linuxpimp20

Hi. A lot of people become interested in programming because it can lead to a profitable career. Although that is one reason programming interest me it ranks pretty low. I use linux and sometimes things don't work the way you'd hope so i know if i can program well i can jerry rig things to work around such situations. I was interested in hearing some stories from people where they got stuck and had to make something out of a clothespin, perl, a tube sock, and a lib to get thing straighten out. thanks for any replies in advance.

DaWei

Actually, profitable careers don't come about like that. While a clothespin may have some attributes that could serve another purpose, they're primarily a good way to hold clothes on a line. Take all the attributes you need, from whatever inspiration, and aggregate them in a new and dedicated (and creative) design. Jury-rigging is for spur-of-the-moment fixes in an emergency, not for producing a viable thangy. As a matter of fact, a jury-rig often highlights a design deficiency, not a design coup.

__________________
Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers

MBirchmeier

/agree

Additionally once something gets jury-rigged there's a tendancy to keep jury-rigging it. I was called into a situation where something needed to be 'fixed'. It was an MSAccess table almost 1.5GB in size (bandwidth costs were eating them alive), that had several hundred tables, role based permission and all sorts of neat things MSAccess doesn't really support. There was some pretty brilliant jury-rigging, but the fundamental problem was Access.

After switching them over to a PHP/MySQL system, the number of tables decreased drastically, the number of rules decreased drastically, and their bandwidth usage was reduced twenty fold.

Work smarter not harder, or in this case work smart, not clever.

-MBirchmeier

Pizentios

i remember my first install of mono, took some tinkering to get to work, since i was compiling ti from source on a slackware box :-)

__________________
Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand.

Check out my Blog <---updated Nov 30 2007!

frankish

More money means more stress and less fun. I'd rather make a teacher's salary and have more time to write my own software.

Arevos

Not necessarily, although I daresay it depends on what exactly linuxpimp20 meant by "jury-rig".

I've got an NSLU2, a small fanless device used for mounting USB hard drives on a windows network without the need for a full PC. The neat thing about the NSLU2 is that whilst it only costs 50 quid, it runs on Linux, has a 133MHz processor (which can be upped to 266MHz by removing a resister, if you don't mind voiding your warrenty), 32M of RAM, an ethernet port and 2 USB ports. As an additional bonus, it's completely silent.

Rather than let such an interesting piece of kit serve up harddrive data all day long, I installed uNSLUng Linux over the top of the NSLU's original Linux OS and I'm in the process of turning it into a general-purpose mini-server.


Another "jury-rigged" item I have is the temperature controller connected to my graphics card. Originally, the card's fan just had one speed; fast and noisy. Now it has a circuitboard stuck to it that varies the voltage to the fan dependant on temperature.

Back in the day when there was no broadband, we had a modem connected to an old Linux laptop with a broken screen, which acted as an internet router to our home network. Myself and my father wrote a piece of software that could turn the modem on and off remotely.

Are these the sorts of things you're after, linuxpimp20?

peace_of_mind

I believe they are, Arevos.

From the title of the thread and the original post I took it as he was looking for stories (for inspiration I suppose) where you ran into a problem and had to be resourceful in making things work. Whether that involved learning to write a quick script, learning more about the OS/hardware, just finding a way to get things done, hence the McGyver reference. Anyways that's how I took the original post as meaning. It probably could have been worded better, but I think I got what he was meaning.

__________________
Amateurs built the ark
Professionals built the Titanic

DaWei

Observe:
Perhaps some elucidation (though not an edit of content, merely a highlight, to benefit acutally reading and understanding is in order).
I daresay that falls under the heading of "not necessarily."

__________________
Abstraction doesn't make it impossible to write bad code; it makes it possible to write superior code.
Contributor's Corner: Grumpy on C++ Exceptions DaWei on Pointers