Adam points to an essay by Paul Graham on A Unified Theory of VC Suckage. Sure, I guess, and if you like learning how and why, read it and also Adam's comments. Meanwhile, I'll just leave you with this amusing footnote:
[2] Since most VCs aren't tech guys, the technology side of their due diligence tends to be like a body cavity search by someone with a faulty knowledge of human anatomy. After a while we were quite sore from VCs attempting to probe our nonexistent database orifice.No, we don't use Oracle. We just store the data in files. Our secret is to use an OS that doesn't lose our data. Which OS? FreeBSD. Why do you use that instead of Windows NT? Because it's better and it doesn't cost anything. What, you're using a freeware OS?
How many times that conversation was repeated. Then when we got to Yahoo, we found they used FreeBSD and stored their data in files too.
Flat files rule.
(It turns out that the term of art for "we just use files on FreeBSD" is flat files. They are much more common than people would admit, especially among old timers who've got that "been there, done that" experience of seeing their entire database puff into smoke because someone plugged in a hair dryer or the latest security patch just blew away access to that new cryptographic filesystem with journalling mirrored across 2 continents, a cruise liner and a nuclear bunker. Flat files really do rule OK. Anyway, back to debugging my flat file database ...)
Posted by iang at March 24, 2005 06:42 PM | TrackBackSo, Ian, you like flat files? I entirely agree; that's why I use Blosxom for my web log; I keep all blog posts as flat files under version control (using Subversion). Maybe you should consider switching from Movable Type? :-)
However I have to say the flipside of using Blosxom is that it really needs tweaking to do anything useful (and I still haven't tweaked myself a comments system) and it's possible to get so much into site tweaking that you don't actually have time to write any site content (or at least content that's not self-referential -- see for example http://www.hecker.org/blosxom/).
Posted by: Frank Hecker at March 26, 2005 07:03 PMYArrrgggghhhh! Gnash. Yes, MT uses (or not!) MySQL. I've spent countless hours debugging MT to fix one or other of the lacking features, and I've never yet figured out where the data is hidden. So the only thing to do is to write hooks in the code where the data comes in and then kick MT in ways to trigger the easter eggs.
Blech.
But I agree. I try and keep my site tweaking to emergency stuff.
Posted by: Iang at March 26, 2005 07:57 PM