The talk was covering Functional Programming and the NoSQL movement (which, as Dave himself puts it, should be called NoRDB). These are two areas of computing that are currently key interests of mine, so it won't come as a surprise to find that I thoroughly enjoyed the talk. I certainly wasn't the only one. Dave did such a great job of covering the positives of these two movements that we're already seeing more and more people signing up for membership to BFPG.

I'm not going to go into the gory details about what Dave covered in his talk as I don't want to spoil it for other people if he plans on doing it again elsewhere. There are a few things I would like to mention though:

• Functional Programming is here to stay. If you're not familiar with it, or haven't yet taken a look at it, I suggest you get started!
• If you're looking to get involved with FP and you're in or around the Brisbane area, be sure to come to one of our BFPG meetups.
• Don't fall into the trap of assuming that if your system needs a back-end data store that an RDBMS is the only option, because it's not!

This talk has inspired me to not only continue checking out the likes of Haskell, Erlang and Riak, it's pointed me at some languages that I never knew existed. Languages which are insanely powerful, very dense, yet still extremely useful. Some examples are J, K and Q. KDB+ in particular is very interesting as it ties in with the use of another type of technology that I was aware of but knew nothing about: Column Databases. Crazy stuff.

After seeing so many people excited by the prospect of Functional Programming after Dave's talk had concluded, I decided to set up a new website for BFPG so that we had a proper home rather than just a spot on Meetup.com. Check it out and feel free to send through some feedback if you have any, or drop us a line if you have any ideas for talks or would like to present something yourself.

That's it for today's brain-fart

For some reason, it's a very common practice for those people who don't have expertise in a certain field to make decisions for people working in that field. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the answer to the question: "Which technology should we use?"

Let me take a step back in time for a moment.

I applied for a job with a certain company (which shall remain nameless) that was looking for a number of C#/.NET developers of a certain level of experience. After confirming an interview date and time, I turned up to find myself facing a panel of 3 interviewers. One of those people held a technical position, though I found out later that the position he held was self-appointed and certainly not an indication of the person's level of technical knowledge or expertise. The other two were in non-technical positions.

During the interview we had the usual discussions and questions around technial knowledge, depth of understanding of certain areas of the .NET framework, views and approaches to dealing with people in teams, agile experience, etc. It all went very well. At the end of the interview I was given my chance to ask a few questions. The main one I wanted to ask was "Why did you decide to use .NET for this project?"

For the record, the previous version of the system was written using an older Microsoft technology stack. The decision had been made to go with .NET for this new version. Can you see the correlation?

The answer was quite stunning. The only reason the project was using .NET was because the previous version was a Microsoft-based solution.

The first thing I thought was "surely that can't be it?". As a matter of fact, that wasn't the only reason for it, but it was the main reason. The decision wasn't made by a technical person, it was made by someone in upper management.

Scary huh!?

In my personal opinion, there is one particular technology that I think would have done a much better job of solving this particular problem, and it's not a Microsoft solution. It's not a Sun solution, or any other mainstream option for that matter. In my view, Erlang would have been perfect.

I don't think that a company like that would have ever even considered Erlang as a viable option. Mainly for two reasons. The first is that the amount of skilled Erlang developers available on the East Coast of Australia is extremely small. The second is fear of the unknown/non-mainstream tech. That is, companies like to go with what other companies are going with.

The crazy thing about this scenario is that management go to market to hire people who are domain experts, and then proceed to tell them which technologies to use. Surely you would be better off hiring people to know how to solve problem X really well, and then listen to what they have to say about the technology stack that should be put in place? No, not in this industry. Probably not in my lifetime either!

So if you're a non-tech person leading a team of techies, please PLEASE listen to what they have to say. Ask them what they think is the right approach and the right toolset. Don't take control of the technical decisions. Let them do what you hired them to do: Solve the problem, and use the right tool for the job. If they don't know the answer, or the answer is always the same, then you've got the wrong developers.

Thanks for listening

It's safe to admit that you just don't know! In fact, it's better if you do admit it. Pretending that you know what you don't not only makes you the butt of the jokes, but you end up being detrimental to the success of the project.

Stop trying to be a know-all. Let go of the idea that you need to be the one to approve everything. Take a step back and be honest to yourself and the rest of the team. You aren't a one-man-band. You aren't the technical guru that you think you are. You aren't even a specialist in a particular area, let alone a jack-of-all-trades.

When you attempt to do something and you fail, stop trying to make it sound like you haven't failed. Please stop yourself from trying to turn your wrong into a right. Everyone fails in one way or another during their working life, and as much as you don't want to admit it, it does include you.

Change your attitude. You'll be doing yourself a favour.

And while you're at it, how about you get up to speed with the technology you're working with. Then you won't have to pretend, and the likelihood of you failing will start to decrease.

Thanks for listening.

Remember, it's not about you, it's all about the software.

I know, this kind of thing happens thousands of times a day. Some arbitrary geek decided to build the next killer app and expects to make a crapload of cash out of it. While that would be nice, the ultimate goal isn't the cash. The goal for me is to build something that gets used, and for me to begin to master an area of technology that I've had a quiet passion for for a long period of time now.

My plan is simple. While learning the technologies that I will be using I'll be building another application and blogging about it so that all of you can learn with me. Meanwhile, I shall use my learnings to build this other application at the same time.

The final result should be a series of posts which help other people learn the technology stack, give better coverage and visibility to languages and technologies that a lot of the geek world doesn't know about (and really should!), and for me to carve myself a bit of a niche here on the East coast of Ozland. I am hoping to be able to consult my services out to other businesses as a result.

For those that are interested in following along, here is the full tech stack and toolset that I'll be using:

• Erlang - A fantastic cross-platform functional programming language that has some amazing features.
• Webmachine - A HTTP toolkit which sits on top of Mochiweb that makes it easy to build well-behaved HTTP applications.
• Nitrogen - An Erlang-based framework that makes it easy to build websites.
• Riak or CouchDB - Both of these amazing pieces of tech are potential candidates for the back-end storage. I'm not yet sure which one I'll go with.
• jQuery - A great JavaScript library for the front-end.
• VIM - My favourite text editor
• Xubuntu - Ubuntu Karmic Koala with XFCE as the window manager.
• Mercurial - My favourite version control system.
• Trac - A project tracking tool.
• VirtualBox - My choice for virtualisation. I tend to run Windows 7 as my primary OS, so most of my dev will be in a VM. When I get my desktop machine back up and running (with all three monitors!) it'll most likely multiboot Win 7 and Xubuntu.
• Google Wave - I'll be using this for communications with some really switched on people in the Erlang community who have kindly offered to help me with questions and whatnot specific to some of the areas of tech I've mentioned above.

During the course of my blogging/learning I'll be focussing on Webmachine, Riak/CouchDB, Erlang and Nitrogen. All the other tools will probably get mentioned along the way, but the primary goal is to focus on these things.

I'm really excited! I'm currently in the process of documenting my goals and the design for the main application. Once that's done, I'll get started with the fun stuff. I've got a lot to do and it should be a fun ride. I hope you enjoy following along!

After a year or so of serving up content, it managed to handle a couple of Reddit submissions without much of a bother! I was suitably impressed.

But there comes a time when you can't help but wonder what else is out there. For me, that time came a little while ago when I boosted the number of plug-ins that I use on this site. Litespeed took longer to serve pages up and I couldn't help but notice it. I'm certainly not blaming Litespeed, because the obvious solution is to remove the plug-ins! But I didn't want to do that as those plug-ins provide features for this site that I don't want to lose. So my quest to find another web server began.

Then recently I started researching ideas for developing software in Erlang. I've been reading up on the language for quite a while and I'm getting to the point where I intend to build something. My first effort is going to be a web application that uses Mochiweb, Webmachine and CouchDB. I know that at some point I'm going to want to have this thing run on the web so that other people can play with it and that would mean that I would have to have a web server available that could also route requests to my Erlang server. Of course, I want it to be quick.

So after a bit of deliberation and research, I followed the footsteps of some big players and ended up installing Nginx (which I believe is pronounced "Engine-X"). I kid you not, this thing is amazing! I'm not going to give a full review of it here because I haven't used it enough to know how good it is. But the speed-up for this site in particular is obvious (at least for me).

My mate Dan's site absolutely flies!

On the whole, Nginx gets a huge thumbs up from me thus far. If you're looking for a speedy web server that can do reverse proxying, dish up static content like a maniac and handle forwarding of requests to a variety of other servers then you should seriously consider taking a look at Nginx.

Thank you, Igor!

Communities are arguably the life blood of technology. Without a good community the likelihood of the technology catching on is drastically reduced. Those communities which lack individuals that are happy to put time and effort in to help get others up to speed tend to stagnate. Any community which involves members that are abrasive, rude and downright offensive is destined to suffer long term.

The level of suffering will vary depending on quite a few things. Those things include existing user base, the age of the technology and the number of different ways that a given n00b can get information about that technology.

IRC is a very common and popular means for members of communities to interact. It provides a real-time element that you don't get with blogs, forums and other media like Twitter. It satisfies every geek's desire to get the answer and get it now. Experiencing support in real time via IRC can be extremely helpful and rewarding. It can work wonders for the popularity and image of the community and the technology itself.

If you're interested in seeing some active and extremely helpful communities, you should take a look at #haskell and #mercurial. Both of these channels are generally very active. The people that spend time in them are both helpful and friendly. Both of these channels indicate to me that there is a very healthy and vibrant community behind each of these pieces of technology.

Unfortunately, this kind of communication also has a downside. The real-time nature of IRC allows people to vent anger on newcomers without any means of moderation. The net result of this is that other individuals become to scared to offer their view or provide support for fear of receiving the same treatment. This goes for members with any level of skill or knowledge. There are some community channels out there containing hundreds of people, and yet there is no conversation. When questions are asked, nobody responds.

After my recent experience in a channel that fist this description, it's easy to see why. In less that half an hour of asking for clarification on certain points, I received a barrage of abuse which, in my view, was totally unjustified.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that it was justified. That for some reason I annoyed someone in such a way that bombarding me with many 4 and 5-letter expletives was acceptable. Do you think that it paints a good picture of the community?

I think not.

In less than half an hour I went from excited to deflated. I lost interest in the piece of technology and lost faith in the community around it. Was my response justified or understandable?

I'm not sure about the answer to this

I feel that it's the job of the community to moderate other members of their community. If people get abusive then other members should step in and prevent it. In my case this wasn't possible due to the fact that the person in question was abusing me via a private chat so that the channel couldn't witness his venting. I'm guessing this wasn't the first time that he's done this to someone, nor will it be the last. I wonder how many others have suffered the same fate? If the silence of the channel is anything to go by, I'm guessing quite a few.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is this: don't underestimate the value and importance of your community. It's one of the most frequented faces of your technology. If it's bitter, unwelcoming and unsupportive, you will not only lose valuable newcomers who come looking for information and support, you will also lose future users due to the poor reputation. Ultimately, your tech will suffer.

If you're part of a community, do your bit to police it. Help those who need help. Stop those people who are abusive.

.. and if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all!

Yes, Portage is cool. It's quick, it builds stuff from source, etc. While that power is great, it's a pain in the butt at the same time. Especially when you're running on a VPS. I am tired of the underlying bits and pieces changing constantly and me having to muck around with masking and unmasking packages just to get things to update and play nicely together.

I made the decision to switch to Debian and I am happy I did it. I don't think the time I'll have to spend maintaining the server will be as high as before. This is all about productivity and as far as I'm concerned this is going to reduce my workload. Given that my software installs don't change once I've got the server up and running, I shouldn't have to spend that amount of time keeping things running.

As always, there's a risk of teething problems when you do a full reinstall. So if anyone out there is having issues then please let me know. Cheers!

This, however, I find more exciting. This article has now been translated into Italian! This is the first time an article of mine has been reproduced in another language, which I think is just fantastic.

My colleague, Cosimo has been hard at work making the Italian version for the last couple of weeks. From what I can see it looks like he's done a marvellous job.

So for those of you who are looking for the Italian version of this article, you can find it over here on Cosimo's blog: .NET-FU : come trasformare in SIGNED un assembly UNSIGNED (senza ricorrere al DELAY SIGNING). Thanks very much Cosimo!

If there's anyone else out there who is interested in translating articles into your home language then please feel free to contact me.

Enjoy!

1. Sorting - Yes this series is still very much alive. I am working through the content of the post on the Quick Sort algorithm. It's quite a tricky algorithm to describe well while not being overly confusing or using too much jargon. Most of the work that I am doing here is around trying to make the information easier to digest. After that, there are still many other algorithms that I'll be covering.
2. Debugging .NET in Production Environments - Experience and skill in this area is surprisingly rare. I've had a bit of experience with it, but was inspired by Corneliu's Tech.Ed AU 08 presentation to take some time to blog about it. A few posts are in the pipe which I hope will aid in exposing the innards of this "black art".
3. Thoughts on Windows 7 Beta - I'll be installing this shortly and playing with it a fair bit over the coming weeks. No doubt I'll have a few things to say. My goal isn't to list features, like so many other sites, but to talk about my views on usability, stability and performance.
4. Thoughts on NDepend - This is a tool that I've read up on but have never used. I have a pro license now and am ready to give it a good run. I'll be posting my thoughts down the track when I feel I'm at a point where I can give a solid appraisal.
5. Project Euler solutions - Yes I'm still working through them. It's hard to find the time to go through them at the rate that I used to, but I still do them from time to time. Yes I'm still using Haskell, and yes I'll be posting the source in the hope that someone can point out how bad it is and help me learn more. The next post will cover the solution to problem 11. I've got two different approaches that I will be talking about as I found both of the fun and interesting.
6. Some "niche" posts - That is, posts which hit a specific point of pain (such as the assembly signing post) but aren't the run-of-the-mill post containing information or value that can be utilised every day. The goal is to share bits of info which might only be useful once in a blue moon, but you're grateful for knowing it when you do need it!
7. Random bits and pieces - Whatever else takes my fancy or pops up along the way.

My aim is to get a good mix of stuff on here to make it enjoyable for a big audience.

Suggestions are also welcome

The last time it happened I wasn't able to get any sites to respond. I ended up popping some manual DNS server entries into my router which I had archived in a "welcome" email that I had received when I first signed up for my Internet account. These worked well for a while, but eventually ended up going offline and so I had to look for another option.

Enter OpenDNS. A free DNS service with a stack of features that anyone can use. I'll go over a few of them.

First up is Content filtering. What a fab idea! Offsite content filtering that stops dodgey and unwanted stuff before it even hits your modem. OpenDNS supports content filtering in a couple of ways which makes it really easy to generally filter out particular sites and content.

The content filtering mechanism is quite extensive. You have the option of choosing a predefined "filtering level", each of which defines a set of site categories which will be filtered out for viewers on your network. The options go from Minimal, which simply blocks known phishing sites, through to High which covers everything from porn and illegal activities to video sharing sites.

There is also a Custom level which allows you to choose the categories that you want filtered. This is the long-hand version of the predefined levels mentioned above, which is great as it let's you pick and choose if you want finger-grained control.

Lastly, as far as filtering goes, you have the option of allowing or blocking sites as a hard rule. This is handy if you know that a particular site is getting caught in your filter but you know for sure that it's safe. This happens surprisingly often, so having a whitelist is very handy. Being able to block a stack of ad sites before they even hit your browser is also a winner, hence the blacklist feature is great too.

Thankfully OpenDNS supports IP address auto-update. Over time, you'll no doubt get different IP addresses from your ISP as your DHCP leases expire or when you reconnect your modem to your service. Given that OpenDNS needs to have some way of determining who you are, IP address really is the only way. So to help keep OpenDNS up-to-date with your current IP (and hence, keep applying your filtering rules), there is a client application that you can have running in your system tray which contacts the service periodically and makes sure that it has the latest IP. While this is a great idea it's a bit crap that you have to run a client application. It's a shame that they didn't decide to support the use of another dynamic addressing system such as DynDns.org (lots of modems have built-in support for updating services like DynDns automatically).

For those who like to make their services feel cosey, OpenDNS supports customisation of various bits of functionality. For example, you're able to change the logo picture (this is more of an interest to site admins). You can also modify messages that are displayed when sites are blocked for various reasons. For those of you on home networks, specifying more meaningful messages for those, shall we say, "less technical" family members will no doubt be beneficial in reducing the number of support calls.

Network shortcuts are another nifty feature. A network shortcut is essentially a bookmark which works across the entire network. All you have to do is specify a name for your shortcut, and the site that it redirects to, and you're done. Once the shortcut has been saved, all you have to do to get to the site is type in the name of the shortcut. When the DNS request is made, OpenDNS looks for any shortcuts by that name that exist in your list, and if found, it will redirect the user to the appropriate site. Groovey!

At first you don't believe it, but OpenDNS is surprisingly quick. I wouldn't say that I have conducted a huge set of performance tests and benchmarks, but I would say that it by far outperforms my ISP's DNS servers as far as responsivity is concerned. Not just that, but it works. I am yet to see a DNS lookup fail requiring me to retry.

The final redeeming feature of OpenDNS is that it's constantly updated and secure. Flaws in the DNS system, for example, have already been patched. This reduces the chances of you dealing with an insecure DNS server (such as the one sitting at your ISP) and ending up at a site that might be a little unsavoury.

To sum up, I really think OpenDNS is a great service. It's fast, feature-rich and very handy. For anyone with a family/kids or a need/desire to filter out some of the f**ked up content that lives on the web (such as this site ;)), this service is for you. Give it a spin!