I've used Postgres commercially for years, with a number of employers. It's a great DB and having dealt with MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, et al I'd never go back - though the softies tell me that SQL Server is much better these days.
I'd be surprised if you can't find plenty of work using Postgres. Maybe it's one of those things people don't feel comfortable talking about - like Delphi in the 90s. Plenty of people used it, but few would own up to what made up their "secret sauce".
Yes.. a dupe of an AC post.. frigging Safari keeps logging out of Slash on every page click. Grr.. And on something I care about (Doris Lessing, one of my fave authors).
FTA: "The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed," wrote the late novelist Doris Lessing
Clearly a well-researched piece.. the only problem - Doris Lessing isn't dead.
Research confirms what IT managers have long suspected, organisational psychologists are perceived as "manipulative" and "self serving".
"I really don't like talking to them," says 20-year IT veteran Charles ("Heap Space") Edwards. "They always seem to have some agenda on their mind, but they can never tell you what it is short of wooly motherhood statements. I want precision, but I've never seen a decent spec come out of the OrgPsy team".
According to the report, 9 out of 10 IT managers "wouldn't piss on an organisational psychologists if their keyboard was on fire".
talk to the specific interests of both business and technical staff
be honest
It's a pretty exciting time to be able to doing what you're doing - lines are blurring all over the place between the artificial divisions within organisations. I'd be reading as much about Lean Management as I can (as the wellspring from which Agile comes), but only if it makes sense in your context.
Too late matey.. I've already had the explanation of the inner workings of my oldest (11yo) redstone circuit based combination locks do my head in. At least these kids are growing knowing what an XOR is. It's kinda sweet, in a geek-family way.
Man.. just release it so my kids will stop asking me "when will 1.8 be out". I woke up last weekend with my youngest's face about three inches from mine, saying "has Minecraft been updated?" We've had to ban discussion about Minecraft from the dinner table, it's just gets too much.
But seriously, Minecraft has been an absolute boon for tech education in our house. My young kids now have their own hosted server for playing with friends, discuss the merits of Java over other languages and have generally replaced a "consumerist" attitude to technology with a much more investigative one. And the story of Notch kicking it all off by himself inspires them. It's all good.
Now kids, go write a mod or something. Mummy and Daddy want to have a sleep-in.
Well.. if you can take some advice from a crusty old coder. After 20 years of coding I've recently swapped over to working as a product manager. As much as I miss coding for money I'm now finding new ways to code for pleasure. I code for my kids, I code for myself - and I no longer feel the pressure of having to produce code under crazy time constraints or the demands of managers with limited technical knowledge.
If you're coding as well as managing it's far too easy to get sucked into the code and forget your other duties. Or piss developers off by getting into their faces a bit too much. I've done both since starting as a PM and realise now that the best part of my job is building a bridge between the techie and non-techie worlds. And that's a joy.
I have a small project that I work on over the odd weekend, helping build services for parents of kids with autism. It's paid work but not much more than beer money - though being Australian that possibly means a lot. But it also feels like I'm contributing something meaningful. Maybe find something like that - something where you can practise your coding chops, have fun and do some good.
This is kinda neat. I know it's a copy of what Heroku and co have already done, and I've no love of PERL, but give the guy some cred. 15 year old or no, if this all works as stated it's a nice piece of hackery.
The article seems to be trying to position John as some kind of hacker/musician. The question on when did you first write computer programs could have had the same answer as when did you last write computer programs.
I love.. love.. love They Might Be Giants - trekked across town on foot one day so I could see them play in a little record store (place was packed, so I never saw them in the store.. but I heard them). As noted elsewhere, if you've never listened to them you're in for a treat.
I think there's a basic misunderstanding on the part of "designers" who go for cuteness (or technically correct but user-experience dumb) when designing interfaces. There's also the problem of over-representation of 20-30 year old, white, male points of view (just, that old chestnut).
My parents are having to sort out getting digital TV set-top boxes for their home, as the analogue signal is all but gone. My mother goes in to try and get some help understanding how the thing they bought works and cops a flurry of attitude from the young male who literally says to her face "I can't stand it when people say they're not tech-savvy. It's not hard". Dad goes in, "Sure sir, how can I help you?".
Having dealt with developers (and been a developer) for almost 20 years, I see this kind of dickwad mentality everywhere: the user doesn't know what he/she wants. Really? Trying talking their language.
History. ICONICS have been around for a long time - their ActiveX controls were originally used inside native Win32 apps. It was an easy way to get reasoably good looking HMIs built when you needed something clean looking (and UI design wasn't your strong point). Fast forward a decade and what kinda worked in native apps has been moved to the web, with nary a thought of the security implications. I wouldn't blame either IT or Engineering per se, but there clearly not been a lot of dialogue between these two camps.
You're a very lucky engineer. Back when I was involved in process control - happy days I'm trying to get back to with http://xpca.org/ - so many engineering depts. were under budgetary and business-political pressure to merge their networks with the corporate network and hand over control of the their systems to the better-budgeted (and more politically savvy) IT departments.
It was madness! Can't control your machinery? Oh, maybe that's because everyone's streaming the Royal Wedding. Too bad.
I think I've told this story here before but the funniest experience was finding a set of cables hidden along an I-beam, asking about it and then getting grabbed by an engineer and told "Ssh! That's *our* network"
Seriously, the industry needs an overhaul. We need to get away from the whole OPC / DCOM / ActiveX craziness before some real disaster happens.
For the record, I'm pro-nuclear. But I'd favour smaller, more localised energy production; maybe using fuels like Thorium, which as you quite rightly point out is much more abundant than other nuclear fuels and has a number of other benefits. I'd also favour bio-fuels that can be proven to be more of an energy gain than a sink for local economies. The chief benefit I see is a more direct understanding of how fuel use effects us, plus a reduction in "power politics" that excludes the use of novel fuels. We're a long way from either of these scenarios, but I'm hopeful.
The safety issues of nuclear power can't be removed from its economic impact - Fukushima and the effect on the Japanese economy a case in point. Likewise the devastating effects of oil spills in the ocean affect the cost/benefit of using crude. My argument was never oil vs. nuclear - it's the consequences of treating these resources as infinite.
Similarly economic issues can't be divorced from safety, where stalling economies influence the level of investment in the safe handling of nuclear and other energies. We are building extremely interwoven systems here that will have to last an extremely long time.
Without any drive towards efficient use of these resources any estimate of our future reserves is at best a guess. The only thing that seems to be unlimited is our ability to consume resources in increasingly larger amounts. Events like Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon should represent an important feedback loop in the economic/energy/environmental systems we all rely upon.
Fair enough, though I'm not advocating that we refuse to use natural resources. There is another option: learn to use less.
Crude oil has so many wonderful applications - from medicine to building materials - yet our preferred option is just to burn the stuff up. Given the amazing properties of materials like Uranium I can imagine future generations, upon hearing about what we did during our limited stewardship of the planet, decry "they did WHAT with it?"
Like you I believe we will find better technologies. I have no truck with the anti-human sentiment that human beings are some kind of plague on the Earth. We are awesome. But I hope that as we develop these technologies there is a parallel development of human wisdom - that we don't think that going without one-person-per-large-vehicle or ever expanding TV widths is, in any reasonable sense, a penalty.
The rhetoric around nuclear energy being a fossil fuel is just pointing out that we appear to be using up the energy reserves way too quickly. Uranium is comparable to oil in the sense that once it's gone it's gone.. Maybe not completely comparable, in that at least the Earth has the capacity to renew its oil reserves - albeit not in a timeframe that of use to any of us.
As you point out, most of the atoms in my body do indeed come from dead stars. The are unfortunately not a reliable energy source in themselves, but given enough time I might be able to decompose into some useful hydrocarbon based fuel. I might even be lighting the lamp your distant descendants use to read about the short-lived era when a handful of generations chewed through vastly more than their fair share of the planet's wealth.
At any rate, I hope that nothing I leave behind taints the Earth. Given the way I live I don't think that's likely, but if I can make rational decisions about how and why I use the resources that are available to me I can leave those who come after me with fewer things to worry about. Which was my original point, cutting through the rhetoric.
Ignoring all the "coal kills more people" vs. "Pu is forever" arguments, the fact remains that all these fuels are essentially nasty, polluting "fossil" fuels (albeit one from dead suns).
Maybe Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon will mark a recognition of the level of care we need to take when handling these very finite resources. I hope so.
I'm never surprised when I hear about industrial systems getting hacked for two reasons: (1) the venerable OPC protocol and (2) the mad insistence of IT departments that everything - including process control systems - has to come under their control.
There's nothing wrong with OPC per se, but it relies on DCOM (which isn't secure). Even if they've moved to the better OPC UA or some other architecture there's still the craziness of making industrial systems accessible over the corporate network.
The tools I *prefer* to use are just cards and good interactions with customers, rapid feedback through short iterations and such. And with my own clients that's exactly what happens.. happy me, happy client.
Where I work at the moment they need slightly more ceremony, so I've found the templates that Karl Wiegers has come up with are super useful:
High-end, complex tools for managing and tracing requirements are awesome if you (a) build space ships or (b) are a bit potty.. IMHO. I've yet to see any concrete evidence that they add as much value as they suck out of a project. Keep it simple and straightforward.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used Postgres commercially for years, with a number of employers. It's a great DB and having dealt with MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, et al I'd never go back - though the softies tell me that SQL Server is much better these days.
I'd be surprised if you can't find plenty of work using Postgres. Maybe it's one of those things people don't feel comfortable talking about - like Delphi in the 90s. Plenty of people used it, but few would own up to what made up their "secret sauce".
Yes.. a dupe of an AC post.. frigging Safari keeps logging out of Slash on every page click. Grr.. And on something I care about (Doris Lessing, one of my fave authors).
FTA: "The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed," wrote the late novelist Doris Lessing
Clearly a well-researched piece.. the only problem - Doris Lessing isn't dead.
Research confirms what IT managers have long suspected, organisational psychologists are perceived as "manipulative" and "self serving".
"I really don't like talking to them," says 20-year IT veteran Charles ("Heap Space") Edwards. "They always seem to have some agenda on their mind, but they can never tell you what it is short of wooly motherhood statements. I want precision, but I've never seen a decent spec come out of the OrgPsy team".
According to the report, 9 out of 10 IT managers "wouldn't piss on an organisational psychologists if their keyboard was on fire".
It's a pretty exciting time to be able to doing what you're doing - lines are blurring all over the place between the artificial divisions within organisations. I'd be reading as much about Lean Management as I can (as the wellspring from which Agile comes), but only if it makes sense in your context.
Good luck!
No Fucking Clue?
wow.. I wonder how much a 2 degree change in average temperatures will cost Canadians?
Too late matey.. I've already had the explanation of the inner workings of my oldest (11yo) redstone circuit based combination locks do my head in. At least these kids are growing knowing what an XOR is. It's kinda sweet, in a geek-family way.
Man.. just release it so my kids will stop asking me "when will 1.8 be out". I woke up last weekend with my youngest's face about three inches from mine, saying "has Minecraft been updated?" We've had to ban discussion about Minecraft from the dinner table, it's just gets too much.
But seriously, Minecraft has been an absolute boon for tech education in our house. My young kids now have their own hosted server for playing with friends, discuss the merits of Java over other languages and have generally replaced a "consumerist" attitude to technology with a much more investigative one. And the story of Notch kicking it all off by himself inspires them. It's all good.
Now kids, go write a mod or something. Mummy and Daddy want to have a sleep-in.
Umm.. science?
Well.. if you can take some advice from a crusty old coder. After 20 years of coding I've recently swapped over to working as a product manager. As much as I miss coding for money I'm now finding new ways to code for pleasure. I code for my kids, I code for myself - and I no longer feel the pressure of having to produce code under crazy time constraints or the demands of managers with limited technical knowledge.
If you're coding as well as managing it's far too easy to get sucked into the code and forget your other duties. Or piss developers off by getting into their faces a bit too much. I've done both since starting as a PM and realise now that the best part of my job is building a bridge between the techie and non-techie worlds. And that's a joy.
I have a small project that I work on over the odd weekend, helping build services for parents of kids with autism. It's paid work but not much more than beer money - though being Australian that possibly means a lot. But it also feels like I'm contributing something meaningful. Maybe find something like that - something where you can practise your coding chops, have fun and do some good.
This whole "George M. Howell is a troll" meme is getting kinda old. Yes, he does say some odd things..but..
.. is not news
"Someone is trolling teh interwebs! zOMG!"
This is kinda neat. I know it's a copy of what Heroku and co have already done, and I've no love of PERL, but give the guy some cred. 15 year old or no, if this all works as stated it's a nice piece of hackery.
The article seems to be trying to position John as some kind of hacker/musician. The question on when did you first write computer programs could have had the same answer as when did you last write computer programs.
I love.. love.. love They Might Be Giants - trekked across town on foot one day so I could see them play in a little record store (place was packed, so I never saw them in the store.. but I heard them). As noted elsewhere, if you've never listened to them you're in for a treat.
I think there's a basic misunderstanding on the part of "designers" who go for cuteness (or technically correct but user-experience dumb) when designing interfaces. There's also the problem of over-representation of 20-30 year old, white, male points of view (just, that old chestnut).
My parents are having to sort out getting digital TV set-top boxes for their home, as the analogue signal is all but gone. My mother goes in to try and get some help understanding how the thing they bought works and cops a flurry of attitude from the young male who literally says to her face "I can't stand it when people say they're not tech-savvy. It's not hard". Dad goes in, "Sure sir, how can I help you?".
Having dealt with developers (and been a developer) for almost 20 years, I see this kind of dickwad mentality everywhere: the user doesn't know what he/she wants. Really? Trying talking their language.
History. ICONICS have been around for a long time - their ActiveX controls were originally used inside native Win32 apps. It was an easy way to get reasoably good looking HMIs built when you needed something clean looking (and UI design wasn't your strong point). Fast forward a decade and what kinda worked in native apps has been moved to the web, with nary a thought of the security implications. I wouldn't blame either IT or Engineering per se, but there clearly not been a lot of dialogue between these two camps.
You're a very lucky engineer. Back when I was involved in process control - happy days I'm trying to get back to with http://xpca.org/ - so many engineering depts. were under budgetary and business-political pressure to merge their networks with the corporate network and hand over control of the their systems to the better-budgeted (and more politically savvy) IT departments.
It was madness! Can't control your machinery? Oh, maybe that's because everyone's streaming the Royal Wedding. Too bad.
I think I've told this story here before but the funniest experience was finding a set of cables hidden along an I-beam, asking about it and then getting grabbed by an engineer and told "Ssh! That's *our* network"
Seriously, the industry needs an overhaul. We need to get away from the whole OPC / DCOM / ActiveX craziness before some real disaster happens.
For the record, I'm pro-nuclear. But I'd favour smaller, more localised energy production; maybe using fuels like Thorium, which as you quite rightly point out is much more abundant than other nuclear fuels and has a number of other benefits. I'd also favour bio-fuels that can be proven to be more of an energy gain than a sink for local economies. The chief benefit I see is a more direct understanding of how fuel use effects us, plus a reduction in "power politics" that excludes the use of novel fuels. We're a long way from either of these scenarios, but I'm hopeful.
The safety issues of nuclear power can't be removed from its economic impact - Fukushima and the effect on the Japanese economy a case in point. Likewise the devastating effects of oil spills in the ocean affect the cost/benefit of using crude. My argument was never oil vs. nuclear - it's the consequences of treating these resources as infinite.
Similarly economic issues can't be divorced from safety, where stalling economies influence the level of investment in the safe handling of nuclear and other energies. We are building extremely interwoven systems here that will have to last an extremely long time.
Without any drive towards efficient use of these resources any estimate of our future reserves is at best a guess. The only thing that seems to be unlimited is our ability to consume resources in increasingly larger amounts. Events like Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon should represent an important feedback loop in the economic/energy/environmental systems we all rely upon.
Fair enough, though I'm not advocating that we refuse to use natural resources. There is another option: learn to use less.
Crude oil has so many wonderful applications - from medicine to building materials - yet our preferred option is just to burn the stuff up. Given the amazing properties of materials like Uranium I can imagine future generations, upon hearing about what we did during our limited stewardship of the planet, decry "they did WHAT with it?"
Like you I believe we will find better technologies. I have no truck with the anti-human sentiment that human beings are some kind of plague on the Earth. We are awesome. But I hope that as we develop these technologies there is a parallel development of human wisdom - that we don't think that going without one-person-per-large-vehicle or ever expanding TV widths is, in any reasonable sense, a penalty.
The rhetoric around nuclear energy being a fossil fuel is just pointing out that we appear to be using up the energy reserves way too quickly. Uranium is comparable to oil in the sense that once it's gone it's gone.. Maybe not completely comparable, in that at least the Earth has the capacity to renew its oil reserves - albeit not in a timeframe that of use to any of us.
As you point out, most of the atoms in my body do indeed come from dead stars. The are unfortunately not a reliable energy source in themselves, but given enough time I might be able to decompose into some useful hydrocarbon based fuel. I might even be lighting the lamp your distant descendants use to read about the short-lived era when a handful of generations chewed through vastly more than their fair share of the planet's wealth.
At any rate, I hope that nothing I leave behind taints the Earth. Given the way I live I don't think that's likely, but if I can make rational decisions about how and why I use the resources that are available to me I can leave those who come after me with fewer things to worry about. Which was my original point, cutting through the rhetoric.
Ignoring all the "coal kills more people" vs. "Pu is forever" arguments, the fact remains that all these fuels are essentially nasty, polluting "fossil" fuels (albeit one from dead suns).
Maybe Fukushima and Deep Water Horizon will mark a recognition of the level of care we need to take when handling these very finite resources. I hope so.
I'm never surprised when I hear about industrial systems getting hacked for two reasons: (1) the venerable OPC protocol and (2) the mad insistence of IT departments that everything - including process control systems - has to come under their control.
There's nothing wrong with OPC per se, but it relies on DCOM (which isn't secure). Even if they've moved to the better OPC UA or some other architecture there's still the craziness of making industrial systems accessible over the corporate network.
Man.. you just grossed me out.. with science!
Oh man.. can I take that back.. too slow.. must have e.coli for brains
But will it run Linux?
The tools I *prefer* to use are just cards and good interactions with customers, rapid feedback through short iterations and such. And with my own clients that's exactly what happens.. happy me, happy client.
Where I work at the moment they need slightly more ceremony, so I've found the templates that Karl Wiegers has come up with are super useful:
http://www.processimpact.com/goodies.shtml
High-end, complex tools for managing and tracing requirements are awesome if you (a) build space ships or (b) are a bit potty.. IMHO. I've yet to see any concrete evidence that they add as much value as they suck out of a project. Keep it simple and straightforward.