* Posts by EarthDog

436 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2014

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We don't need maintenance this often, surely? Pull it. Oh dear, the system's down

EarthDog

Re: An ex employer did that too.

Management is more about egos than anything else. Screw doing it right, do it my way because I can order you to do it. In the words of a famous TV series; "I used to work in a shoe factory, now I'm in charge. To the workers of the world."

EarthDog

Re: An ex employer did that too.

Good Lord. Working for 3 narcissists at the same time.

Oh sure, we'll just make a tiny little change in every source file without letting anyone know. What could go wrong?

EarthDog

Re: Ratelimiting

sounds like a real bastard

Cambridge student rebuilds Polish Enigma-code-breaking box that paved the way for Turing ... and Victory!

EarthDog

Re: Cambridge

apparently close to 50 percent of the voters didn't see the episode.

EarthDog

The reason they succeeded

Is that the Brits and US started out with a good pole position.

EarthDog

Re: Cambridge

Bah! Cambridge is a dump.

You know this Land of the Free thing, yeah? Well then, why allow the FBI to trawl through America's browsing history without a warrant?

EarthDog

Re: Fourth AND Fifth Amendments

the war on drugs shredded those two useless clauses years ago.

EarthDog

But we've got the best numbers!

Incredible numbers. Numbers like no one else! No other COVID19 nation on Earth can beat us! They don't have our numbers. We're number 1! We're number 1! USA!USA! Whhooooohooooo!

Microsoft prevents Domain of Danger from falling into miscreants' paws by forking out cash for corp.com

EarthDog

We'll let Mikey set up the domain

He's microsoft certified.

COBOL-coding volunteers sought as slammed mainframes slow New Jersey's coronavirus response

EarthDog

It's mission critical! We need more help!

Are you willing to pay for that help?"

"It's not that critical"

Shipping is so insecure we could have driven off in an oil rig, says Pen Test Partners

EarthDog

Re: And yet...

why do that when you can brick every super tanker on the planet? The goal economy would collapse.

EarthDog

Re: Bad design

Going on decks in bad seas is more than inconvenient it is dangerous. Some one said corporate campuses are larger, but they are designed to be part of an internal secure environment. The same thinking must be applied to ships. With compartmentalized subnets.

Wake me up before you go Go: Devs say they'll learn Google-backed lang next. Plus: Perl pays best, Java still in demand

EarthDog

$147k in the Bay Area?

That's not even minimum wage giving the cost of living there.

EarthDog

Perl is only as hard as you make it. But that requires foresight, discipline, and adherence to good practices. You know, skill.

Behold Schrödinger's Y2K, when software went all quantum

EarthDog

Re: I found a Y2K bug a few years ago

the alternative is ECT. So yes, when ever possible.

EarthDog

I found a Y2K bug a few years ago

I was working as a QA on a project for a tech company a few years ago, who will remain unnamed as I don't want to embarrass Bill and Dave, which used a calendar widget from an unnamed open source software hub which was built around Git. Well I was doing my routine testing, using some manual exploratory testing to augment automated regression testing, when I put in a date in the future. The date the calendar then showed a date in the early 1900s. Imagine my amusement when I got to title the defect report "Y2K bug detected in calendar widget". Imagine the disbelief and amusement when I mentioned it at our next standup.

Which is one of many reasons I don't trust or have a high opinion of programmers.

Which is also why I sometimes feel like weeping.

Open wide, very wide: Xerox considers buying HP. Yes, the HP that is more than three times its market cap

EarthDog

Re: How are they going to fund it?

Their definition of "innovation" is financial shell games to come up with funding to buy a company no sane person would buy for any reason. Using Yapenese Rai to borrow cryptocurrency and then use it as an asset to leverage bond purchases which would then, along with a mortgage on cash flow, to buy HP Inc.? Now that's innovation! See also NINJA loans back in '07

If you didn't get the reference here is an article on Rai: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones , a pretty solid and stable form of currency.

EarthDog

Re: the main idea of a hostile takeover is surprise...

Our greatest weapons refer, surprise, and a fanatical devotion to bonuses

1,700 lucky Brit kids to visit Apple Stores for 'Year of Engineering'

EarthDog

Re: Huh?

Go to meetings, fill out reports, review documents, drink coffee, eat donuts (all organic gluten free), more meetings, actually do some work (maybe once or twice a week), more meetings, etc. In other words:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBfTrjPSShs

How one programmer's efforts to stop checking in buggy code changed the DevOps world

EarthDog

Re: Jenkins?

Having done QA, QAing your own work is really not QAing it. IMO.

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

EarthDog

I think the 60's and 70's

EarthDog

Re: Controlled experments: thats the ticket

and wine. Don't forget the wine.

EarthDog

Re: and the bands ..

Stringiest Cheese Incident.

http://www.stringcheeseincident.com

GitHub.com freezes up as techies race to fix dead data storage gear

EarthDog

That's the problem. They used the wibbly wobbly web. They should have gone serverless and then the server and storage problem would be solved!

/s

Powerful forces, bodily fluids – it's all in a day's work

EarthDog

Re: Monitor

+1 for being a good teacher.

EarthDog

Re: Re:down the mine

If it was something safety critical then you had best copy it legibly and accurately. As opposed to the Freidman school driven "cut costs by doing just good enough as long as the deaths cost less than the profits".

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

EarthDog

Re: Not in IT...

Hooray for the good guys!

EarthDog

Re: Not in IT...

That's "Residual Human Resources"

EarthDog

Re: Not in IT...

And/or make big assumptions on their skill and training levels. "He was hired to run Oracle so I assumed he knew the difference between SYS, SYSTEM, SYSOPER, and sysdba, ".

Mega-bites of code: Python snakes into 1st place for cyber-attacks

EarthDog

typical

a language gets popular. get's pushed into in appropriate roles. demand for <insert name of language here> programmers spikes. People start taking "Learn <programming language in 21 days head first> courses". Managers start hiring monkeys. Badda bing badda boom, crappy code and security flaws everywhere.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

How an over-zealous yank took down the trading floor of a US bank

EarthDog

Re: DevOps?

It's called SAFe.

Quit that job and earn $185k... cleaning up San Francisco's notoriously crappy sidewalks

EarthDog

Zuckerberg is proof

Adtech-for-sex biz tells blockchain consent app firm, 'hold my beer'

EarthDog

Re: Did zUckERbErG create this on his day off `

Silly valley is 90% brogrammers and other such ilk. So their understanding of female psychology and all the variations thereof is.... non-existent. But if it doesn't work it is obviously due to the fact the user doesn't know how to use the software properly, and the universe should change to match the software. Right?

IBM fired me because I'm not a millennial, says axed cloud sales star in age discrim court row

EarthDog

Re: lying scum are still lying

There is no difference

What can you do when the pup of programming becomes the black dog of burnout? Dude, leave

EarthDog

Re: Been there. Golden handcuffs were my problem

I need a change of pace. An opportunity for more growth. I'd like to ry my hand at doing X. Seeking new challenges. Seeking a smaller environment etc.

Kill the blockchain! It'll make you fitter in the long run, honest

EarthDog

Re: A large consultancy at a tech conference this week

Not so fast. It needs to be containerized BYOD 24/7 serverless leverage synergy apps with social media capabilities.

US Congress mulls expanding copyright yet again – to 144 years

EarthDog

Re: Copyright, Patents all screwed.

Life + 50? Why? So the person's freeloading relatives can make money with no work and then brag about what clever business people? And then decry the poor for being lazy parasites? If you want to see parasite go to a pricey resort town and watch all the trust fund babies stuffing their monthly checks up their noses.

Agile development exposed as techie superstition

EarthDog

Re: RE: that core premise has always been at the heart of best development practices

you get it. see "Agile is Dead" by a creator of the manifest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M

EarthDog

Re: Thank the heavens

The intent was that agile be an adjective, not a proper noun. A philosophy or approach to software development. Not a rigid methodology which is what it was sold as.

EarthDog

Re: Agile is b*llocks. Any non-idiot knows this.

and always write it with a small "a" and not as a proper noun.

EarthDog

Re: Coming back to this article and comments a day later

first off agile is an adjective, not a proper noun.

EarthDog

Re: Let's get rid of these myth too

Have you done studies on it? Would you publish your results online?

EarthDog

Re: Let's get rid of these myth too

Have you measured your output? How? Never underestimate the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

EarthDog

Re: Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

Here are some ways sociologists, use what fits https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/sociology/sociological-research-methods/sociological-research-designs-methods

I think I was talking about observational and case studies. But even so they try match up groups, e.g. while studying education level and it's impact they would try to control for age, ethnicity, income level of the subject's household while growing etc.

As far as burden you can run reports on defect escape rate, features delivered etc. which should be documented somewhere.

EarthDog

Re: Ahh, Agile -- process fad du jour...

Management fixates on surface details; we must use Jira, have standup, sprint planning, training classes etc. So But they do not grasp the underlying spirit and social messages. They buy the books, read the articles etc. but done read deeply enough. It's sort of like "everyone successful is wearing wide ties so I look successful and so will be successful". I somestimes refer to "cargo cult" management or programming.

Your post is a good example of using appropriate tools and being agile when developing software, use what works. If waterfall works, use it.

And then there is the matter of 2 week sprints. Everyone fixates on that. But to be agile you adjust sprints to the the complexity and organizational friction you encounter. Maybe 3 weeks or 4 weeks or whatever you need.

Remember, agile is an adjective not a noun.

EarthDog

Re: Daily meetings

Are you using a silo'd QA or embedded? Embedded seems to work better

EarthDog

Re: Agile is b*llocks. Any non-idiot knows this.

This is the perspective of one of the original authors of the agile (small "a") Manifesto. An interesting talk titled "Agile Is Dead" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-BOSpxYJ9M

EarthDog

Let's get rid of these myth too

They have no scientific foundation.

they are:

10x programmer

Exponential Defect Cost Curve

The Software Crisis

https://blog.fogcreek.com/10x-programmer-and-other-myths-in-software-engineering-interview-with-laurent-bossavit/

EarthDog

Well there is another approach often used in Sociology. Find 2 groups with as much overlap in factors as possible such as tool sets, problem domains, team sizes, maturity of the product etc. Make sure they are using different development methods. Gather data for both projects and compare. Repeat the process for several projects and throw in some longitudinal studies as well. Then over time you'll have a series of naturalistic studies from which inferences can be drawn.

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