Great Bumper Sticker

Saw this yesterday:

Thank God I wasn't OS/2 Warp

Which OS are You?

ISO Good-enough Idea

Joel Spolsky's latest article is largely a rehash of one of his earliest articles, whereby he expounds on his belief (which I share) that there's no substitute for top-notch programmers. The thing that got me thinking was his "shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company," and this chart:

Best Working Conditions

→

Best Programmers

→

Best Software

→

Profit!

The problem I have with this is that you still need a pretty good idea to start with, or you're never going to get the best programmers in the first place. Great programmers aren't in it for the money; they want to work on stuff that interests them. Cool stuff. Sexy stuff. Having a great working environment with lots of other great programmers around is a big draw too, but how are you going to achieve that without the great idea in the first place?

This hits a chord with me because I know a lot of great programmers with whom I would love to start a company, but I've been waiting for the perfect idea to come along and it hasn't. But perhaps the trick is to just come up with a good-enough idea -- good enough to get one or two other great programmers to dive into it with you -- and just take it from there.

So...who's got a good-enough idea?

New Climbing Pics

Added some new climbing photos to the gallery, from our recent trips up to Tuolumne and Tahoe. No captions as of yet...soon.

Tuolumne was amazing. It was our first time climbing there, despite having gone to Yosemite Valley many times. We went up with Tori and Chris, the couple we met at Cortright on July 4th weekend. We didn't have a campsite reserved, so we poached camping at a trailhead parking lot just outside of the park. The next morning we got up and got in line at the Tuolumne Meadows campsite and had no trouble getting a place for that night.

The climbing was great, the only downsides being the heat (about 80-85, but at 9000+ feet, the sun is pretty scorching) and the mosquitos. We'll definitely be heading back later in the season when things cool off a bit.

At Tahoe we spent a day climbing at Donner (Snowshed and Black Walls), and then a day at Big Chief. It was also hot there, so we did our best to climb in the shade. Most of the climbing was short sport or toprope routes--not our favorite kind of climbing (we'd much rather be doing long multi-pitch trad). But it was good to check out another area.

Ok, I think I've written enough so the text wraps around the images.

There's Sex In My Violence!

Another great column by Mark Morford. Complaining about a bit of hidden sex in a game that glorifies sex, drugs, and violence does seem a bit misguided. Yeah, Puritan roots!

Falling

Cool and a bit disturbing, and strangely addictive. Use your mouse to move her around. Pretty nice bit of programming.

Embrace Your Geekness

Somebody has deemed today Embrace Your Geekness Day. So what better way to celebrate than post to my blog.

I searched around for information about the origins of this holiday, but found nothing other than lists of other obscure days (July 15th is Respect Canada Day!). How does one get a day proclaimed anyway? There are some openings left; one calendar I looked at had the 29th and 31st of this month still open. How about a Wear Flip-Flops to Work Day? (Googling for that came up with a single hit.)

Belated Happy Birthday

The July 4th New Yorker cover was classic:

Scrumptions Muffins

From a cookbook by the Ladies Auxillary of some hospital in Rhode Island:

Scrumptions Muffins

1 cup softened vanilla ice cream
1 cup sifted self-rising flour

Mix well. Pour into a muffin tin lined with paper cups, about 3/4 full. Bake at 350 F for 20 min.

You know you want to make them. I know I will.

Update: Made them. I had to improvise a bit, as I didn't have self-rising flour. I added about 1/2 tsp. of baking powder instead. They were pretty bad. Very dense. Must have been the flour.

Always check your logs

Brad's #1 rule of debugging web apps: always check your log files. All of them.

A friend of mine just ran into a problem where a php file upload script that had been working fine for months suddenly started barfing on large files. He was getting a "partial upload" error. I told him to check his web server error logs and his system message log. He did the former, and after hours of pounding his head against the wall, I finally went in and poked around myself. I actually found the problem before looking in the log files, but there it was in /var/log/messages:

Jul 7 15:27:42 xxxx /kernel: pid 46891 (httpd), uid 80 on /var: file system full
Jul 7 15:30:02 xxxx /kernel: pid 46875 (httpd), uid 80 on /var: file system full
Jul 7 15:49:07 xxxx /kernel: pid 46872 (httpd), uid 80 on /var: file system full

The temp directory that php was using for file uploads was /var/tmp, and /var only had 216K left. This is why small file uploads were working, but larger ones weren't. (As an aside, be careful of what you're storing in /var. On some systems, log files are kept in /var/log, and /var is often set up as a separate partition, and often relatively small at that. In his case, the whole partition was only 252M, and /var/log was eating up 195M of that...and growing. We moved /var/log to /usr/var/log and created a symlink.)