOS is probably a better choice, we run redhat in production at this point and centos is a better fit for the time being. The problem I've found is that many of the instructions available via google were written against prerelease versions or espouse manually installing random rpms instead of just using yum. While I get this "works", I'm not a huge fan of this approach and would rather do everything with the package manager. After a LOT of scouring and trial and error, I finally found the "magic" combination. The winner is courtesy of http://www.pc-freak.net/ . I've taken these instructions and tweaked them slightly for my purposes. The original poster did this on a more "full fledged" version of centos with a windows host and my instructions are for a minimal install using and OSX host (though I'm certa...

Parents of the world, I have one piece of advice that will give you a tool to help your child become happy, healthy, and productive. Give them a shovel and tell them they can do anything they want with it. Note, if you are in an urban area, this might be BAD advice, so suburban and rural people listen on, urban folks find a friend in the burbs with a yard and then follow along. A kid with a shovel is an amazing thing to watch. Kids who are impossible to pry from the WII/PS3.. who don't like soccer/football/whateever, who might otherwise be surly or withdrawn... will become captivated by the idea that they can can explore and possibly find buried treasure, fossils, rocks, and dig/play for hours. Add water to the mix and the possibilities are endless: sand castles, mud castles, mud pies, mud pits, waterfalls, ponds, you name it! Too often in our modern world, we think of parenting as an activity that requires structure, supervision, and direction. I think excessive amoun...

In a recent elevator conversation with the team, we stumbled on a side conversation about the difference between accuracy and precision. I've always used them defined this way: Accuracy - The nearness of a value to the "real" value Precision - The resolution of a measurement It turns out this is not entirely correct and these definitions, while technically accurate in certain fields, are not universally held to be true. In fact, the above definition of precision is almost completely wrong for most other engineering and scientific disciplines. A more accurate (see what I did there?) set of definitions would be something like: Accuracy - The nearness of a value to the "real" value Precision - The probability of repeated measurement yielding the same result Measurement Resolution - The resolution of a measurement Source: Wikipedia

I'm currently struggling with another project suffering from what I dub the "Trail of Tears" architecture pattern. This is a situation where the architecture is littered with the remains of legacy code that never seems to get removed. This leads to mounting maintenance costs, and a fragile architecture that becomes increasingly difficult to manage. It also has the side effect of creating a "broken window" problem where there is no clear "correct" way to do things and the necessary rigor around adhering to standards and best practices (I HATE that term...but oh well) rapidly falls apart. Historically, the only way I've seen to combat this is to rigorously support opportunistic refactoring other wise known as following the " Boy Scout Rule ". While this has it's own problems (folks breaking seemingly unrelated things trying to clean things up and inflated scope for features being two key ones) it has proven to be the only way to...

I just read Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom and I just realized that Minecraft is the new Doom . If you don't believe me, find a teenager that has a computer (or smartphone, or tablet) that hasn't played Minecraft. Doom revolutionized gaming, not by making the FPS technologically possible (thought this is a big deal), but because it spawned a multitude of user generated mods and made it relatively easy and open to do this. This, in turn, incited myriads of hacker youth to build their own mods, edit levels, even (in my case) buy books on graphics programming and learn about BSPs, GPUs, ASM coding, optimizing C code, and other esoteria that I would have ignored. Frankly, the almost the entire gaming industry owes a debt of gratitude for inspiring the current flock (actually, we're probably on the second or third generation now) of hackers who saw success building their own games with toolkits provided by the makers of Doom. This seems to have been largely ignored up...

As a software developer (Architect?) I find myself in a constant battle with clients and project managers about changing estimates and their inaccuracy. I've lost count the number number of times I've given an estimate and then had to revise it to the dismay of folks who assumed seemingly subtle changes would move the estimate down or allow it to remain the same, only to see it creep up. There are a number of variables that increase the estimation risk and I'll briefly touch on the major factors. Major factors are: Changing requirements/assumptions - a fundamental truth is that any change incurs overhead. The act of changing the design to remove a requirement is is work too...remember, even simplifying the design is work. Removing a requirement mandates revalidating a design against (even if they're simplified) the new requirements. Changing the team structure - an experienced dev is much more effective than a newbie. Moreover a person well versed in a parti...

In OSX, they've frankly done a pretty good job of enabling multiple versions of java at the same time, but just as frankly it's somewhat obscure and inconvenient to manage multiple versions. It's not mind bogglingly difficult but for us oldsters who are lazy, I created a convenient way to switch versions inspired by (though nowhere nearly as awesome as) rvm for ruby. Download all of the versions of java you want to use from the appropriate location java 1.6 , java 7 , or java 8 . (you need at least one to start with) Add the following lines to ~/.bash_profile jvm() { export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v "$1"` java -version } Either source .bash_profile by typing ". ~/.bash_profile" or simply close your terminal and relaunch At this point you can change versions of java by typing: jvm 1.6* or jvm 1.7* Yes, there's more to it, refer to java_home for more version matching options, and it could be way more awesome, but this...