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September 21, 2005
Master of my tiny world
No real writing today, except email that'll potentially get lost. That's often what happens when you send something that could cause work for someone else, even if it's legitimate.
Instead, I wrote shell scripts and Makefiles to package man pages, making them easier to install. (Thanks to Christopher for his suggestions. It's great having your main customer right down the hall.) If you don't know what a man page is open a terminal window and...
$ man man
That's actually supposed to be a sort of UNIX joke. If you cannot open a terminal window, you no doubt do not need to know what a man page is. But you're probably missing the key feature of UNIX, which is a special brand of humor.
After that I worked out (with Eric and Armand, mainly Eric) much of what we need to know to be able to do online help with the doc tools in use at work, so we can also use those tools to localize it. I was muttering under my breath about our convoluted way of handling things, how tough we sometimes make things for the user.
Eric said something edifying at that point, "Solaris isn't an OS. It's an API."
That's actually literally true, because that's what people are buying. You get Solaris, and the API is stable in a rock solid way. It's so stable that you can generally just upgrade the system and all your applications will continue running, as will all your scripts. Not like GNU/Linux distros, where you expect your applications to survive to the next update only if you check everything or use only absolutely de facto standard stuff.
Of course that's a big pain in the keister... for the developer underneath the API. Developing underneath the API is like having unprotected sex. Lose continence for a moment and you pay forever after.
The "master of my tiny world" idea is the feeling of working in shell. You issue commands, one after another. That's all you do. And the system just executes whatever stupid orders you give it. It's worse than a cynical employee, because even a cynical wage slave won't just take any stupid idea you have to its logical conclusion, no matter how many important files are destroyed.
Posted by Mark at September 21, 2005 09:16 PM
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