I ☠ computers #2
10 o'clock, September 22, 2005
(This is mostly in answer to Ben.)
I never used any software in the 90s that was as painful to install, configure, use, or (god help us) upgrade as Apache or Postfix. I’m sure it was out there, but I wasn’t using it. (Admittedly, there are people who like mucking around in configuration files. I understand how such people could consider administering Apache to be less painful than administering, say, AppleShare. However, I am no longer one of these people.) I can’t speak to Google Earth because it only runs on Windows. But I’m not claiming that nobody today is writing good desktop software, or that the state of the art in desktop software hasn’t moved forward. I’m bitching about the state of the art in server and client/server software.
SQL and I had our honeymoon. We still see each other from time to time, but the romance has long since gone out of the relationship. What’s not to like about MT being on mysql is that I don’t want to have to learn to be a mysql administrator just so I can have a blog. Admittedly, I’ve managed to get away without having to learn to be a mysql administrator so far, but the price of that is never being able to upgrade it or back it up. (For the record, all commercial RDBMSs that I’ve ever worked with suck from this point of view, too.) Likewise, the fact that you can hack the scripts MT is made of is certainly handy, but since I didn’t go to the trouble of, say, setting up a source control system and a test environment before I started hacking it, I now can’t remember what I’ve changed and when it comes to upgrading I have, again, screwed myself.
As far as local vs. remote goes — well, I’ve been lucky, I guess. In twenty years I’ve never actually destroyed my own computer, or even come particularly close. And since we’re still five or ten years away (as the Glasgow Internet Experience showed) from me being able to access my stuff anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world, I prefer to keep the files I might want to look at where I can get at them. (Email is another story. But the primary use case for email is when I definitely am connected, not when I mgiht-or-might-not be.)
Also, when it comes to remote file management, there’s this:
Figure 1. Why I don’t use any of my Linux accounts as my primary file storage.
Admittedly, there probably is a way around this, too, like WebDAV or something. Or Samba. Or God-knows-what. But all of that comes around, again, to administering more server software. Which is what I’m sick of.
P.S.: And while the folks at Six Apart have done as well as anybody could expect with the web interface to MT, can I just say, for the record, how much fun it is to edit large rich-text documents like this one in a web browser text area? No fun at all, that’s how much.
One countervailing concern, though, is hard drive death. Since i've just suffered through the first actual drive failure in my decade+ of being a computer user, i'm sensitive at the morning; when the drive stops spinning, all data is lost.
But that just calls for backups. :)