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Lind­say did an excel­lent blog post yes­ter­day titled “Every­thing old is new again”, about the re-emergence of multi-dimensioned databases.

Great title, but just to prove his point, it applies even bet­ter to a post he shared on Google Reader a few days ago, writ­ten by Kurt Schrader and titled “Liv­ing in a Post Rails World”. To quote that post:

I think that the Ruby world is even­tu­ally going to end up in a model like this, writ­ing small sim­ple apps that all talk to each other, and can be replaced or upgraded at any time.

<snip two paragraphs>

All of my hard/long run­ning logic is well tested, encap­su­lated, and most likely run­ning in lit­tle agents on the wire.

Sound famil­iar? It should. Kurt has re-discovered the same prin­ci­ples that the Holy Fathers of Unix dis­cov­ered, over a quar­ter of a cen­tury ago. Doug McIl­roy, circa 1978:

(i) Make each pro­gram do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than com­pli­cate old pro­grams by adding new features.

(ii) Expect the out­put of every pro­gram to become the input to another, as yet unknown, pro­gram. Don’t clut­ter out­put with extra­ne­ous infor­ma­tion. Avoid strin­gently colum­nar or binary input for­mats. Don’t insist on inter­ac­tive input.

Later, he sim­pli­fied it:

This is the Unix phi­los­o­phy: Write pro­grams that do one thing and do it well. Write pro­grams to work together. Write pro­grams to han­dle text streams, because that is a uni­ver­sal interface.

Of course, Henry Spencer said it the best:

Those who don’t under­stand UNIX are con­demned to rein­vent it, poorly.

Read­ing the draft Exec­u­tive Order order­ing Guan­tá­namo Bay deten­tion facil­i­ties to be closed, one minor para­graph jumped out at me:

© The indi­vid­u­als cur­rently detained at Guan­tá­namo have the con­sti­tu­tional priv­i­lege of

the writ of habeas cor­pus. Most of those indi­vid­u­als have filed peti­tions for a writ of

habeas cor­pus in Fed­eral court chal­leng­ing the law­ful­ness of their detention.

If that was the entirety of the order, it would be a huge step for­ward for peo­ple still impris­oned there — they’ll be able to force the gov­ern­ment to jus­tify their impris­on­ment, a right that was con­sis­tently denied to David Hicks and the other detainees.

You can read the whole order from a link at the bot­tom of the ACLU’s press release.

Peo­ple have been telling me to read STR for ages, but I’ve never got around to it. Pas­cal just went to the site while I was shoul­der surf­ing — and thus I dis­cov­ered this review of Ubuntu:

One of the great things about Win­dows is the ease of obtain­ing pow­er­ful util­i­ties and appli­ca­tions. In addi­tion to hun­dreds of great titles avail­able on CD-ROM you can down­load awe­some share­ware appli­ca­tions: sim­ply click on Setup.exe and most installers will instantly deploy your cho­sen soft­ware, some­times with cool bonus pro­duc­tiv­ity apps that enhance your brows­ing expe­ri­ence. In com­par­i­son with Microsoft’s common-sense approach, pan­de­mo­nium reigns on the Linux platform.

The only way to install soft­ware is via a tool called the ‘pack­age man­ager’ which is con­fus­ingly also called ‘Synap­tic’. This works accord­ing to a sim­i­lar prin­ci­ple as a com­mu­nist super-market: You have a lim­ited range of soft­ware which has been cho­sen on a purely ide­o­log­i­cal basis rather than func­tion­al­ity. If you want to ‘think dif­fer­ent’, it’s tough-luck again: Another obvi­ous fail for the ‘contender’.

To make mat­ters worse, in order to install an appli­ca­tion you must be ‘root’ which entails mem­o­riz­ing a series of con­fus­ing pass­words. By con­trast Win­dows allows any user to install the appli­ca­tions they need to do their work — a wise pro­duc­tiv­ity gain that endears the flex­i­ble NT plat­form to IT depart­ments the world over.

The rest is good read­ing too. Very infor­ma­tive! I’m switch­ing away from Ubuntu forthwith.