John Topley's Weblog
June 2003 Article ArchiveGet Your Back UpSunday, 22 June 2003I read a theory once that said that data doesn't exist unless it is stored in at least three locations at once. Another theory, Murphy's Law, would say that the first theory would be proved true on the night before an important meeting and whilst finishing a report, when your computer dies and you don't have a backup! I've always been paranoid about my data. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to safeguard it and make sure that I've haven't built up a vulnerable position. It's no secret that most computer owners simply don't bother with backups. I wonder how much data is lost a year because of this? I don't blame people for not backing up. It's a chore and not nearly as automatic as it should be, although things are slowly getting better.
In seven years of home PC computing, spent using three different computers, I've not lost a single byte of data. Maybe I've just been very lucky; I've never had a hard drive die on me, for example. Perhaps Murphy will strike me now that I've written this article! My data was probably most at risk when it was stored on that first PC. I bought a tape drive and used to back it up over three tapes using the backup application that came with Windows NT 4.0. That never felt very trustworthy. Restores were very hit and miss. The real breakthrough came with the advent of affordable CD–R and CD–RW drives. As an aside, a friend of mine bought a CD–R drive in 1993 and it cost over £3000! He also had to buy a one gigabyte hard disk to go with it—an almost unheard of capacity at the time—and that cost another £1000. My first CD–Rewriter was a Philips drive that gave up the ghost as soon as it was out of warranty. A trawl of the newsgroup archives revealed that this amazing feat of precision built–in obsolescence from Philips was a common occurrence. After that, I read lots of reviews and bought a Plextor drive, which was fast and never missed a beat. My current PC has an unbranded drive which is serving me well. My present backup scheme consists of two handfuls of CD–Rs which contain Norton Ghost images of my Windows, program files and data partitions and a weekly CD–RW backup of my changing documents. I've just added to this plan because I've bought a SmartDisk Universal Media Reader, which is a USB gizmo that can read and write seven different memory card formats. I bought a 256 MB Compact Flash card, which is large enough for me to copy my e–mail message store and my most important documents to, but small enough for me to take to work with me so that I have an off–site backup. The device is simplicity itself to use because you don't have to install any drivers under Windows XP and it adds three removable drives to Windows Explorer. You can copy files using drag and drop as normal. My only criticism is that I would have liked to have seen a spring–loaded media ejection mechanism as my digital camera has, because you have to give the card a bit of a tug to remove it. This would have undoubtedly have added to the forty pounds cost though. Instant GratificationTuesday, 17 June 2003To my surprise, I've been programming in Visual Basic 6.0 again recently. I'm still writing Java code in my day job but I had occasion to create a demo application. Most weeks I hold an informal class cum coding clinic (alliteration above all), where I help a couple of friends with their programming. They're just starting out with SQL Server 2000, so I thought it would be useful if I wrote a simple program to illustrate the use of SQL Server views, stored procedures but also custom collection classes. It's all based around the Employees table within the Northwind sample database, but I digress. The thing that struck me most about returning to VB after over eight months learning J2EE was not how much I'd forgotten, but how instantly gratifying it is to use! I'd almost forgotten the speed with which RAD tools let you construct a user interface and write simple event–handling code to stitch things together. Oh, the sheer pleasure of being able to draw a button on a form instead of having to write HTML code for a Web interface. Oh, the joy of pressing F5 to compile and run the program instead of having to wait for the application server to start up. I found it immensely satisfying to be able produce a simple old–fashioned desktop application and have it finished within two hours! No hassle learning the latest framework or having to mess about with deployment descriptors. Of course comparing J2EE to Visual Basic 6.0 is ridiculous, somewhat akin to complaining that Kew Gardens takes more effort to maintain than a potted plant. The terrain covered by J2EE is vast and it's extremely doubtful that a single developer could learn it all. Developing a high–quality enterprise application involves the mastery of many different disciplines and once achieved I'm sure there's a high level of intellectual satisfaction to be had from a job well done. However—and maybe it's something as basic as the fact that I'm not using the IDEA IDE—I simply found those couple of hours back in VB to be more fun than a lot of my enterprise Java coding to date. Broken WindowsThursday, 12 June 2003I don't know about you but I'm getting fed up with patching Windows XP. I usually visit Windows Update once a week to see what's new (I've disabled automatic updates because I can decide what patches I need, thank you), and barely a week seems to go by without there being a new fix or update to download. At the time of writing, the Windows Update installation history tells me that I've downloaded 64 updates since 1 March 2002! Maybe it's a good thing that all of these fixes are coming out; perhaps it's a result of Microsoft's much–vaunted Trustworthy Computing initiative, where Bill has finally decided to get serious about security. I do worry though. I worry about the code. There must be real pressure for the developers to isolate the cause of the vulnerabilities and to find a fix. Fast. I hope they do lots of regression testing.
The Windows code base must be in the process of being patched into something its creators would barely recognise. Code grows almost organically over time. The Windows Server 2003 code base is said to be 50,000,000 lines of source code. You read it right: fifty million lines of code. The entire source code tree itself is said to consist of over 100,000 files that total five gigabytes. That's an unimaginable amount of code to navigate, let alone manage and maintain. It's so big that as a result of the Windows 2000 effort Microsoft had to build a new source control system (I guess Visual SourceSafe just couldn't hack it) to cope with the demands of such a large project. People talk about Windows being bloated but I think the size is a genuine reflection of the features. Whether or not all those features should be in there is separate issue. Kudos to the people at Microsoft for keeping on top of such a beast when most organisations struggle to manage and deliver projects a tenth or even a hundredth of that size. With all this in mind, I guess I really shouldn't complain about having to download the odd update. How Soon We ForgetSunday, 08 June 2003I first started programming for the PC in about 1996. I'd seen some screen shots of Visual Basic 4.0 in a computer magazine and thought that it looked pretty good and quite different from the boring programming in BASIC that I'd done at school. Fortunately a friend persuaded me to try Delphi 1.0 instead and started off a love affair with the product that's lasted ever since. Sure, there have been waverings. The purchase of a C++ book during a mad period when I considered making a serious effort to learn that language. Luckily, sense prevailed and I realised that for the sort of programming I was involved with I'd be thousands of times more productive sticking with Delphi; which by this time was 32–bit and had lots of new features to get excited about. So I treated myself to another Delphi book to atone for my infidelity. There were also odd distractions such as tinkering with Web languages; a bit of HTML here, some Javascript there and grand dreams about an awesome personal website, which came to nothing (until now that is!) Nowadays I find myself in a position which I never thought I'd be in. I haven't touched Delphi for months and struggle to even remember how to write the simplest statements in the language. I feel so guilty about this that I double–click the Delphi shortcut once in a while, sort of like taking a neglected old pet for a walk. And then I realise that I haven't got anything that I want to write—or more accurately, anything that I have time to write properly—and close Delphi down again. It's not even as if anything has supplanted my Delphi. All that's changed is that I'm now employed professionally as a programmer and I find that I don't want to spend the evening programming after a day at the coal face with J2EE. I spent a year using Visual Basic 6.0 at work and now that we've switched to Java I find that the same thing is happening again and that my VB knowledge is evaporating (some might claim that's a good thing)! All of which proves that languages are like muscle: use them or lose them. When Is A Nerd Not A Nerd?Wednesday, 04 June 2003When is a nerd not a nerd? It depends on the subject that the person is nerdish about, it would seem. I'd probably be classed a nerd in many circles because I know more than the average person about computers. I'm interested in them—damn it—I'm passionate about the subject and yet I'm in a relationship, I don't have a huge beard and people have told me that I possess the odd social skill. So why am I considered a nerd because I know that holding down the Alt key and then typing 0169 on the numeric keypad produces the copyright symbol, but someone who knows that Manchester United played at Maine Road (Manchester City's old ground) during the Second World War is not a nerd? That's equally nerdy to me. I could start to compile a list of cool and uncool list of subjects that people get nerdish about:
The fact is that I don't have a problem with people being nerds because I think that it's good and healthy for someone to be enthusiastic about a subject and to want to learn a lot about it. As long as it doesn't take over their lives completely and they leave a bit of time for watching Star Trek. Knowing Where To LookSunday, 01 June 2003I've been surprised recently. Everyone knows about Google right? I think it's the best general–purpose search engine out there and use it all the time. I've been surprised because Google Groups seems to be something of a secret amongst people I know. I sometimes wonder if that's to do with Usenet being the older and less glamourous relative of the World Wide Web or maybe it's just because most people never got as far as exploring the mysterious newsgroups features of programs such as Outlook Express. I have to confess that I was using e–mail for quite a while before I investigated what this old–fangled newsgroups thing was all about. I'm glad that I did because it's helped my programming tremendously and also provided some laughs along the way. Having access to the entire Usenet archive is great because it's like having an expert permanently to hand. If I hit a programming brick wall I can usually feel pretty confident that the answer's out there somewhere and that I can find it. Very few problems are unique. The other side of the equation is that it's a great place to offer help to others when feeling altruistic. I find Google Groups to be such a useful resource that I've set up links on my Internet Explorer Links toolbar for predefined advanced searches: |
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