Posts by Tim99 2323 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
Yep, years ago I took a (holiday) trip with a company car from Perth to Derby via Carnarvon, Karratha, Hedland, and Broome with a few side trips (>8,000 km in total) with almost no traffic lights.
On the other hand, two weeks ago, I went on a shopping expedition with Mrs Tim99 from Mandurah to Osborne Park, via Melville on Highway 1 (~80 km) and would have gone through >50 sets of lights.
The population of WA is ~2.6 million, with >2.1 million living in Greater Perth.
About 1992, I commuted several times a week through the suburbs for about 10 years, but the City of Perth certainly had roundabouts before that. Possibly the first ones were the on the Causeway crossing Heirisson Island in the 1950s, but I’m not sure that they count - They are/were teardrop shaped as the main bridge carriageways weren’t crossed by traffic. Anyway, they were only for the posh people who could take a vehicle into the City :-) These days the Island has traffic lights so people "know" when to move.
I now live in a retirement village, and a number of "rural" residents will take a 6 km diversion to avoid one a couple of kms away that has a minor road crossing a dual carriageway.
Yes, and when WA introduced one of the first suburban roundabouts (Yangebup?) most of the locals stopped at the white line and waited for somebody else to move. Sometimes the traffic was stationary on all four entrances and only moved when a driver who had the right-of way waved the next vehicle around the roundabout across...
In the Old Dart, I find that when this old fart is in a hire car with unfamiliar controls, the High Wycombe roundabout is "challenging" - Instead of signalling appropriately, the windscreen gets wiped,...
"Or WordPad?" : A very long time ago we asked our Microsoft Rep if we could have a version of WordPad with a spell checker (We thought we were large and important). He told us that if such a thing was available no-one would buy Word. I laughed thinking he was joking, he wasn't.
I'm retired now and use TextEdit for many things, sometimes I even turn on "Make Rich Text". If I need anything fancier "Pages" will do for most of it.
I agree. I rotate 3 TM backup disks, which have saved me from self-inflicted brain-fade on a couple of occasions; in particular being able to put back deleted emails. BUT, because I have earnt my paranoia, I have 3 Rotated Carbon Copy Cloner bootable back-ups too.
The half your age +7 was sanctioned by the church in feudal times. The rationale was that males could (and did) marry at 14, and females at 12. These were typically to consolidate political ties between important families. Children could be betrothed at 7 years old. This would mean that two 14 year-olds could get married. It then worked out at 20&17; 30&22; 40&27; 50&32; 60&37; and 70&42. This may well have been because of relatively low life expectancy; likelihood of death in childbirth; and high mortality rates for children, and the need to ensure succession.
A group I was in had a similar concept we called "fire fighting" management. Everybody spent so much time rushing from one incident to another "putting out individual fires" that there were no resources to fireproof the business.
After running a couple of businesses, I expanded that idea to try and quantify it - My model was based on the 80:20 rule, along the lines that once you reached a 20% stuff-up quotient you’d spend 80% of your time and resources on the 20%. It appeared to have been frighteningly reliable.
My (handwritten) passport from the 1970s has "Government Service" in the relevant field. It probably covered everyone from the nice lady at the Post Office who sold you a stamp to David Callan. I think my favourite classification at the time was "Gentleman", which meant access to sufficient wealth to not need "employment".
" But I don't see any way of doing that without making professional development so onerous that 90%+ of software companies fold, and the rest start charging 10x current prices."
"You make that sound like a bad thing" (Gene Hunt - Life on Mars). See also: Sturgeon's Revelation"...
I use DDG, and can't remember the last time I used Google directly. DDG supports bangs! which are reasonably anonymous: e.g. searchtext !g does a Google search; searchtext !w a Wikipedia search. There are thousands of others...
Old/Middle English wifman - "female adult person", via "female head of household" became wife. "World” also from wer; meant age, or concerns, or affairs, or interests, or business, of male humans - Perhaps we should replace that with “global"?
Make and female connectors, could we call them plugs and sockets? Asking for a friend.
I offered a colleague some "Gentleman’s Relish" on toast, when he claimed the superiority of Vegemite. He didn’t finish it, and the subject was never mentioned again...
Prostate problems - Mine was also >600mL, full for much of the time, and waking up for 4-5 trips every night. Green-light laser treatment has apparently fixed it, but the nice surgeon told me to expect further treatment "sometime in your 80s" - So something to look forward too...
"not the backing store any professional should use for a reliable web service" Horses for courses. My idea of a professional is someone who can work within the constraints that exist.
Your mind is made-up, but you can indeed replicate SQLite with commercial and FOSS packages: Dqlite - https://dqlite.io (If you don't mind using Canonical); rqlite - https://github.com/rqlite/rqlite ; SymmetricDS (but more for replicating to bigger databases) ; aergolite - https://github.com/aergoio/aergolite (I have no idea if it's any good) ; LiteSync - http://litesync.io/en/sqlite-synchronization.html (seems to be pricey).
You can advise that something is not suitable for purpose, and if that is not accepted walk away. I was offered a full time government job to create a Lab Information System. The boss, and a panel, asked for a solution to run across 5 laboratories in different parts of the country - My response, based on writing almost identical systems from scratch, and also installing commercial systems was: Either write their own, and staff it appropriately to look after changes and maintenance themselves; or, buy a commercial system and adapt their operation to match it, and not to install their own custom stuff. Experience had shown that once you move away from a "standard" commercial system with your own modifications, future updates would strand you - They wanted to use their in-house skills which were dBase/Clipper for a front-end (It was the early 90s and dBase was approaching obsolescence) and somehow cobble it onto a new commercial Oracle system - I politely told them "No". They offered me a full-time job at deputy director level (Formal interview panels - Apparently they had heard of them), I said no. They asked why - I told them that in my professional opinion their stuff would be orphaned by the commercial supplier. They asked for other alternatives. I thought that as they (like almost all labs) were using spreadsheets extensively, they could continue to use them for local manipulation and display, provided that all of the results were secured and available through a database; and that they should invest in a decent report writer (Not Crystal!) for printed output. They still wanted dBase and Oracle, and seemed to not understand why I wouldn't take a nice government job (I'd been a Scientific Civil Servant before my last salaried job). They went ahead with someone else who was a general programmer. It was a disaster, and after struggling for a few years, his successor installed an off-the-peg commercial system.
I see from your posts that you use Python. I use and like it too, but for heavy lifting on a server I would use it with C (My age is showing, maybe you would like C++). SQLite was originally written to do some quite serious stuff in Tcl and C, including talking to "real" databases. That's why I liked it with PostgreSQL for some of our commercial stuff (As you know great for prototyping, but we realised that it worked well for a lot of stuff by itself). My customer base is probably different - We specialized in $2-20 million p.a. companies, as well as local authorities and smaller government departments. A big database for them increased by "only" 10,000 - 10,000,000 rows p.a., but the data was "important to them, and needed to be right" - Much of the database didn't need to be live, so historical storage in read-only archived tables was preferable (UNION SELECT or UNION virtual table with the live stuff).
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OK, some rambling old-fart lessons learned in 50 years of doing this sort of stuff:-
Work for yourself, you'll never be rich or secure as an employee or contractor. If it all goes wrong it's your own fault.
Keep up (highly) specialist skills outside IT, otherwise your work gets outsourced cheaply to someone with generic skills. I'm a Chartered Chemist - Someone told me about 40 years ago that it's relatively easy for a chemist to get IT skills, but not for an IT person to do chemistry - I cheated, I needed to do this stuff in the 1970/80s for chemistry, but a lot of paying work was outside that.
Soft skills are nearly as important as technical nowse. If you can't get on with people you are wasting your and their time.
Microsoft has persuaded most that "only just" good enough is good enough. Computing stuff not working seems to be tolerated by many: Yesterday I was "helping" a younger neighbour to order coffee. The Nespresso web site and App were down for at least an hour, she thought that this was normal. I prefer stuff that works (within the punter's constraints).
Avoid commercial (database) packages whenever possible: Oracle - What do you call an Oracle Customer? A Hostage... Microsoft - That's a lot of SQL Server instances/databases you have there - Congratulations, we have just dramatically changed our licencing (Sorry, it's much more expensive)...
Cheers.
Tom, perhaps you didn’t notice the [I’ll get my coat] icon...
But, my reply could be along the lines of "what’s the DR plan for when the server with the "YourServerDatabase of Choice" gets a double disk failure”.
A possible use for SQLite is at my original link: "Systems designers report success using SQLite as a data store on server applications running in the datacenter, or in other words, using SQLite as the underlying storage engine for an application-specific database server... ... For example, the server might have a separate SQLite database for each user, so that the server can handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous connections, but each SQLite database is only used by one connection.”
On a personal note: I have had some success in setting up temporary structures for the user in a Transaction based on {BEGIN TRANSACTION, CREATE [TEMP] TABLE/VIEW stuff for the user, populate the necessary temp stuff with data subsets, manipulate and check, then update the server tables, DROP whatever, and then do a COMMIT or ROLLBACK}... Another approach is to use ATTACH and DETACH of a separate temporary SQLite file for each user. If you don’t need to write back to the database you can use an in-memory ATTACH, but this does not support transactions.
SQLite was ACID compliant with journaling from about 17(?) years ago. In a crash or power failure the transaction will roll back the next time the file opens - It is possible to corrupt an SQLite database by having another OS process overwriting sectors in the file; by not using appropriate transactions; using a file descriptor after it has been closed; and using an OS file backup without snapshots (The Online Backup API allows incremental backups to other locations, allowing database users to continue uninterrupted while a backup of an online database is made).
OK, I'm retired - My background includes writing stuff with/for the first version of DEC's Rdb; Oracle from V4 (*NIX and Netware); Informix; Postgres; Sybase and then MS SQL Server (from V 4.2), including writing a couple of shrink-wraps which are still in use on 2017 & 2019, some web CGI; and a number of specialised scientific and business systems.
I have indeed found SQLite to be a useful test/prototyping tool, but it is more powerful than many (most?) think. I would almost certainly use it instead of relying on multiple key–value "databases". I hope that I have established that it is more capable than its use for "toys and running tests". Now, if you had said that about MySQL, I might have agreed with you :-)
...~100k requests per month, but sometimes quite bursty (nothing, nothing, nothing, 2k requests in 5 minutes).
So, you could have used SQLite* on two small servers and saved money? It seems to use React on Linux. Seriously, SQLite is quite adequate for a lot of the LAMP sites out there:-
*"... any site that gets fewer than 100K hits/day should work fine with SQLite. The 100K hits/day figure is a conservative estimate, not a hard upper bound. SQLite has been demonstrated to work with 10 times that amount of traffic. The SQLite website... uses SQLite itself, of course...it handles about 400K to 500K HTTP requests per day, about 15-20% of which are dynamic pages touching the database. Dynamic content uses about 200 SQL statements per webpage. This setup runs on a single VM that shares a physical server with 23 others and yet still keeps the load average below 0.1 most of the time."
That was in 2015, I'm pretty certain that the site gets a few more hits since then :-)
Before Windows, a number of these systems used DOS and QuickBASIC because it was much, much, cheaper than the dedicated units or minicomputers that preceded them. The good news was that QuickBASIC was quite good at opening a serial line, sending or receiving data, closing the line and crunching the received data. The really good news was that they weren’t connected to the internet...
Normally, I use DuckDuckGo, sometimes with the g! bang if i especially want to see a Google Search. Recently, to see "what I'm missing" I used Google directly - I thought their prominently linked article with thier POV was forced, artificial, hypocritical, and unconvincing - Mel Silva, Managing Director for Google Australia - "When you put a price on linking to certain information, you break the way that search engines work, and you no longer have a free and open web". Pretty much all of the comments posted there were negative...
About 50 years ago I was a Civil Servant. My father (a Senior Local Government Officer) asked me who I thought was the most important person in a meeting - I said that it was the Chair(man). No, he told me it's the Secretary - If it was not minuted it didn't happen; and agendum for the next meeting are posted by the Secretary. He *always* made sure that he was the Secretary - If he couldn't attend the meeting it was cancelled...
An old saw: Why are they called minutes, when they take hours to discuss?
I'm retired, but teach seniors as a volunteer (after fighting this stuff professionally for 50 years). Many of the 65+ missed out on computing, can be very wary of it, but realize that they probably "have to use it". The alternative was that their son/daughter did it all for them. In our experience the iPad works for many. We found that Android takes perhaps twice as long to teach and can require a lot of "hand holding" (Samsung - I'm looking particularly at you here). Phones, even big ones, are just too small. Almost nobody wants Windows (or Chrome, Linux etc) unless one of their children has supplied it. "Hand-me-downs" PCs and Android tablets are almost useless (they were handed down for a good reason). An iPadAir at AU$899 (£579) is affordable by many, the new iPad at AU$499 (£329) may be a bargain (particularly over 5 years).
The assistive technology is very useful for people with poor motor skills (Once the punter has wrested with Siri, many seniors also have limited typing skills). "Life savers" include: ordering (groceries), on-line banking, CentreLink, FaceTime, Photos (particularly when children/grandchildren are locked down inter-State), games, crosswords, etc.
I normally show them DuckDuckGo to get rid of most of Google's sales crap. For people who are plagued by web adverts, I demonstrate FireFox Focus - The free content blocker can be used by Safari.
On a personal level, I now use an iPad Pro more than any other computing device. Would I use it for large spreadsheets? (No) - Adding a bluetooth keyboard is useful for writing reports, and the ability to use a mouse and an HDMI adaptor is a good teaching and demonstration tool. Downsides include not being able to use plain text (I copy/paste from "QuickText"); having to load a PDF into Books to search for content; and too many websites assume that I'm using an iPhone...
Before I retired I ran a small specialized software company. Amongst other things, we had written a product used by a number of local authorities. One site in particular was "special" as it was the first one. I had done "them a favour" by saving data from an American based system that had been badly corrupted. The original supplier did not want to fix it, as we suspected that each of their sites had a different "bespoke" system and the original author had retired. MS Access 2 had just come out and we cobbled them together a simple database containing the original data. Several of the "staff" were volunteers and the manager wanted a "friendly" front end and some management reports. The whole thing cost them a couple of thousand dollarpounds. We started to get phone calls from other users of the American system asking us to sell them a copy. Over the space of a few months we had sold about twenty. We were then asked by a national government body to expand the system so that it could be used widely. After suitable workshopping and user feed-back we had ~200 sales, and the option of a SQL Server back end...
Then the problem with the "special" local authority... They had removed much of their IT (3 people) and replaced it with a single in-house support person and a large national contractor. After a few months, some genius noticed that the department where our software was installed was about a mile away from the main building and connected by a 128k ISDN. Our stuff ran well with a local printer and a dedicated SQL Server. The staff used (almost exclusively) Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint managed by a small server with a shared printer. The staff managed nightly back up tapes themselves. This arrangement meant that the new contractor had to send someone to the local site on occasion.
Now the bit of real genius thinking - The contractor decided to manage the local office from the main building by joining the local site to the main PDC, connected by the ISDN. The local staff discovered that sending a MS Word print job would now take minutes to complete. The local office manager asked if there was anything that could be done to fix that. I suggested putting the main printer on the receptionist's PC and making it a local share. Apparently, from time to time the contractor removed the share so that it could be "managed better". The office manager would then put it back.
A couple of weeks later I had an accident and badly broke an ankle and was "no load bearing and no travelling" for 16 weeks. After about 14 weeks I got frantic phone calls from the local office and their senior manager - Everything was broken. I got someone to drive me and my wheelchair to a meeting that was set for the following day. When I arrived I was sent to the conference room where the contractor had five staff down one site of a long table, the senior manager was at one end, the office manager was at the other, and I was on the other side of the table from the contractors. After a number of years of working in the public service I could recognize a "put up job", so I politely said good morning and let them talk. After a brief intro from the senior management I was then subjected to about 5 minutes of unpleasant ranting from the senior contractor, with additional barbed comments from his staff. I waited until they had stopped and asked how long this had been going on, and what was actually "broken" to cause the meeting. "Nothing has worked for the last month" I was told, "You keep going in there and fiddling with stuff and breaking it. The gist was that we were a small company and don't know what we were doing, and that they were a large national company and were considered to be an industry leader. "OK", I said, "We were asked to supply our software by the main government body, and now have about 200 sites - This site seems to be the only one with a problem. I have been doing this stuff for about 20 years, the staff that you send appear to be juniors. You can see that I am in a wheelchair - This is my first day out for more than 3 months, so what has changed on site?". "Nothing", I was told "Your stuff broke it!". I asked "Could I make a guess that you have included the SQL Server in the main domain and moved it to the main building? If you have, every bit of traffic now needs to go up and down the ISDN. If you want to work that way, did you consider using "Terminal Services"? It went very quiet on the other side of the table...
It was agreed that I would "help" the large contractor sort things out. After they left, the local and senior managers asked me to stay and called in the remaining local IT person and then asked what was really going on. The story was that the contractors were coming in every few days, their manager had said that he was not impressed by our software. They thought that they should rewrite it (and presumably take over this small market, of which we were now the main supplier?). The senior local authority manager knew me; and after everybody else had left, told me he thought that I could help sort out what was actually going on. I suggested that maybe their big contractor had tendered for a low-cost basic on-site support contract, and that "additional hours worked" were charged at a (much) higher rate?
It seemed to sort itself out. The SQL Server went back to the local site, the LAN was sorted, the in-house person was asked to "supervise" local back-ups; I received a nice invite to the Mayor's cocktail party; another local support person was employed; the new contract was with a different supplier for a fixed up-front cost, and site presence *only* after a call out with a <24 hour response (for about a half of the real cost of the previous arrangements). The new owners of "our" company still have the site as a customer along with about 600 others, but the bad news is the contractor is still in business, and some still consider them to be "an industry leader".
