street chicken, knew where it was going
had a very confusing day at work, went from osX to windows to centos 5 to rhel4 to fedora to debian
started me thinking a lot about standardization, and most importantly whether it was actually possible
life is pretty messy, and server systems have a way of getting out of control coz everyone has their own preference
so why the chicken?
i was walking home through spring hill and i turned up the hill to walk home and there was this chicken. this chicken had so much purpose, it looked at me and it its eyes i could see the conviction and commitment
i wasnt sure where the chicken was going, but the chicken was
now, brainflash, if a chicken could get it together maybe i could have a standard server environment
but heres the bite- wave your iphones in the air if you agree with me

• you always have to pick up someone elses server infrastructure, and despite good intentions the system doco you need to get it running is nowhere to be found - maybe it was never written - did i say that out loud?
• sometimes the sata raid driver you needed to get working yesterday wont even compile on this bloody os
• the os maintainers have had a brawl with the people who wrote your favorite package and is no longer included in the new distribution, but you only found that out after you setup 15 servers in texas
• you pay for what you get, and despite paying through the nose for a supported and mainstream os, you still got nothin

  monk-ee 200711111935

  
  

why not cargo cult- whats the incentive to actually achieve anything?
what the hell is cargo culting you say ?

wiki background
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
An isolated society's first contact with the outside world can be a shock — often the natives will first assume that the newcomers are spiritual beings of some kind who possess divine powers. With time, however, it will inevitably become apparent that the outsiders are mortal and that their power comes from their equipment (or cargo). Cargo cults tend to appear among people that covet this 'magical' equipment, but are unable to obtain it easily through trade. Given their relative isolation, the cult participants generally have little knowledge of modern manufacturing and are liable to be skeptical of Western explanations. Instead, symbols they associate with Christianity and modern Western society tend to be incorporated into their rituals as magical artifacts. Across cultural differences and large geographic areas, there have been instances of the movements independently organizing. Famous examples of cargo cult activity include the setting up of mock airstrips, airports, offices and the fetishization and attempted construction of western goods, such as radios made of coconuts and straw. Believers may stage "drills" and "marches" with sticks for rifles and military-style insignia and "USA" painted on their bodies to make them look like soldiers, treating the activities of western military personnel as rituals to be performed for the purpose of attracting cargo. The cult members built these items and 'facilities' in the belief that the structures would attract cargo. This perception has reportedly been reinforced by the occasional success of an 'airport' to attract military transport aircraft full of cargo[citation needed]. Today, many historians and anthropologists argue that the term "cargo cult" is a misnomer that describes a variety of phenomena[citation needed]. However, the idea has captured the imagination of many people in developed nations, and the term continues to be used today. For this reason, and possibly many others, the cults have been labelled millenarian, in the sense that they hold that a utopian future is imminent or will come about if they perform certain rituals. ok enough of the palaver
why the jaded title?
In the programming context its enough to say that cut and paste is an essential tool CC (cargoculting) programmers repetoire.
now, the argument goes like this
why would you use code and functions and other jazz like that when you dont understand it. surely that makes the code unstable and if it breaks you have no skills to fix it
rebuttal
ok how many people know what a catalytic converter is? could they find it or fix it when it broke. but almost every person with a modern car uses one
ok so we are not all pretending to be mechanics or car engineers, but it is fair to say that in our everyday lives we use things we dont understand and can fix and modify through the direct empirical method ( just give it a wack, wiggle it a bit or pull it apart and put it together with bits missing)
to be continued.....................

monk-ee 200711301035