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Ramblings About IT Philosophy
Recently, I’ve been thinking that I should write down some of my views on IT. I don’t believe in a black & white world, but in one that’s full of realities, tradeoffs, and compromises. I’ve worked with people who refuse to (or are unable to) recognize that and spend energy trying to dictate instead of collaborate, typically to the detriment of themselves and frustration of everyone around them. IT exists to support and enable an organization, and should not be an end unto itself.
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Distributed Monoliths
As part of developing RESTful HTTP APIs at work, there’s been a lot of discussion over the “best” way to architect/implement everything. To avoid relying strictly on my own instincts and relearning mistakes that many others have already learned from, I’ve been reading O’Reilly’s Building Microservices. I haven’t finished it yet, but have gotten a lot out of what I’ve read so far (and been pleased to see that my instincts have been largely supported by someone who’s experienced implementing such systems).
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NUMA and torque/Moab
TL;DR Support for NUMA systems in torque/Moab breaks existing means of specifying shared memory jobs and limits scheduling flexibility in heterogeneous compute environments.
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Adieu Android, or bienvenue iPhone!
My foray into the world of Android phones is finally at an end, and am now the owner of a shiny iPhone 4S. It was an interesting experiment, and there were a few features that I will miss that I haven’t found a way to do on the iPhone, but the Android experience finally got bad enough (and I hit my 2 year contract anniversary) to push for a phone upgrade at work. There were just too many issues with my Droid and Android in general from a usability standpoint to suffer it any further. Issues with the Android ecosystem (at least as I’ve been able to experience it… maybe 4.0 will really start to address some of their problems):
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The cost of supercomputing
So this upcoming week is the big annual supercomputing convention, SC10, down in New Orleans. Since I’m skipping out (anxiously waiting for the arrival of Little Miss Sunshine), I’ve got time to actually try and read through the slew of new product announcements and news coverage. So today I saw this quote on twitter from hpc_guru and just had to share:
“Cost of the building next generation of supercomputers is not the problem. The cost of running the machines is what concerns engineers.”
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eMusic makes me a sad panda
I’ve been a happy happy joy joy subscriber at eMusic since 2005. I wasn’t sure what I thought initially when Lee clued me into it (indie music being a new thing for me), but after that first month I was hooked. Took me a few months and then I bumped up to the annual subscription option. Until recently, my most recent subscription plan worked out to $16/month, which got me 90 tracks a month.
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Bad Karma
I guess I’ve been swimming in bad karma or something lately. First, I broke the nice set of Sennheiser HD515 cans I use at work leaving me with the craptacular closed Aiwas I’d used before seeing the light. Then, I broke the belt clip on my cellphone. Fortunately, superglue seems to have solved both problems. Then, I realized my Thinkpad wasn’t charging like it should. Everything indicated it was charging, but the battery meter kept getting lower.
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Damn Dolphins!... or hanging out with Rachel and Tammy
Rachel and her roommate Tammy (who’s a hoot btw) came down Friday night to catch the show at the Canopy Club featuring The Living Blue, Tractor Kings, Dark Country, and The Dolphin. We showed up some time during the Dolphin’s set and all I have to say is weird. I couldn’t really tell whether they were playing something or just getting setup and making random noises on-stage. We elected to wait out at the bar until after their set was over.
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That time of year again... Ethics Training!
What an unbelievable waste of time. Some state law passed last year (at least I assume last year… I started having to do this last year anyway) requires that all state employees must go through ethics training every year. Interesting how grad students are considered employees when it means additional requirements/constraints be placed on us and students when they’re talking about salary/benefits/parking/etc. Fortunately it’s done through the web instead of requiring us to attend an actual class.
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You eeediot!
What’s the deal with stupid people getting union secretary gigs in Universities? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some great and helpful secretaries in my time. But so many of them are just so useless! I’ve been dealing a bit with one in the business office for our department trying to place orders for my students in senior design. Here are my two experiences so far: Took a couple of days to get my first order placed.
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