It is often said that “perfection is the destroyer of good,” similarly I believe that all to often in startup companies, the process of product development destroys the process of developing the product.

As I am currently looking for my next gig, I am seeing a bunch job descriptions. I don't mean to be disrespectful of the various positions I see, but its deja vu all over again and I think after a couple decades in the industry, I can make a few small observations.

For fun, the other night, I did a quick porting job on a company's web based J2EE product moving the database from MySQL to PostgreSQL. The performance gains were instantaneous. Creating and dropping indexes without locking up the product is always a bonus. Queries are faster, concurrent inserts are faster, deleting rows was faster, all around there were big improvements. I'm not sure they'll make the institutional change, but it is at least a proof of concept to make the argument if necessary.

This is my favorite question to ask on an interview:

Given this java program, what is the output and why?

public class test
{
	public static void main (String args[])
 	{
		Integer a = 5;
		Integer b = 5;
		Integer c = 2000;
		Integer d = 2000;
		if(a == b)
			System.out.println("a==b");
		else
			System.out.println("a!=b");
		if(c==d)
			System.out.println("c==d");
		else
			System.out.println("c!=d");
	}
}

The Answer

If you are using a cheap wireless card based on the RTL8185 chipset, but are having horrible signal strength, you need to use the custom realtek drivers from realtek's website. The standard linux driver is the rtl8180 module. The RealTek driver is named r8185b, and it doesn't work 1n the 64 bit kernel.

The RealTek download page is: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/

The 64bit build has these errors:

make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.32-28-generic'
CC [M] /home/markw/drivers/old/rtl8185/r8180_core.o