Understanding VMWare Snapshots – Also, it’s probably a good idea to learn this stuff.

How old were you when you started programming?
I first tried at 12, but couldn’t get started in a way that was meaningful to me. I ran into a problem at 18 in college that I solved with an Access database.

How did you get started in programming?
That access database needed to be glued together with a lot of VBA to make it work the way we needed it to. I read a book and just jumped from topic to topic reading the bare minimum I needed to make it work. Unlike most programmers, I wasn

What was your first language?
VBA, then VB6, then Bash shell scripting, then PHP, and from then it was on.

What was the first real program you wrote?
Probably a VB6 program for a class. The first one that stuck around for a while was in PHP3.

What languages have you used since you started programming?
VBA, VB6, PHP, Shell scripting, Java, Python, Perl, C#, and VB.net

What was your first professional programming gig?
Writing shell scripts and regular expressions to update OregonLive automatically with a minimum of cleanup. All the text for the site at the time was sent over in the Oregonian’s custom typesetting language.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yeah, probably. I still say that programmers who want to work with the toys because they’re shiny and they enjoy making them do things should not go into programming at all — they belong in computer science research. The programmers I enjoy working with are the ones who use the programming tools to solve problems. They also recognize that maintainability and future-proofing ARE problems and code in ways that solve them.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Do read other people’s code. Don’t read their comments. If you can’t understand what it’s doing from the code, then throw the code out because the comments aren’t worth reading. Code in a way that keeps things simple and makes things easy. Easy, simple systems are easy to maintain and reliable. Don’t over engineer it or try to be clever because you’ll only end up creating something that will get thrown out shortly because it’s hard to keep working.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had?
Um, with my clothes on? Seriously, get out and live a little. It’s not all about programming. Programmers work to solve problems that people run into, and unless you’ve got life skills and social skills, you won’t be able to understand the problems sometimes.

College Station sucks as an area to grow things unless you’ve spent some time enriching your soil. The two varieties of lawn grasses that grow around here are Bermuda Grass and St. Augustine Grass, which isn’t that unfortunate because both will grow decently well in the clay subsoil we have, both are relatively drought tolerant, and as long as you’re not using fertilizers that favor one or the other, you can cross-seed them and they’ll help reinforce each other and present a greener total picture.

The clay sub soil is the worst problem. Any time it rains, most of the water hits the lawn and then flows straight down into the gutter because it runs off the clay. This is also true of any watering you do of your lawn or garden — it all hits the clay and runs right off downhill.

This summer, I’m growing some tomatoes in mostly unenriched areas. I did some enrichment using coarse sand and wood mulch to break up the clay, but it hasn’t been that effective and I’ve had to do a pretty extensive daily watering for brief periods to get the water deep enough to be effective. Thanks to the water running off the clay, most of my plants haven’t developed deep root systems … all of them have sent out wide root patterns just below the surface of the soil. And what’s worse has been the fungus. The lawn dries out and dies, and as it rots, it provides a fine thatch that retains water wonderfully and provides a great home for mushrooms and other fungus to grow… right in the middle of my yard. I’ve been putting down antifungal treatments as a preventative but still haven’t managed to get ahead of it. I’ve also had serious problems with blossom-end rot on my vegetable plants. My tomatoes, peppers, and squash have all had an impossible time establishing fruit.

After a bit of googling, I found two solutions to my lawn and garden problems. The first thing is deep spot watering. Deep spot watering means that you need to buy a programmable faucet timer and have it turn on the water in a specific area for five to ten minutes at a time, take a rest of about an hour (at very least a half hour), and then water again for five or ten minutes. You want to get the water down as far as possible into the soil — six inches if possible. If you find that any water is running out of your lawn and down into the drainage areas, then switch immediately to a different area. This cycle has helped to reduce my water bill and after three weeks has brought back almost my entire front lawn. You’ll want to water either early in the morning (4am-8am) or after the sun’s no longer directly on the lawn in the evening, but watering too late into the night will aid fungi in attacking your lawn.

The second solution is to spread some gypsum granules, which are available in a 40 lbs bag from Home Depot for under $10. Lime granules would also work. Gypsum is Calcium Sulfate and Lime is Calcium Carbonate. The calcium apparently over time will help break down the clay subsoil into actual soil — and it remedies the blossom-end rot problem in my fruiting plants, which is a sign of a serious calcium deficiency. Before an improvement is really noted it will take about three years of consistent applications, but I’m hoping to accelerate that a little bit by aerating the lawn and then applying it again next spring. The one caution when you’re using Calcium Sulfate instead of Calcium Carbonate is that you want to avoid ammonium sulfate-based fertilizers when you’ve just applied Calcium Sulfate because you can easily burn the grass.

I have no idea how specific this nutrient-free clay subsoil is to our area, but every house in the neighborhood that has been in place for over a year and doesn’t expend massive amounts of water via an automatic in-ground sprinkler system is having similar problems. My lawn now looks MUCH better. Hopefully this helps someone out!