Month: May 2014

Creativity, Defects and Systems Thinking

“If you don’t remember that, you will regret it.”

1) Systems thinking, improving the whole: the performance of a system depends on how the parts fit, not how the parts perform individually.

2) Removing defects is not the same as system performance improvement – you’ve got to aim for what you want, not focus on what you not want.

3) Creativity is not continuous – doing the right thing (wrong) vs doing the (wrong) thing right.

Two things that bothers me with Chrome/-ium

  1. My bookmarks and reading history is synchronized in a way I can’t control (yes, I’ve lost all my settings and bookmarks once)
  2. Can’t set proxy settings for the application only – it uses the full system’s proxy settings

WebKit is BSD/LGPL so that’s good, although entire application isn’t open sourced (which Firefox and the Mozilla organisation is about) – it’s open enough.

The things that bothers me with Firefox, making me shift again:

  • Speed, performance. It’s almost on par with Chrom[e|ium] when only displaying one tab, but after that – it’s a different game.
  • Developer tools. While Firebug sparked much of what we have today, again – the tooling is simply better (and I assume it’s the underlying platform that’s part of the reason to this)

Chrome/Chromium has a richer plugin (app) echo system. There’s a lot for Firefox too, but I have the feeling that there are less developers and development traction in that echo system.

docker, vagrant, packer

It’s just awesome. I so wished I’d had these tools when I started my career some 14 years ago. Problems I’ve ran into with Docker:

  • diskspace, as docker with aufs puts all stuff in /var/lib/docker – make sure there’s enough room :-)
  • stability, with the version of Ubuntu and docker at my disposable has been pretty unstable with kernel oopses eventually freezing the entire host OS

But “apart” from the stability issue, it’s really nice to run packer inside an lxc (from docker) with the goal of producing vagrant boxes. :-)