Recently in Systems Category
ORMs (Object Relational Mappers) are a basically a way to have a OO layer between your application code and your RMDBS. There are some basic "features" of an ORM, but not all ORMs support all of these. In any case here is a list of common features:
- OO interface to tables, rows, functions, etc, in your database. So you can use native application code and OOP to interact with your data.
- A more elegant/simpler API to interact with your database. Many ORMs use some other database API under the hood, but add routines and interfaces (or simplifies calls) that the normal API lacks.
- Object (data object) persistence. So that you can create an instance of some data you are modeling and then be able to store that object and revive it later with state preserved.
- Abstract the interaction between your application code and your database such that in the future if/when you need to move to a different database you application code will require as little change as possible. Ultimately, changing databases should be a matter of configuration files, or perhaps even less work. And your app code wouldn't even know the difference between Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, or something else.
Exchange doesn't work well with free software. Exchange is designed to work with Outlook, and no other client is even considered important. They do claim to have IMAP support for other email clients, but Microsoft's IMAP seems to be unstable. It continually has problems freezing up. About 3-5 times per day the IMAP service on the Exchange server hangs and needs to be restarted! Lame! And so all Thunderbird users are stuck playing this "is my email working now?" game all the time.
The other thing is calendaring only works with Outlook clients. Exchange doesn't support iCal/WebDAV or any other open standard. So for calendaring we pretty much are forced to use the web interface for Exchange. And the web interface for Exchange has two versions- a full featured one that only works on IE, and then a crippled one that is served to all other browsers. LAME again! So all the "features" of switching to Exchange are really only features for Windows users who use Outlook and IE. If you use anything else, then your email and calendaring just got a whole lot worse!!
Zimbra did have some known bugs in their calendaring, especially in booking conference rooms for meetings. However, I believe the folks at Zimbra have been working on that for their next release. Email never was a problem with Zimbra for any user that I could tell- Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever.
But I'm not bitter.... yet.
I like Movable Type a lot. It seems to be more intuitive than a lot of the other ones I have looked at and tried. I will be moving my posts from my other blog to this one over the next little bit.
This
book is awesome. I learned so much from it that I have placed it
second on my list of books every software engineer should read. There
are so many great topics covered in such a easy to read and understand
way that you can't help but want to try them out. And after trying a
few out, you start to wonder how on earth did you live without some of
these things.
There are a few books I have read that I really
got a lot out of, and this was one of them. I was familiar with a lot
of the things discussed in here, but not at any great detail (at least
with some of them). I even learned a thing or two with perl (imagine
that!).
So I finally was able to get the domain spencerchristensen.com. It was taken for a while by someone else, but when I check just a couple of weeks ago, it was available. So I am setting up my personal site.
I have had a personal site for years at http://www.mecworks.com/~spencer , but this has fallen dormant for a long time. I hope to get back into maintaining a personal site with this one. I still don't have a lot of free time to give to this, but hopefully I can at least give more that what I have been doing.
