Category: Uncategorized

Six months too late, I’ve now been certified in basic Azure DevOps. Top tip: if you wholeheartedly embrace the Microsoft system it works so much better. What surprised me was that GitHub is now well-integrated. I still won’t use Azure for personal stuff since VSCode has connections to everything Open Source I use.

This repeated MacOS upgrade fail annoyed me. I saw stuff on the internet about Apple’s servers being overwhelmed. That wasn’t it. It turns out I only had 4G of free disk space left.

I’m never getting only 128G of SSD again. Deleting 8G of Spotify cache, and it worked smoothly, if slowly.

Simples!

Edit: had a major fail going to 12.4. The system locked, unbootably so. I took it to the Apple store and the very nice man poked it with some electrons and the update completed.

Coming out of a job where I was working on a 20-year old Perl codebase, I’ve got some burns to get off my chest. I’m reading “Accelerate” by Forsgren, Humble and Kim which claims to have scientific backing for what makes for efficient development in a team. In my recent experience:

1. Use decent version control. To me, that means GitHub. Use a branching strategy to code each branch to a JIRA. Make the branches short-lived, preferably a day. GitHub is stateless. Diffs are resolved at merge-time when pull requests are made. Under NO circumstances use something like Perforce. That is like putting a large speed bump under a low slung car. It’s stateful. Mapping a repo into your filesystem is a pain. Rewinding commits is a royal pain. Ugh.
2. Release often, releases should be easy. A marker of a high performing team is how frequently they release software. A release should not be confined to one person on the team and take half a day.
3. Great balls of mud are hopeless. We’ve been writing new software as microservices for a while now, and more recently bundling them up in Docker containers (and if you’re really advanced then using Kubernetes). In the Perl world that means using a framework such as Mojolicious, Catalyst or Dancer with excellent modules like the Template Toolkit for the view and DBIx::Class for the model and not v1 of view software that’s barely been touched for years and v2 exists. It also highly bound to Apache and hard to use elsewhere.
4. Ongoing support for mod_perl in Apache 2.x is ongoing. It’s already been abandoned in Apache 1.x so I would note that software is doomed at some point.
5. Be very careful layering software upon software. Or using features that make things opaque. Oh, and having magic variables and not documenting them. For example, you have Puppet. That’s great. Why not layer Heira on top and render most of the puppet documentation useless. Or use a templating system that magically calls in a hierarchy of other templates. Oh, and where does that database handle come from? Somewhere in the bowels of that page startup. Not sure which module.

In summary, I’d say be aware of the speedbumps. How can you improve them?

Macksville resident Melanie Williams was also shocked by a swarm of spiders climbing the outer wall of her home as they fled for higher ground. “I occasionally see spiders around the place but never anything like that, it was just insane,” she told the ABC.

The spiders outside her home were “horrific” but her neighbour told her there were twice as many inside his garage, she told Guardian Australia.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/22/horrific-swarms-of-spiders-flee-into-homes-and-up-legs-to-escape-nsw-floods

Poor Ronald.

I’d found out about the Newport wetlands and after a kerfuffle on Reddit, found there was a Cardiff Wetlands down in the bay. We went and had a mosey. That was disappointing. It’s a patch of land inside the barrage, probably left over from a dock back in the day. Despite the enthusiasm of the signposts, the wildlife was disappointingly vanilla: ducks, swans, tits, crows, magpies and so on. The air was reassuringly noisy, but if there were exotic birds, they were shy. It’s worth a little walk. Once. Enjoy some pictures.

Totally unfamiliar territory for me. I have a Maven install unpacked. How to get Jenkins to see it? Answer: go to Global Tool Configuration, and set your Maven installation to *not* install automatically, then set MVN_HOME to where your install is. Simple!

The day after the vote when the result was revealed, my reaction was incandescent and aghast. How could 52% of the people who voted be so daft? Turns out it’s a common delusion. My acceptance speech as leader of an independent political party:

“My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen,

We are now in the privileged position of having got rid of the Tories and their austerity agenda and are now in a position to move this country forward again. BTW, The word Tory derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe; modern Irish tóraí; modern Scottish Gaelic Tòraidh: outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”.

David Cameron’s ill-advised referendum to save the Tory party disenfranchised 48% of the population, and in the subsequent years and we have since been fed a steady stream of lies by leaver politicians and press.

Unlike the squirrels in leavers heads, I treasure the pillars of being in the EU. I like having free trade with 27 other countries. I like that the Good Friday agreement, which ended what was, in other words, a civil war, is enshrined in an open border. Northern Ireland has come on in leaps and bounds. My neighbour will probably go back to Switzerland or Germany if the university research funding dries up.

The bullshit about the “unelected beaureaucrats” is exactly that. We elect MPs to the European parliament and we get a veto over any legislation. We have rejected remarkably little.

I like the fact my human rights are enshrined by law. The Tories in their Brexit panic threatened to do away with it.

I waited in vain for the £350 million a week for the NHS. The Tory promises of more police or more money for the NHS doesn’t even make a dent in the damage done by ten years of austerity. Turkey was never going to join the EU, more’s the pity.

If you Google “leaver lies” you’ll find plenty of collated lists. If an unworkable Brexit had gone through, I’d have been off to Asia.

So anyhow, here’s to a future of being part of one of the largest free trade areas in the world, Schengen and the Euro.”