Month: March 2008

“It Works”

This blog post, “The Worst Thing You Can Say About Software Is That It Works,” written by one Kenny Tilton, is pretty hilarious. This is the most beautiful thing I’ve read in a while:

if a pile of code does not work it is not software, we’ll talk about its merit when it works, OK? Therefore to say software works is to say nothing. Therefore anything substantive one can say about software is better than to say it works.

Reading this triggered flashbacks and PTSD. I’d mentioned to a manager recently that I wanted some time to do some badly needed refactoring. My explanation of why was met with a pause, then, “Let me get this straight. You want time to take something that already works, reorganize it, possibly break things, and we wouldn’t have anything new to even show for it?”

That last part was wrong–the value added comes from maintainability and extensibility, but I couldn’t get him to really grasp those ideas. He’s not a technology person. For all he knew, maybe this was an elaborate ruse on my part to be left undisturbed while I surfed porn at my desk for a few weeks.

I work in a very small shop with all non-technology people, so this sort of thing happens a lot. It’s frustrating. It’s sort of nice to know I’m not alone in encountering this mindset. But man… if even the fellow programmer in Kenny’s story doesn’t get it, I’m not sure there’s much hope for the rest of the world.

A Quick Observation

For some potential upcoming work, I’ve been catching up on the changes made to Java over the last few years, and exploring the popular frameworks and libraries now in use.

Folks on reddit.com harshly criticize the bloat, unnecessary complexity, and huge runtime requirements for Java. They have their points. But I have to say, having worked on perl and PHP lately, where good code organization is the exception and not the norm, looking at Java again is a very welcome change.

The APIs for stuff like Servlets, Faces, EJBs, and Hibernate may be difficult to learn and remember, but at the very least, I find I always know where to look for something, and it’s usually where I expect to find it. In my book, over-abstraction is the lesser evil compared to not enough.

EAcceleratorCacheFunction = Cache_Lite_Function + EAccelerator

It’s pretty much all in the title. In a nutshell, EAcceleratorCacheFunction is a “memoizing” cache class for PHP that uses shared memory for storage. It is mostly compatible with Cache_Lite and Cache_Lite_Function.

Just like Cache_Lite_Function, it supports per-cache-object lifetime values, instead of specifying the lifetime of an item at the time you store it. This lets you dynamically change the lifetime of the cache. For example, if system load goes up and you don’t mind serving sightly older content instead of regenerating it:

$load = sys_getloadavg();
// use 5 min avg (ignore momentary spikes)
if($load[1] >= 6) {
    $lifetime = 900; # 15 min
} elseif($load[1] >= 3) {
    $lifetime = 600; # 10 min
} else {
    $lifetime = 300; # 5 min
}
$cache = new EAcceleratorCacheFunction(array('lifeTime' => $lifetime));
$cache->call('make_page');

I wrote EAcceleratorCacheFunction as a drop-in replacement for Cache_Lite_Function. On a virtual private server, doing cache reads/writes from memory instead of disk has made a noticeable difference in performance; it helps tremendously that the database has to contend with less disk I/O.