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May 22, 2005
Fedora Core - The Fun Begins
22 May 2005
SEATTLE - Things were kinda slow around here on Saturday morning so I decided to inflict some well-deserved pain upon myself by attempting a new Linux install. I had an old mini-tower case that used to run RedHat 7.2 before the primary drive crashed. Between it, and my wife's old desktop box I figured I had plenty of (low-powered) hardware to keep me busy for a few hours.
The Box, Power Supply & Drives
The mini-tower is actually from our first PC, purchased in 1995. Because I'm loading it up with drives (more on this later) I swapped it's 200 watt power supply with a 250 watt (I know...but it's better than the 200 watt) from the desktop case. The only modification necessary was to extend the cable connected to the switch.I found two 3GB drives and a single 13GB drive, all of them Western Digital. These were configured as follows:
| IDE Slot | Master | Slave |
|---|---|---|
| IDE0 | 3.2GB Caviar 33200 | 13.6GB Sparta |
| IDE1 | 16x CDROM | 3.2GB Caviar 33100 |
Which Distro? Configuration
While building up the box in the garage, I was downloading RedHat Fedora Core 4 (Test 3). Why Fedora? Good question. Probably the deciding factor was my familiarity with "things RedHat" from the old mini-tower. I had been all over that system over the years and am quite comfortable (relatively speaking, of course) with it.The partition scheme I choose looks like this:
| Partition | Name | Size (MB) |
| /dev/hda1 | /boot | 98 |
| /dev/hda2 | / (root) | 2996 |
| /dev/hdb2 | /usr | 6000 |
| /dev/hda3 | /var | 996 |
| /dev/hda5 | swap | 509 |
| /dev/hda6 | /home | 5150 |
| /dev/hdd1 | /tmp | 511 |
| /dev/hdd2 | /share | 2504 |
The configuration (Which is still being installed...a day later. So much for a "few hours") is starting with the workstation settings, with some extra stuff added, including:
- Web Server
- FTP Server
- MySQL
And whatever else looked interesting...
Posted by caropepe at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2005
When is Software Design Complete (Enough)?
17 May 2005
SEATTLE - In this age of agile software development, it's too easy to rush through design, and begin coding too soon. In addition to the obvious problems (missed requirements, etc), this can also have devestating effects on the development team when they start seeing that development has built something completely different than what they were expecting.
On the other side of the coin, we've all heard of projects being stuck in "analysis paralysis", that state of never really getting started on a software development project becuase there is always one more thing to learn and discover. There are a number of reasons for getting hung up like this, but fear of not capturing that last bit of "crucial" information to the success of the project is probably one of the biggest.
We don't want to rush through analysis and begin building too fast, but it's also pretty obvious that we don't want to spend too much time on the design. These competing requirements need to be balanced against each other until an accurate and shared idea of what is going to be built emerges.
So how do we know what design is "complete enough" to get started?
Read More... NOTE: This article posted at my UW staff website.
Posted by caropepe at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)