Recent blog entries for cynick

Played with a bunch of palm software today. Mapopolis is kinda cool.

Big deal today was talking this guy out of thinking IIS was anything resembling high performance. He kept phrasing things like "IIS barely exceeds our performance requirements, and is thus high performance" as opposed to "IIS barely exceeds our performance requirements and Apache, Zeus, and thttpd kick its ass twelve ways to Tuesday."

Same guy we had to talk down from thinking Visual Basic was cool, too. Some people. They're so smart, but sometimes they can be sooooo stupid. Argent, myself, and another programmer we work with spent the better part of two hours showing him lots of VB breakage that didn't exist in a half-dozen sane environments (Tk, even *spit* Motif), explaining concurrency issues, basic data structures, etc. I mean, the guy is a professional programmer, and he's not a -bad- programmer either, but ... argghh.

So I'm attempting to build a new, somewhat cleaner and more modular rc.firewall startup script for FreeBSD.

Instead of having a editable /etc/rc.firewall, I'm redoing it so that loads scripts and ipfw rules from /etc/ipfw/ (or maybe /etc/fw/) when it's run, so that after bootup you can say "sh /etc/rc.firewall safe" and it resets the firewall rules to something safe, and you can specify a group of rulesets you want in rc.conf. Or that's the current idea, I'm still playing with ideas as to what would be nicer, both for the end luser who just wants people not to be able to spam through their systems and the firewall guy (such as I style myself) who ends up having to build a new firewall rule system for every new system he puts together based on the flaws she found last time.

And it gets me thinking how old POSIX sh seems. I don't go five minutes without saying "Gee, I wish I had <some TCL feature>" or "this would be so much easier in zsh." We're so spoiled these days.

Urgh. They took away my dimwit cert. I feel so betrayed. Comic self-debasement is important, dammit!