In my experience, the custom applications I deal with seem to be built with not just incorrect assumptions regarding load, but *no* assumptions regarding load. When I first fired up one particular application in a production environment, we were seeing 6000 incoming messages per second. I asked the lead developer what we should be expecting to see. He had no idea.
This is caused by short sighted project management, which translates into short sighted programming. The necessary questions about throughput aren't asked, because it all works fine on the developers' PC with a test load. In our case, we eventually got the application running OK, but changes that have been made since have not taken into account anything to do with I/O, so the fact that our CPU usage is not maxing out seems to indicate to the development team that we are not bound by the server performance, and hence have not reached any scalability thresholds.
Obviously this is madness. If one was to investigate the scalability of this application properly, one should be looking at where I/O happens, where interprocess communication happens, where object creation and destruction happens, and so on... There is no other way to scale an application -- you have to define what the "load" is, find what happens when you increase it, work out where any bottleneck is, and how parallelisable this bottleneck is. Anything less is no more than buzzwords.
Leave room in each section for additions. Keep sections well separated. Move whole sections at once if you run out of room. Put large books somewhere else with a similar sorting method -- I have a separate shelf with large volumes in the same basic order, but all on the one shelf. I also used to have a separate shelf for O'Reilly books, as I had a collection of them which I would refer to more regularly.
When you put books back, if you don't have time to replace them correctly, leave them somewhere else, and wait until you have time, then reshelve them all at once. Basically do it like they do in a bookshop.
Unless you're lending books all the time, I can't really see the need to use a dewey system or some database, unless you really want to learn about library management for its' own sake.
One other solution I've used for my significantly smaller collection is to keep them in approximate acquisition order. If there's a specific book I'm looking for, I usually know approximately when I bought it. Doesn't work so well as books get older and less used though.
Of course, the other suggestion is to rationalise ruthlessly. Sell them, give them away, whatever. Even if you refer or read a book a day, that's 10 years worth of books, which could be used by someone else...
You say "Some people have incredible self-discipline, a solid work ethic, and the ability to delay gratification."
That's exactly the point. I didn't have those things, and I was failing in many ways in my life despite my middle class background and various unfair advantages, up until about two years ago when I decided that I needed to do something about it. Hence, I am now more successful than before because I made the decision to be so. These character traits may well be something you're born with, but you are always in control of yourself, and can create them if you want them. Basically, I object to paying my taxes for people to indulge themselves with a lack of discipline, laziness and impulsiveness. Why should I work hard, against my natural character, in order to pay for people to pissfart about? Pah!
This article was interesting, but then I read: "By the mid-1980s, the avalanche of Australian diamonds will be pouring onto the market."
It would be good to read something more recent, perhaps? Obviously, diamonds are still forever, and this avalanche of Australian diamonds didn't kill the market entirely. What happenned?
Maybe the reason that they have a high proportion of spam to ham is that there's not much ham? Maybe no-one wants to send them real email, so all they get is spam. Maybe if spam was made from cows, it would be different in India. Is it different in Israel? Maybe it's Spanna (spiced manna)?
I recall using RT (http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/features.html, I think) a few years back, and finding it very easy to set up and use. Clients even used it, as it could be linked to emails... Very cool.
If this really is what he wants, and it seems the most logical interpretation, then I'd suggest simply placing a script like.my_aliases on each server, and then running "..my_aliases" after each login.
However, I have a STRONG aversion to lots of aliases, particularly for someone learning systems administration. When I first started using unix, the sysadmins in the Engineering department had set up a bunch of DOS-like aliases on our servers, so we would feel more at home. We came to depend on these, and a few non-DOS aliases too. I think some were there to make csh look more like sh, or vice versa.
The problem came when I went to use a unix machine in the Computer Science department, which didn't have these aliases (I guess the CS students were considered clever enough to learn Unix, whereas the Engineering students expected everything to be DOS). I was lost for some time, and needed to copy the aliases file over (and just finding that took me ages, as I wasn't familiar with/etc), in order to use the system, even for things like ls. I then asked my local guru about this, and he recommended that I just stick to the defaults, so I'd be able to move between systems without pain.
Since then, and 10 years of sysadminning later, I've got a huge aversion to customising environments. For eg, I always use sh (well, ksh), as it's always available and is always installed in the root filesystem. Likewise, the reason every sysadmin should know vi is because it's always there (apart from the fact that it's better for quick edits of small files than emacs). I tend to avoid vendor-specific tools, as I have needed to move between Solaris, IRIX, Linux and BSD too often to "reprogram" my fingers each time. Obviously, it depends on your situation, and now that I have been using Solaris exclusively for about three years, I've become a little less flexible, but generally, I try to stick to the lowest common denominator, and just be really good at it.
I'd take fun outside of work hands-down. I don't want a job that replaces my social life. Still, I'd certainly take a pay cut to do a job that I thought offered me better self-development. In my case, that means management, rather than technology. I'd see it as an investment for my future career. But I would never leave a well-paying job with good career development for one that paid less and offered less career development but seemed fun... unless I was financially set, and considered it to be semi-retirement.
We tell them whatever we need to tell them to get them to do what we want them to do. We escalate as needed (we're a high profile project), and clobber them from above. We trick them (we know more about their systems they they do), and get them to do things that have side-effects we like (eg we once got control of the NIS system to add a large number of users for a tedious job, and added a UID=0 user that they didn't notice, so from then on, we owned NIS, and could get (some) things done easily).
We still struggle to get things done, and would have much better results taking a co-operative approach, but due to history, and the fact that everyone around me takes this approach, I can't actually change the culture here. It blows, but you got to do what you got to do.
I've always taken the view that anything that I do that can be done as efficiently by someone cheaper, whether outsourced, young, or stupid, should be. There is no such thing as job security, there is only demonstrable value. I know that I am talented enough to be worth more than four or five average outsourced resources. I also know I'm probably twice as valuable onsite as offsite. Hence, paying me four times the outsourcer's rate to have me onsite is a good deal for my employer...
The fact is that employers don't need permission to outsource you. My job, in fact, will be outsourced in the next six months, at my suggestion, because I think they could do the job cheaper and better, and I want to do something different.
It's pretty easy for Australians to go to the UK (indeed, I'm Australian, and came here for the reason mentioned above), particularly if your parents or grandparents are UK citizens, as is relatively common in Australia (eg my mother is English). It's got little to do with the "tightness" of the relationship, and everything to do with historical links. The US fought a war of independance with the UK, whereas Australia still has the Queen as head of state.
Consider the fact that I am an Australian citizen, and will be a UK citizen shortly, but I can't get a work permit in the USA without sponsorship from a US company. However, as a UK citizen, I can work anywhere in the EU.
Thanks for the thoughts. I certainly couldn't do what I do now from a remote location, but that's half the point. I want a change. I absolutely don't want to work odd hours. I want to take advantage of the fact that my skills are valuable in $ or £ or , and those currencies go a long way in Rupiah or whatever. Basically, this is an idea I'm exploring as an alternative to working 3-6 month contracts in London, and travelling for the rest of the year...
1) I lived and worked in Australia for Australian companies 2) A European company based on London outsourced some work to me in Australia where it's cheaper. 3) I moved to London, where it's more expensive, to do the same work there, so I could be paid more. 4) I'm looking into moving overseas where it's cheaper, to do the UK work and still keep (some of) the higher pay.
It's got nothing to do with the US... But I get your point. Interesting point, too...
I've had extensive experience with partially outsourced teams, working with people split between London, Adelaide, Sydney, Moscow, Barcelona, Bangalore, Delhi, Hong Kong, New York and Singapore. Sometimes these have been successful, and sometimes not. I know what works and what doesn't, as well as what to do to make things work better.
Basically, a poorly managed project will get worse if you work remotely. Involving people with poor language skills (either foreigners or just illiterate english speakers) doesn't tend to work. If you have big timezone differences, the work needs to be packaged up in self-contained units where a couple of days worth of work can be completed without further interaction. I wouldn't attempt something like this if I required daily interaction with people in some other timezone to do it. You don't want to be stuck in a daily meeting at 7pm local time in your island paradise so you can catch some Londoner at the start of their day.
If someone set up some sort of company where this was possible, with contracts that weren't entirely one-sided, I'd seriously look into doing it as an employee/contractor. I would think it would need to work more based on small peicework projects so as to have lower risk for everyone...
If you're actually serious in discussing this idea, email me. Likewise for any other readers...
Bali is way cheap. Jakarta is only slightly cheaper, and my friend lives there as a school headmaster, earning a good $US wage, and pays $US50 per month for a live-in maid, and a little more than that per month for his modern four bedroom house... An hour long shiatsu massage in Bali is $US4. If you were living rather than holidaying, it could be absurdly cheap.
In a place where the average wage is $US40 per month, 20% of my current pay as a contractor for an investment bank in London would make me a pretty wealthy person. Hell, I'd doing relatively alright in local terms with 1% of my present pay.
... eg what I want is something that will do A4 (or ideally A3), edge-to-edge, high quality. I'm not worried about speed, and not particularly worried about cost per page... Someone tell me what to buy!
I wanted someone to tell me "buy this one if you want speed, this one if you want value, this one if you want quality, this one if you want large prints, and this one if you want a good all-rounder". Give me opinions, dammit, I don't have time to form my own! I'm a consumer, for crying out loud!
Have you seen how atrociously bad Motorola phones are? The interfaces are useless. The "sabotage" (or mistake, depending on your PoV) was in doing a deal with Motorola in the first place. I mean, sure, they have a cool-looking phone, but compared to real phones, they are so painful to use.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, the custom applications I deal with seem to be built with not just incorrect assumptions regarding load, but *no* assumptions regarding load. When I first fired up one particular application in a production environment, we were seeing 6000 incoming messages per second. I asked the lead developer what we should be expecting to see. He had no idea.
This is caused by short sighted project management, which translates into short sighted programming. The necessary questions about throughput aren't asked, because it all works fine on the developers' PC with a test load. In our case, we eventually got the application running OK, but changes that have been made since have not taken into account anything to do with I/O, so the fact that our CPU usage is not maxing out seems to indicate to the development team that we are not bound by the server performance, and hence have not reached any scalability thresholds.
Obviously this is madness. If one was to investigate the scalability of this application properly, one should be looking at where I/O happens, where interprocess communication happens, where object creation and destruction happens, and so on... There is no other way to scale an application -- you have to define what the "load" is, find what happens when you increase it, work out where any bottleneck is, and how parallelisable this bottleneck is. Anything less is no more than buzzwords.
Subject groups (tech, fiction, business, etc)
topic (programming languages, hardware, databases, discussion)
subtopic (C, java, perl)
whatever
Leave room in each section for additions. Keep sections well separated. Move whole sections at once if you run out of room. Put large books somewhere else with a similar sorting method -- I have a separate shelf with large volumes in the same basic order, but all on the one shelf. I also used to have a separate shelf for O'Reilly books, as I had a collection of them which I would refer to more regularly.
When you put books back, if you don't have time to replace them correctly, leave them somewhere else, and wait until you have time, then reshelve them all at once. Basically do it like they do in a bookshop.
Unless you're lending books all the time, I can't really see the need to use a dewey system or some database, unless you really want to learn about library management for its' own sake.
One other solution I've used for my significantly smaller collection is to keep them in approximate acquisition order. If there's a specific book I'm looking for, I usually know approximately when I bought it. Doesn't work so well as books get older and less used though.
Of course, the other suggestion is to rationalise ruthlessly. Sell them, give them away, whatever. Even if you refer or read a book a day, that's 10 years worth of books, which could be used by someone else...
Why is this moderated funny?
1 653667?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/047
You say "Some people have incredible self-discipline, a solid work ethic, and the ability to delay gratification."
That's exactly the point. I didn't have those things, and I was failing in many ways in my life despite my middle class background and various unfair advantages, up until about two years ago when I decided that I needed to do something about it. Hence, I am now more successful than before because I made the decision to be so. These character traits may well be something you're born with, but you are always in control of yourself, and can create them if you want them. Basically, I object to paying my taxes for people to indulge themselves with a lack of discipline, laziness and impulsiveness. Why should I work hard, against my natural character, in order to pay for people to pissfart about? Pah!
This article was interesting, but then I read: "By the mid-1980s, the avalanche of Australian diamonds will be pouring onto the market."
It would be good to read something more recent, perhaps? Obviously, diamonds are still forever, and this avalanche of Australian diamonds didn't kill the market entirely. What happenned?
They need to equip it with a spinning wheel.
Maybe the reason that they have a high proportion of spam to ham is that there's not much ham? Maybe no-one wants to send them real email, so all they get is spam. Maybe if spam was made from cows, it would be different in India. Is it different in Israel? Maybe it's Spanna (spiced manna)?
I recall using RT (http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/features.html, I think) a few years back, and finding it very easy to set up and use. Clients even used it, as it could be linked to emails... Very cool.
If this really is what he wants, and it seems the most logical interpretation, then I'd suggest simply placing a script like .my_aliases on each server, and then running ". .my_aliases" after each login.
/etc), in order to use the system, even for things like ls. I then asked my local guru about this, and he recommended that I just stick to the defaults, so I'd be able to move between systems without pain.
However, I have a STRONG aversion to lots of aliases, particularly for someone learning systems administration. When I first started using unix, the sysadmins in the Engineering department had set up a bunch of DOS-like aliases on our servers, so we would feel more at home. We came to depend on these, and a few non-DOS aliases too. I think some were there to make csh look more like sh, or vice versa.
The problem came when I went to use a unix machine in the Computer Science department, which didn't have these aliases (I guess the CS students were considered clever enough to learn Unix, whereas the Engineering students expected everything to be DOS). I was lost for some time, and needed to copy the aliases file over (and just finding that took me ages, as I wasn't familiar with
Since then, and 10 years of sysadminning later, I've got a huge aversion to customising environments. For eg, I always use sh (well, ksh), as it's always available and is always installed in the root filesystem. Likewise, the reason every sysadmin should know vi is because it's always there (apart from the fact that it's better for quick edits of small files than emacs). I tend to avoid vendor-specific tools, as I have needed to move between Solaris, IRIX, Linux and BSD too often to "reprogram" my fingers each time. Obviously, it depends on your situation, and now that I have been using Solaris exclusively for about three years, I've become a little less flexible, but generally, I try to stick to the lowest common denominator, and just be really good at it.
I'd take fun outside of work hands-down. I don't want a job that replaces my social life. Still, I'd certainly take a pay cut to do a job that I thought offered me better self-development. In my case, that means management, rather than technology. I'd see it as an investment for my future career. But I would never leave a well-paying job with good career development for one that paid less and offered less career development but seemed fun ... unless I was financially set, and considered it to be semi-retirement.
Deceit, power games and manipulation.
We tell them whatever we need to tell them to get them to do what we want them to do. We escalate as needed (we're a high profile project), and clobber them from above. We trick them (we know more about their systems they they do), and get them to do things that have side-effects we like (eg we once got control of the NIS system to add a large number of users for a tedious job, and added a UID=0 user that they didn't notice, so from then on, we owned NIS, and could get (some) things done easily).
We still struggle to get things done, and would have much better results taking a co-operative approach, but due to history, and the fact that everyone around me takes this approach, I can't actually change the culture here. It blows, but you got to do what you got to do.
I've always taken the view that anything that I do that can be done as efficiently by someone cheaper, whether outsourced, young, or stupid, should be. There is no such thing as job security, there is only demonstrable value. I know that I am talented enough to be worth more than four or five average outsourced resources. I also know I'm probably twice as valuable onsite as offsite. Hence, paying me four times the outsourcer's rate to have me onsite is a good deal for my employer...
The fact is that employers don't need permission to outsource you. My job, in fact, will be outsourced in the next six months, at my suggestion, because I think they could do the job cheaper and better, and I want to do something different.
It's pretty easy for Australians to go to the UK (indeed, I'm Australian, and came here for the reason mentioned above), particularly if your parents or grandparents are UK citizens, as is relatively common in Australia (eg my mother is English). It's got little to do with the "tightness" of the relationship, and everything to do with historical links. The US fought a war of independance with the UK, whereas Australia still has the Queen as head of state.
Consider the fact that I am an Australian citizen, and will be a UK citizen shortly, but I can't get a work permit in the USA without sponsorship from a US company. However, as a UK citizen, I can work anywhere in the EU.
Thanks for the thoughts. I certainly couldn't do what I do now from a remote location, but that's half the point. I want a change. I absolutely don't want to work odd hours. I want to take advantage of the fact that my skills are valuable in $ or £ or , and those currencies go a long way in Rupiah or whatever. Basically, this is an idea I'm exploring as an alternative to working 3-6 month contracts in London, and travelling for the rest of the year...
In what way does it suck?
And don't get me wrong, I love London -- I just could do with a change of pace and place for a while. Not necessarily permanently...
Well, I'm Australian...
1) I lived and worked in Australia for Australian companies
2) A European company based on London outsourced some work to me in Australia where it's cheaper.
3) I moved to London, where it's more expensive, to do the same work there, so I could be paid more.
4) I'm looking into moving overseas where it's cheaper, to do the UK work and still keep (some of) the higher pay.
It's got nothing to do with the US... But I get your point. Interesting point, too...
Could you drop me an email? I'd really like to find out a little more about your experiences. Cheers
I've had extensive experience with partially outsourced teams, working with people split between London, Adelaide, Sydney, Moscow, Barcelona, Bangalore, Delhi, Hong Kong, New York and Singapore. Sometimes these have been successful, and sometimes not. I know what works and what doesn't, as well as what to do to make things work better.
Basically, a poorly managed project will get worse if you work remotely. Involving people with poor language skills (either foreigners or just illiterate english speakers) doesn't tend to work. If you have big timezone differences, the work needs to be packaged up in self-contained units where a couple of days worth of work can be completed without further interaction. I wouldn't attempt something like this if I required daily interaction with people in some other timezone to do it. You don't want to be stuck in a daily meeting at 7pm local time in your island paradise so you can catch some Londoner at the start of their day.
If someone set up some sort of company where this was possible, with contracts that weren't entirely one-sided, I'd seriously look into doing it as an employee/contractor. I would think it would need to work more based on small peicework projects so as to have lower risk for everyone...
If you're actually serious in discussing this idea, email me. Likewise for any other readers...
Bali is way cheap. Jakarta is only slightly cheaper, and my friend lives there as a school headmaster, earning a good $US wage, and pays $US50 per month for a live-in maid, and a little more than that per month for his modern four bedroom house... An hour long shiatsu massage in Bali is $US4. If you were living rather than holidaying, it could be absurdly cheap.
In a place where the average wage is $US40 per month, 20% of my current pay as a contractor for an investment bank in London would make me a pretty wealthy person. Hell, I'd doing relatively alright in local terms with 1% of my present pay.
... eg what I want is something that will do A4 (or ideally A3), edge-to-edge, high quality. I'm not worried about speed, and not particularly worried about cost per page... Someone tell me what to buy!
I wanted someone to tell me "buy this one if you want speed, this one if you want value, this one if you want quality, this one if you want large prints, and this one if you want a good all-rounder". Give me opinions, dammit, I don't have time to form my own! I'm a consumer, for crying out loud!
I read that as "Parents Chilling Effect on Science", and was quite confused.
Have you seen how atrociously bad Motorola phones are? The interfaces are useless. The "sabotage" (or mistake, depending on your PoV) was in doing a deal with Motorola in the first place. I mean, sure, they have a cool-looking phone, but compared to real phones, they are so painful to use.