Categories
Development

Code reuse is a myth

Arash Barirani is pondering why domain models is so rarely reused. After all they did teach us in school that reuse is one of the big advantages of object orientation. Everyone could see that the Car and Tire objects the teacher used for illustration easily could be reused in another car and tire application.

He still seems to be having some faith in the concept though, and is still wondering how to achieve it. I on the other hand has lost all faith. Well, not all, but most of it. The problem is: Different customers has different views of their domain, even though they might be doing the same stuff.

Some domains like accounting could probably be used across companies. It is strictly defined, and there are common rules for how to account for everything that happens through a year. Other domains like running a big warehouse will not be the same unless both organizations believe in the exactly same way of running their business. Depending on processes and the people in it the domain can be completely different. There might be some similarities, but even the language might be different. And you sure as hell can’t march in there and tell them to change their language and processes just to fit to an existing model.

It depends on the people running it. As they change or leave, the company will need to change too. That’s when you need SOA… Of course not. But you will need a flexible well designed system that copes with change and is easy to maintain.

Categories
OS tricks Web

The backups you never make

So my harddrive for my home-server crashed. Seems like it short-circuited or something. Any tips for restoring would be appreciated. 🙂 I had devised some sort og backup mechanism, that obviously didn’t work. Lost about a years worth of posts. 🙁

Have signed up to Dreamhost now which offers 200GB diskspace on the cheapest plans. Finnally we are seeing hostingplans that are viable for my hosting. My first impression of their controlpanels etc. are really good too. Some minor glitches, but seems like a well thought through product.

UPDATE: Think I retrieved most my content from some caches. It’ll be a fair bit of job to put it back into wordpress, but at least it’s not lost. 🙂

Categories
OS tricks

Cleanup directory

So we started running Maven snapshots at a fairly regular basis to enable automatic running of Watir tests. This fills up the disk really fast so I had to do some research to fine a linux command that would delete all but the newest snapshot from multiple projects:

find /var/www/maven2-snapshots -type d -path '*SNAPSHOT' | xargs -i bash -c "find {} -type f -not -path '*maven-metadata*' | grep projectname | sort -r | awk 'NR>6'"

The above command will keep everything that is called maven-metadata something and the 6 latest files in the directory (Maven generates 6 files for each snapshot).