After a lot of effort over the last two nights, I’m finally down to fewer than 100 unread items in my aggregator and fewer than 100 open tabs in both my work and home browsers. Turns out I’m just as much of an online packrat as I am in (what passes for) real life.
By the way, Kimota94 etc., I forgot to include my work blogs in the total I sent a while back… might want to add another 450 posts or so, about 3/4 of what I’ve posted here. Not that it’s a race or anything…. 🙂
Fortunately, I have no faults of any kind. I am perfect in every way, perfect in intelligence, good looks, attractiveness and general wisdom. I have only one fault — I’m a liar.
Something that was pointed out at last night’s company party—albeit it not so many words—is that the most successful project we have, the one that will be in front of millions of real paying customers before the larger ones hit even a few thousand, is the one that’s been developed completely out of band in only a few months by a group of only four or five people.
In related news, I’ve just started reading Getting Real:
Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.
Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that’s not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn’t).
Getting Real is staying small and being agile.
The only downside to Gérard Langevin’s live-saving surgery is that he no longer qualifies for entrance to Carleton University, where the ‘K’ stands for ‘Quality’!
(For full humour effect, substitute the name of your own safety school and a derogatory slogan for it.)
And a happy go to hell.
Following a few more occurrences like this incident and a bit of debugging and analysis, I finally decided to bite the bullet and replace my motherboard. Because the processor is semi-old (an Intel P4 with Socket 478) I wound up replacing it too rather than trying to choose one of the (very small selection of) motherboards that supports it. Eight hours after placing the order with NCIX it’s been shipped, and for $50 less than anywhere else I found; both prices dropped by a substantial amount as I was browsing. That’s a pretty good deal and speedy turnaround, both of which I’ve come to expect from the company.
So with any luck grok will be not only stable but better, stronger, and faster than it was before, sometime this weekend.
There are 10 types of people in this world: people who are good at binary, and 9 others.
For a fraction of a second I thought Matt had stolen my topic. Fortunately (for him!) it turns out we’re just perusing different sides of the same coin. To wit:
Back when I started at the company, four owners and umpty-ump name changes ago, our philosophy was to do the most with the limited resources we had. There were two main reasons for that:
In practise, that meant that we’d cram as much as possible into every piece of hardware and software we had. My first workstation was a 486/40DX that did triple duty as the company’s nameserver and mailserver; occasionally I’d have to run something in X Windows, so that would be running too; and it also became our first intranet webserver when I installed a just-released piece of software from NCSA called httpd. Our software ran on a single PC, then the next-generation version expanded the requirements to a SPARC/PC cluster with the SPARC handling video output, system control and applications, and the PC handling serial ports.
And it was good.
We worked that way for about five years, vastly expanding the capabilities of the software using the same hardware we’d always had. Sure, we got new machines from time to time that had faster processors, more memory, and so on, but we’d keep the old stuff running as long as it was physically possible. Our cluster grew by another PC, but that was it.
Then came the buyout by a big Silicon Valley company, and everything changed; not immediately or all at once, of course, but gradually, like boiling a frog. We heard stories about the magical land to the west where money dripped from the ceilings, there were perks and freebies as far as the eye could see, and everyone had huge racks… of servers!
And we wantss preciouss. Shiny preciousss, nice precioussss… we waaantsssss….
And we gots, to a certain extent; never as much as the parent company, but things started showing up. And as we got more, we started to do less with it, which was the fashion at the time in the west. A three-server product cluster sprouted a dedicated GUI host, a dedicated command-and-control server, a dedicated database server, and two more workhorse PCs to do some of the heavier lifting. We started ordering quad-processor SPARCs with two gigabytes of RAM and storage space measured in fractions of terabytes. Even QA got their share, two clones of production environments for stable and destructive testing. We started installing racks of our own in the server room.
Then the dot-com bubble popped, and we got more. As the parent company shed employees, the racks of equipment they had used came to us. We were swimming in servers; I got a server of my own to play with
.
Things levelled off after that; the stock crashed and suddenly we were back to being the little startup that could, maybe, if we really tried hard. But the damage had been done. There were still scads of equipment around, but none of it was used to anything resembling its capacity. Instead of sharing one underutilized machine to do three or four low-resource functions, we kept using three or four servers; every new process meant a new computer. The minimalist mentality once present had been overtaken by the habits formed during our short-lived affluence.
That’s all several years ago now. Since then I think we’ve started to get back to middle ground, a reasonably steady state where we’re not straining for resources but not neck-deep in them either. We’re making better use of the hardware we already have, and limiting the inflow to stuff we actually need. But every once in a while I’ll see a desktop computer taken from an office after an upgrade and wonder why it isn’t being used as the modern-day equivalent of my trusty old mailserver/nameserver/webserver/X terminal….
Apparently three posts three days ago isn’t enough for some people. 🙂 So here’s one I’ve had on my List of Things to Post About for some time.
My name is Peter. Always has been, always will be. Over the years people have tried to assign me nicknames, but only a few have caught on for more than a day at at time.
I generally don’t mind being called something else, as long as it’s not (shudder) Pete—do I look like a Pete to you?—but I don’t really encourage it either. Still, some have stayed around in certain groups, so here are the stories:
Peetay was given to me early in my first year at university by Bob Kapur, the Giver of Names. It came about when I mentioned that both of my parents were French teachers; Peetay was, obviously, how the French would pronounce my name, since it’s spelled similarly to aller and parler (pronounced allay
and parlay
, respectively). (Fortunately he didn’t realize that péter is a French word, and I didn’t enlighten him to its meaning.) Bob and Dave Drewe popularized it around our residence floor, and those two and Dave’s wife Avvey are the only ones who still use it at all.
Warlord was the result of two ricochets. Bob’s the culprit again: he decided that one of the guys on our floor looked like Glory, a pro wrestler in what was then known as the WWF. Naturally Glory‘s roommate received his tag team partner Power, which was doubly funny because a) he was in the electrical engineering program, and b) he was physically about as far away as you can get from a pro wrestler.
I got to be friends with Mark (Power) and when Bob realized we hung out together he decided I needed a wrestling name to go along with them. It so happened that Power & Glory had recently been part of a six-man tag team match with Warlord, and because I was already follicly challenged and goateed the name was a natural fit.
This one was a bit of a running gag, particularly with Dave. Never mind my mild manner; appearance was key, and I became the Warlord of more things than I can remember, each more outrageous than the last. The culmination was when, via the whiteboard on my door, he anointed me the Warlord of Carnal Deviant Lust.
Somehow Dave quickly shucked the Psycho moniker Bob gave him. And Bob managed to completely avoid getting a nickname himself!
PeterJanes is my name at work. This one’s straightforward: we currently have five Peters at work (seven if you count Pedro and Petros) and there are only so many variations available.
I do have one more nickname that stems from the way I sign my email. Actually, it’s more of a pet name (no, not the Fido kind) and it’s known and for use by one person alone… so in the immortal words of the Soup Nazi, No soup for you!