2016 — 12 June: Sunday
Relative silence for a while was due, in part, to relatives. Or do I mean Relativity?
After a delicious lateish lunch in Soton1 — and a trip through IKEA that yielded a new curtain for my back door that Peter's g/f later very kindly sewed into shape and hung for me — it was time for a wrestling match with Peter's home-build
FreeNAS server that (to put it simply)
just
did not
want to boot.
When you see simple instructions like "Connect a LAN from the client to the dedicated IPMI LAN port on the server", followed by "start the server and enter the BIOS", you set off with a cheery whistle. But without a screen you are so stuffed!
Evening entertainment?
By 22:30 a joint decision was made to watch something full of action and mindless CGI (or was that the other way round?). We naturally alighted, therefore, on "Bridge of Spies" which was new to all of us. It deals with the fascinating complex of Cold War events that led to the spy exchange of the U-2 pilot Gary Powers in a Berlin that had then just been bisected by its ghastly wall. Done very well.
After the kinder had departed up the stairs to Bedfordshire, I got a chance to read...
... which features the "Just Eat" Continuous Delivery (software, as well as food!) system as one of its case studies, namechecking my son. Small, continuous, incremental changes is a wholly different way of deploying software that seems to make a great deal of sense. Cool!
Full stack developers are recruited, then molded into engineers as they learn the skills required to not only ship software into production, but make sure it stays there peacefully... Failure is expected, and recovery modes are designed in. Incidents are seized upon as learning opportunities...
That's my son, that is :-)
I still recall...
... my IBM mole report of a 1994 lecture on "The Design of Design" in IBM Hursley from Fred Brooks. It began:
Today, the name of IBM's first-ever lady Fellow tripped off the lips of no less than Fred Brooks Jr during an entertaining talk here in the Auditorium. A talk he called "The design of design". (Frances Allen was named as one of the wise people nurturing one of the (many) sparks produced by John Cocke as he dashed through the IBM thickets and forests striking his intellectual flints constantly -- the particular spark he had in mind being the one that flared up into global optimisation in compilers, of course.)
If you have to ask who Brooks was, or what his claim to fame is, just shut the door quietly on your way out. Our visitor maintained that "great designers must be grown deliberately, managed imaginatively and protected from managers and managing". Simple enough, one might think! Until you consider Machiavelli's assessment of the blocks to progress when wishing to bring about change. Revisited in Antony Jay's marvellous "Management and Machiavelli".
My roof...
... has clearly been made fully watertight2 "JIT" judging by the somewhat heavier drizzle that was initially knocking around this cooler morning. This is good (though mostly for the jungle growth, not me). Today's adventures, if planned, have yet to be revealed to the one now typing. I shall settle for another cuppa and await developments.
Hello World...
... in (yet another) virtual guise. Junior has just introduced me to "Vagrant":
Strikes me that this particular pre-canned example is quite disk-hungry at 39GB. But it can be destroyed in a matter of seconds.
An afternoon...
... spent, in part, at the Blue Reef aquarium on Clarence Esplanade, at the Southsea Castle end, followed by first some icecream, and then a Chinese meal in Shirley Road at Kachina, rounded off an enjoyable weekend flying visit. I'm only sorry we couldn't solve the mystery of the totally impenetrable BIOS on his little server PC.