October 2007 Archives

Wikipedia defines polymorphism as "the ability of objects belonging to different types to respond to method calls of the same name, each one according to an appropriate type-specific behavior."  There is nothing too fancy about polymorphism other than it's name.  All it means in layman' s terms is that you can define some common behavior for multiple types of objects and have a common codebase which may or may not care about the different variations on a type.  A good analogy would be the biological taxonomy system.  You may remember this from high school.  It has Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species.  If we were to model all living things according to their taxonomy, then we could have software which behaves much like a dog kennel.  The dog kennel takes domesticated dogs.  There are many specific breeds of dogs but the kennel knows that any domesticated 4 legged dog will do and will be compatible with their kennel.  We could say this dog is polymorphic in a way.  Not only is it a domesticated dog, but it's a carnivorous canine which is an animal.  Does our software support all animals?  Maybe.  If so, this dog would work there too.

Object Oriented (OO) languages are a staple of the development community, however many people continue to argue against them, citing that they are inefficient, useless, confusing and unnecessary.  There are many real benefits to using OO even for very small projects.  It does require a different mode of thinking though to convert from a purely procedural environment into an OO one.  In this article I will show some of the values added by implementing using OO designs and what is saved in the long run.

It's the end of October and the 2007/2008 snowboarding and skiing season is right around the corner!  I'm very excited for this year and to prepare, I've decided to get some new outer clothes before it starts to snow and the prices shoot up. I also had a look at some of the new snowboard offerings from Burton, amongst others, who is pushing the boundaries of rational purchasing with their new $1000 Vapor model.  I'm not in the market for a new board this year but I thought I'd share some of my findings for stylish jackets and pants for both men and women.

Everyone knows (or at least they SHOULD know) that they need to back up their data but so few people actually back up what they have properly or regularly.  It's always once you've lost your entire digital photo collection or that book you've been writing that you realize you've been totally neglecting your back up discipline.  I can't tell you how many hard drives I've seen or had crash over the years.  I've probably had 20 crash under my own accord.  I didn't let them overheat, bang them around or do anything out of the ordinary.  The fact of the matter is that much like how your car engine will eventually wear out, so will your hard drive.  Your hard drive contains moving parts that WILL wear out over time.  Making sure your data is in at least one other spot is absolutely essential if you care at all about your digital property.

I've configured and maintained over 100 UNIX-based servers over the years starting with Slackware Linux 2.0 back in 1995.  Over all course of all the deployments I've become very biased about my operating systems.  Linux clearly has a solid lead with desktop applications, but for server deployments and maintainability, I believe firmly in FreeBSD.