Caleb Cushing's Blog Also known as XenoTerraCide
Posts with the tag rant:

Premature optimization is not evil

Or rather people should stop saying this because most of the people that say it don’t actually seem to actually know what is meant by “Premature Optimization” or how to determine when it is evil. I’ve heard people say premature optimization is evil to asking. “Is there a 3rd party library that does this more efficiently?” (knowing if there are better options is premature optimization?), “Thinking about architecting your app for horizontal scalability is premature optimization” (it is if the design is significantly more complex, but if it’s just between using REST and ensuring stateless (which is about the same complexity up front, but it’d be harder to convert later)), “wanting to do Dependency Injection is.

please don't use Dist::Zilla::PluginBundle::USERNAME

or create them. Here’s the problem…. (short version is Don’t put PodSpellingTests in them)normally you’d have[pluginA][pluginB][pluginC][pluginXTests][pluginYTests][pluginZTests]and one of them doesn’t work on your system (for whatever reason), well you can just do this.[pluginA][pluginB][pluginC];[pluginXTests][pluginYTests][pluginZTests]the ;is a comment in ini, now dzil won’t use that plugin. But people will say well you don’t want to do that of course I want that plugin enabled. Here’s why you may not temporarily. Casual user X has a bug in /your/ module that’s using dzil, they code up a patch, and they want to run your test suite.

Bad Customer Service from T-Mobile

So about 2 months ago I got fed up with Sprint (they suck for different reasons) and I already knew that they had better service coverage than Verizon in my area. My friend suggested T-Mobile, so I went and got setup with them for a 14 day trial period. I took the phone made some calls tried the web browser, I didn’t like the blackberry itself, but that’s besides the point.

You should have hired me! ( just a vent )

So this is about the 10th time my friend has asked me for help on a SQL (w/ SQL Server) problem. I Actually interviewed with his company at one point and they elected not to hire me. Why? because I have never found windows errors useful, have therefore never used its logging facility, and was unable to answer questions about it. I’m was UNIX guy then and am now. But I’m still better at figuring out problems on software I’ve never even used, with only about 1/10th of the information that I need.

Download Book, The Ruining of a Good Feature

1-3 Months ago Safari Booksfinally started allowing you to download full books in pdf. It used to be that you had to download chapters of books in pdf. This was annoying even if you had tokens to do it. Tokens are Safari Books way of making sure we aren’t pirating en masse, you get 5 tokens a month and can only keep 3 months worth. So now we can download full books how nice?

Perl by Example not on O'Reilly's Safari

I like Safari. It’s a great product that I pay ~$500 a year for. I just started a Perl class and the book is Perl by Example. Guess what it isn’t on safari or at least searching for the exact title doesn’t find it. I’ve queried the O’reilly and Prentice Hall people. I pay $500 a year, all the rest of the ‘By Example’ Books are there, I want my book.

Participation Points

At Baker College they don’t allow teachers to grade based on attendance. I’m sure this policy is common with most schools. So what do the teacher’s do? they grade based on participation. This is crap as to be able to participate you must attend the class. What the teacher’s are actually doing is re-labeling attendance points as participation. Because it doesn’t matter whether you take part in a class conversation. All you have to do is show up.

Modern Bigotry - Black History Month

First off, I’m not racist, I’d like to think I’m not bigoted in any way.But I’m tired of all these equality rants from blacks and females.WE WERE SLAVES. So? so what? every race under the sun has had slaves and been enslaved at some point during the history of humans. Why are you special?Why don’t we have a white history month? A Jewish history month? A Latino history month? etc, etc.