Wed, 13 Jan 2010
Grocery Arrival Excitement?
Many years ago, in the first dotcom boom, I worked for a website
performance monitoring company. I was one of the early employees
(developer number 3 and sysadmin number 2) and I remember being
in a meeting with the company CEO who was telling us about a new pitch we
were doing for $SUPERMARKET, they were going to try this new idea of
shopping online and then delivering it to your door.
The worst part of it was that they didn't just want monitoring, they wanted a full transaction engine (with some basic OCR), a product I can probably get away with confessing that we didn't have at the time of the sales pitch. We all knew the deal, if we didn't get it life was going to be very hard there for the next six months, so we all knuckled under. The road was long, difficult and uphill in the snow in both directions but eventually we got to the day of the pitch. Which we aced in an astounding display of luck - the new app sometimes got itself in to a little bit of a state if their website had a failure - which it did about 20% of the time. They loved the demo and wanted us to give them full coverage while they did maintenance work. If we pulled it off then we'd pretty much get the deal, none of our competition at the time could match the features, it was just the uptime that was a little worrying.
So we went out and bought a dozen small desktops, monitors and networking kit, installed them all in our spare store room, put some tables and chairs in and had a company meeting. The management were completely open about what was happening, they took questions and then asked how far we'd go to help. We covered the whole weekend from Friday night to Monday morning. Nearly the entire company chipped in, from three letter titles to sales to dev to systems to HR. We had eyes on the machines over the whole period, including when the Solaris admin, the only person to let us down, didn't make his time slot. Out of all the transactions the worst was beans, they had a new version of the code on some of the servers and it'd return very odd results for beans and break the transaction runner in horrible ways. I'll never forget the 4am calls asking what we do when they offer you a lawn-mower instead.
I placed my first ever order online with the $SUPERMARKET yesterday and hopefully it should arrive in the next couple of hours. The interface may have changed and so many of its users take the service for granted that it's a little humbling to realise how much the Internet's changed so very many things. I guess this post's about a combination of things, the best job I ever had (the company was sold in the end to one of it's competitors. I left happy in the knowledge that we ate their lunch until they gave up trying to compete and bought us), how dedicated staff can be in the right environment, why you should push the boundaries of your industry and how sometimes even cans of beans can be exciting.
I had to put a single can in the order to complete the circle. Here's to hoping they don't charge me for a lawn-mower.
Update: They didn't deliver on the night, there was a "problem with the payment" so they took the money out, using the same details and delivered it two nights later. I'll class this one as a draw.
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Posted: 2010/01/13 20:05 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 30 Sep 2009
Dynamic Motion on Google Earth
It's very easy to become quite blase or even cynical about new technologies
but sometimes a project grabs your attention and coaxes out a "that's very
cool", the
real time augmented Google Earth had that effect on me.
How long will it be before you can roll back an overlay by X weeks and see what happened in that game last Thursday or check the traffic on your new route at 7am on every Friday for a couple of weeks?
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Posted: 2009/09/30 21:57 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 08 Apr 2009
New Laptop? New job?
Is it just me or does everybody seem to go and buy a new laptop just
before they leave their current job? Is it the techie version of buying
new work shoes?
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Posted: 2009/04/08 11:37 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
2009 Q2 PiP
I've been quiet on the PiP front for a while now. While the day to day stuff
has kept me busy it hasn't exactly helped move my career along, I spend
most of my time doing things I already know how to do but with a little
twist on them.
In an attempt to stop myself from further stagnation I've put a short list of goals below that should be my bare minimum for the next three months.
- Attend one technical conference / training course
- Attend two technical user group meetings
- Read and review 3 books.
- Write and publish a Perl modules.
- Write and package a Python or Ruby module
- Write and publish a technical article.
- Create a personal Debian repo
- Create 3 Debian packages, at least one of which should contain other peoples code.
- Write 30 blog posts - at least 15 of which should be technical.
I'll do a follow up post at the end of the quarter so see how far I got.
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Posted: 2009/04/08 10:20 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 09 Mar 2009
Speakers - Always Repeat the Question
If someone in the audience asks a question that you plan on answering
then please repeat it, with your own wording, before you respond.
This gets us two things - the person asking probably won't have a mic so not everyone will hear what he said, they will when you repeat it. Secondly - by repeating with your own phrasing - you'll get basic confirmation that you understand what's being asked rather than answering the wrong question; which wastes everyones time and leaves the asker frustrated.
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Posted: 2009/03/09 21:06 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 05 Jan 2009
GUI config apps and a thousand cuts
Today has been one of those death by a thousand cut days. We did a
migration first thing in the morning (I'm not supposed to be awake at 6am
unless it's from a really late night) and while all the big bits were
planned and moved successfully the work list was missing enough little
pieces to make the rest of the day very annoying.
What made the work a lot harder was that the changes had to be made through a web front end that abstracted about 20 seconds of vim in to four minutes of clicking buttons that were never in the same place twice. It's been a while since I've had to bulk make production changes using this kind of interface so I was freshly amazed at how awful it was.
First of all was the time it took. The average change was about 8 mouse clicks, most of them on different pages, across a slow application that was working with a very large (for it) dataset. Second was the lack of a safety net. I had to do full copy and pastes to somewhere safe for each thing I wanted to change before changing it. It may not sound like much but if you come from the land of version control and diffing changes then it just feels so risky. And if you don't then I suggest you start learning one. Instead I had to rely on some hastily written post check scripts that confirmed the changes were correct when publicly viewed. We'd normally write these as a double check but without version control they become the single safeguard. Which were only effective after the change was made, which is better than nothing I suppose...
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Posted: 2009/01/05 20:17 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 02 Jan 2009
New year, new laptop - Samsung NC10
Near the middle of December I lost a very dear, and constant, companion -
my Sony Vaio 'some model number or other'. After nearly five years the
laptop stopped charging and it wasn't worth paying for the repairs. I put
off getting a replacement for as long as I could but while I had the work
laptop as a standby I needed a machine I could treat as my own. Something
outside the company security policy. Something I could install lots of
applications and languages I'll only ever look at once on. So I bit the
bullet and bought myself a Samsung
NC10.
It's not exactly been a long time since I bought it so I've hardly stressed the machine too but first impressions are very favourable. Battery life on wireless is a good four-six hours (depending on what else I'm doing). The keyboard is much nicer than the Asus ePC I used for about ten minutes before cramping my hands up and the screens actually very usable. It'll never replace a dual monitor setup but it's fine for writing little scripts, web browsing and reading my email.
I've got a 1GB memory upgrade on order (it can only take 2GB) and then I'll see if I can make VMWare play nice without killing the battery.
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Posted: 2009/01/02 21:22 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 02 Sep 2008
Google Chrome - Initial Thoughts
Like most of the techy part of the Internet I dutifully downloaded Google Chrome today and had a little play around. And just like all those other people I'm going to write about it. The difference is I'm very ambivalent about the whole thing.
Chrome seems nice enough. It's quick, works with all the websites I've tried so far and does have a killer feature - the task manager. Finally breaking tabs out in to their own sandbox is an idea whos time should have come years ago. Being able to see which sites are doing hugely evil things with my memory is a wonderful thing. I'm also inappropriately happy with the in-page search showing how many matches it found.
Unfortunately that's about it. While the minimal design and streamlined core functionality are lovely, these days I'm used to my extensions - the web developer toolbar, YSlow and the work flow changing Ubiquity are just too useful for me to give up.
It's not just the fact that these extensions
are missing that puts me off, it's the lack of how to write custom
extensions, searches etc. that feels wrong. Firefox is a platform as
much as a web browser. Using Chrome what is the command line for pulling
out the memory usage for the currently opened tabs? Do I need to
screen scrape a running about:memory? I can't help but think
they'd have three Firefox versions ready for download by now.
So will I be moving over to the new and shiny? Not yet. As useful as the broken out tabs are I need more functionality than Chrome can give me, so while I might use it for some day to day surfing it's no where near ready for me as a developer. Although I;m guessing they never intended for it to be.
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Posted: 2008/09/02 23:08 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 25 Jul 2008
I got a muffin
And not just on the waist line. Not the worst sysadmin appreciation day
ever.
I do now have this feeling of dread as I wait for the other shoe to drop though.
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Posted: 2008/07/25 11:43 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 16 Jan 2008
Neward, chromatic and External Perspectives
Ted Neward is the latest person to get linked to in the ongoing campaign to
prove that parrot isn't dead,
sleeping or pining for the fjords (sorry, couldn't resist). While
chromatic rebuffs some of Teds points I can't help but think something is
missing - a little outside perspective.
chromatic rightfully points out that the project isn't dead (and has actually been pretty visible in the perl sphere since the start of the year) but look at it from more of an outsiders angle - unless you are already in the perl community it's not obviously moving. A release every month is lovely and all but the announcements are apparently not hitting all the right places if people like Ted (who seems to at least keep an eye on a number of different projects and technologies) haven't noticed. And if he's not seen them then the unwashed masses of other developers won't have either. Is this a problem? Depends on what you want from the project. Mindshare is a wonderful thing but introducing people to a technology before it's ready can destroy its chances of success.
PS I wanted to be glib and just say "motion != progress" but that seems unfair considering the amount of time people are investing.
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Posted: 2008/01/16 11:36 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 15 Jan 2008
Three Things - 1 of many
This weeks three things are -
- MySQL 5.1(.20+) can log errors via syslog (finally)
- IBM Blades run quite well despite being very wet. (don't ask)
- Amazon Prime is too helpful. (Wooo individual book orders)
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Posted: 2008/01/15 19:48 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Proof of Ownership and Third Party Escrow
I own a lot of old comics, piles of DVDs and a somewhat smaller (but
still decent size stack) of audio CDs. These take up a lot of physical
space, the comics decrease in quality, they all attract dust and are a
pain to dig through when I want to find that one song on a compilation
CD from 2002. Or was it 2001?
I have a lot of data - iso images and virtual machines are among the biggest disk eaters. A large percentage of it sits on a number of small external hard drives that are cheap, easy to upgrade (buy a bigger one, run an rsync and done) and simple to take offsite.
I'd love to use the latter to solve the former - I'd happily buy two 500GB drives (dirt cheap) rip redundant FLAC and MP3 copies of a number of my CDs (and scan / rip everything else) and then dispose of them to get a shelf back but how do I then prove everything is legit when something crops up and I have to display the fact I paid for them? Amazon orders? Credit card receipts? With the grossly inflated fines being levelled in the US I'd be bankrupted if I couldn't prove I did buy the soundtrack to Finding Nemo (although the fine might be less painful than having it in the public record that I did - it was a present, honest!)
So where are the companies offering indemnity, escrow and proof of legitimate ownership? Why can't I tick a "remember I bought this" button on Amazon and know that they've got my back? (as well as my VMs, online storage and book purchasing history?) Is this impossible to do? Is there no market for it? Where am I going to put that next order from Play when it turns up...
It could even be a way to recover things you've lost, they'd have the proof that you owned it and it'd cost them practically nothing to issue you another copy. As much as I love CSI, Buffy and Stargate I want my floor space back.
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Posted: 2008/01/15 19:28 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 08 Jan 2008
O'Reilly Books and Odd Password Requirements
It's not that widely known but O'Reilly offer a user group discount -
it's 35% off the cover price and free delivery so it's often cheaper than
you can get the books new from anywhere else.
A few days ago I wanted to order a couple of books and because there are no conferences this month (and so no lovely Josette) I signed up online. The process itself was quick, easy and painless but one step stuck out in my mind - "Password cannot contain special characters or spaces". To me this is a weird limitation and one that seems to harken back to the days of old.
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Posted: 2008/01/08 23:12 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 02 Jan 2008
Linux Journal - Offensive Adverts and the real Problem
Linux Journal is getting some coverage again, last time was an
advert, this time it's a headline about Perl that Andy Lester didn't like
and caused him to post that "The Linux Journal owes the open source community, especially the Perl
community, a big apology." You can read the full
complaint yourself over at use.perl 2.0 - sorry - Perl Buzz ;)
I like his post, despite the fact he's got a valid point the delivery irks me more than the underlying issue. It's a great example of person being indignant on behalf of a whole lot of people who don't care, and in many cases have no clue who he is or why he's claiming to speak for them. For some reason I keep wanting to type 'ESR' now... He could have posted in his own (actually very good) use.perl journal and stated that he found it unpleasant/disgusting and people would have nodded or disagreed with him. But no. Instead it has to be a big sweeping thing. I don't mean to pick on Andy but as a member of the Perl, Linux and open source communities I wanted to voice my counter opinion and say - LJ please publish what you want. I have a credit card and the ability to cancel my subscription if I don't like it. Oh, hang on, I did that over two years ago - which leads me to my other point.
Right - ignoring the whole moral outrage thing can we focus on the real issue please? Why does Linux Journal seem to be such a waste of paper these days? From 2000 to 2005 I used to be a devoted reader but over the last couple of years it's just not worth the time or money. I don't know if it's just the explosion of blogs and other decent technical content or just my reading habits changing but I find it hard to justify the cost (and actually finding a copy) just to get the hidden gems that are Reuven Lerner and Mick Bauer. To avoid sounding overly harsh I should probably point out that the articles haven't taken a huge dive in quality so much as so many clued, interesting people are now posting daily in indirect competition. Oh and the new editor was annoying as hell.
Going back to the original Perl headline incident the possible highlight of this for me (which I realise I probably shouldn't find childishly amusing) is that LJ just pulled the original story. No negotiation or endless discussion, they just pulled the whole thing.
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Posted: 2008/01/02 16:40 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 02 Jun 2007
Little Bits of Code
When I worked as a developer I played around with servers and
infrastructure in my spare time, now I get paid to worry about that kind
of stuff I quite enjoy writing the occasional useless piece of code.
This weeks were a patch (well it started as a patch) to Statistics::Lite
to make it pass its tests. And then I got distracted in to re-writing its
test script from Test.pm to Test::More.
Educational and slightly useful. Then I was sent to LOLCODE
where I whiled away a lunch hour trying to add support for I HAZ
A BUKKIT(arrays) and better file handling to one of the perl
implementations. (for the record I'm not a fan of lolcats, but the lolrus is
amusing.)
While the results are far from useful the implementation I looked at did
it's parsing with reads and regex substitutions; which I'd
never seen done before. So I did learn a new (although less than ideal)
trick or two from playing with it.
It's the learning that's important, not the seriousness of the examples or outcome.
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Posted: 2007/06/02 09:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 17 May 2007
Project Blackbox - London Dates
Project
Blackbox is in London for a single day. And I didn't get a place.
Gah.
It looks so shiny...
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Posted: 2007/05/17 19:09 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 08 May 2007
Budgeting - how not to do it
The topic of budgets came up in the office today (the team I work in wants
to spend more than we have - of course - but SUN
thumpers are so shiny...) and I was reminded of a tactic used by one
of my previous bosses in a VC backed company.
The systems team were assigned an amount for the year that was too low for the planned upgrades (which had been signed off) and was a suspiciously round number. We took it and spent the lot in about three weeks. We bought as much of what we needed as the money allowed and then had a meeting where it was explained that we wouldn't be allocated anymore cash. Under any circumstances
Over the next six months we had the usual amount of hardware failures. Which we couldn't afford to fix. The service started to get slow and we needed to horizontally scale. But we couldn't afford any new machines. Then the email server died. My boss had meetings with the VCs and board where he explained how to fix it but that we had no money. After nearly a month of them fuming and things gradually getting worse (we were quite a popular site at the time) we got the same amount of money again (bringing us back up to what had originally been asked for out of some magic corner no one dared ask about.
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Posted: 2007/05/08 20:27 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 03 May 2007
SciFi Selection
In one of those serenity^Wserendipitous moments I seem to have an
abundance of Science Fiction close to hand. Thanks to Richard I've got
tickets to see Spider-man 3, Amazon DVD rental have sent me
Metropolis, A Scanner Darkly and Triangle. Paul grabbed tickets for the
London SciFi weekend showing of Quatermass and I'm now the
proud owner of the whole Deep Space Nine run.
Sometimes it's good to be a geek. Now I just have to find time to actually watch the things.
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Posted: 2007/05/03 18:12 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sat, 21 Apr 2007
Automated Database Provisioning Papers
It's been a week of databases, replication, provisioning and planning for
automation. While winding down (it's an on-call weekend) I found some links
I'd marked for future reading. If you're interested in database
provisioning (especially read only replicated slaves), practical
autonomics and how they could potentially be useful in a real environment
then these papers make for an interesting ten minutes
It doesn't take a massive leap in imagination to see how a similar approach could be used in to horizontally scale web servers in conjunction with an intelligent monitoring system or load balancer. Mix in some thin provisioning and centralised logging and it's something I should really schedule some time to play with. Now, to the papers!
Database Replication Policies for Dynamic Content Applications(pdf)
Autonomic
Provisioning of Backend Databases in Dynamic Content Web
Servers(pdf)
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Posted: 2007/04/21 15:57 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 17 Apr 2007
The Great IPv6 Experiment
I don't normally write short posts with a single link but the The Great IPv6 Experiment amused
me. In an attempt to crack the chicken and the egg adoption problem they have put up
an IPv6 only website full of porn.
They say porn pushes technical innovation. We'll see. Although probably not until the videos are over.
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Posted: 2007/04/17 21:11 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
