Programming Note

by Bryan

6 comments

1 Badtux { 01.11.12 at 10:31 pm }

SNORT!

I had to blow away a Windows 7 install yesterday morning because I’d managed to get things so mangled in the registry trying to get my dcom components registered despite the #@$%! security system that I’d gotten the system unstable. The DVD install finished at 10am yesterday morning. Then I started running Windows Update to bring the system up to date. And rebooting. And running Windows Update to bring the system up to date. And rebooting. And running Windows Update to bring the system up to date. And rebooting. Wash, rinse, repeat until 10pm last night, with a break for a Jeep club meeting. Now you know why I had to bake cheesy crackers last night at 10pm last night…

Anyhow, no, it wasn’t finished. Today was run Windows Update, reboot, run Windows Update, reboot, blah blah blah. Just *NOW*, at around 8PM, is everything up to date…

So: Two days. TWO DAYS of my life just got wasted by Microsoft. GRRRRRRR!

2 Steve Bates { 01.11.12 at 10:52 pm }

BadTux, you think Linux is a chaotic mess by comparison to THAT?

Last time I rebuilt from scratch… purely a voluntary decision to upgrade; nothing was broken on my previous version… it took me just over four hours total. During that interval, I had very little to do except eat pizza and drink beer. Once… once only… it asked me about an option. Chaotic, indeed! [/snark]

Oh, and there’s this… I’ve been hammered by Windows viruses twice, despite having eSet NOD32 fully updated up-to-the-day and being pretty careful about sites I visit and emails I open. Linux? Nope. The regular security updates seem to do the job.

3 Badtux { 01.11.12 at 11:44 pm }

Steve, you haven’t written commercial software for Linux or you’d know what I’m talking about. Every Linux distribution puts important files and libraries in a different place, and even has different ways of starting services at system boot (upstart vs. sysv init vs. bsd-style init). Every Linux distribution has its own way to handle setting up networking and sometimes even *multiple* ways. Every Linux distribution has its own mechanism for handling software installation (dpg vs zypper vs yum vs. the various tarball-custom BSD-inspired methods), and so forth. So I standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux / Centos because that’s what most potential customers, corporations, are running, okay? Except that the predominant server platform that ISP’s are running on their own infrastructure is Debian, due to its stability, and that’s like a different planet entirely and it’s a major market that can’t be ignored. GRRR!

It’s not a real issue if you’re writing Open Source software or if you’re doing an embedded appliance where you have 100% control. But for a commercial software developer, it’s like trying to pin a tail to a blob of jello. And now there’s the RHEL5 to RHEL6 transition…

By contrast, if you can get your program to run on Windows, it generally runs on Windows and will keep running until Microsoft decides to do a complete reboot like they did with the Windows 95/98/ME -> Windows NT transition when they released Windows XP as their consumer OS, finally getting rid of the last vestiges of DOS. You write to the Windows XP API and it’ll run on 95% of the desktop machines on the planet whether they’re running Vista or 7, and it’ll run on all of the Microsoft server platforms whether 2003, 2008, or 2008R2. So yes, internally the Microsoft OS’s are a mess. But it’s a mess that’s backward compatible, which usually cannot be said about Linux (indeed, Linus *rejoices* in breaking internal kernel API’s so that commercial hardware drivers can’t really be written for Linux).

– Badtux the “Linux sucks, just in a different way” Penguin

4 ellroon { 01.12.12 at 12:37 pm }

Uh oh… I just got a new computer built and set up with Windows 7… and am about to connect it to the net. Thanks for the warning, Bad Tux. Luckily I have a laptop and other computers accessible around the house to entertain me while I reboot and update and restart and …

5 Bryan { 01.12.12 at 4:18 pm }

I’m in the middle of updating the laptop to Professional from Home Premium and getting the XP emulator running because the XP box picked up a worm at some point. To fix the XP I had to get a wireless adapter because the Ethernet card blew out due to a lightning strike that was close.

Of course as soon as it was on line the XP started updating and so did the virus software, so with a virus scan it was out of service for six hours.

The XP emulator requires a 500MB download and Microsoft’s server wasn’t working as it was the monthly update day and somebody in Northern California was rebuilding a Win 7 box from the distribution CD.

Then I have to find a removal for this damn rootkit worm on the XP and transfer it from the laptop, because the worm blocked sites that actually worked and sent you to malware sites.

Google is now delivering more paid links than real links on the first page, even when you are looking for something from one of the bozos that paid for the links. The bozos link to their home page when what you need is buried in their support section.

Then I have to get all of the program from the XP and transfer it to the virtual XP machine which doesn’t like you adding subdirectories to the root directory.

And the fun continues…

6 Steve Bates { 01.13.12 at 12:49 am }

“Steve, you haven’t written commercial software for Linux or you’d know what I’m talking about.”

Guilty as charged. My move to Linux came mostly after my career developing commercial s/w was over. Early on, I wrote a few test programs for Linux just to prove something, but I quickly discovered that everything I really needed in retirement was already out there, free for the taking. So I never became a “real” Linux developer.

I followed Ubuntu from about version 3 or 4 to version 10, and over that span, my impression is that every maintenance task (s/w installation or upgrade, etc.) became gradually easier… much easier. But I haven’t dealt with the same issues in other Linux distro’s, so you are correct, I don’t know what maintaining multi-platform s/w is like in that world.