Businessmen they drink my wine / ploughmen dig my earth

[hirez]

You should read this book it is very good. (And I am only mildly biased)

I don't know how it happened but I am mixing with the cool kids.

For reasons unknown entirely bloody obvious because hell is other people, every time I look at G+ 'nearby' on t'mobile, all I can see is/are complete tosspots. I must admit that I start to look at it on a proper browser once or twice a week, but since the cookies timed out I can't be arsed to log in to the thing, so go off and do something marginally more interesting. It's probably a shame.

Comments

[ms-siobhan.livejournal.com]

:-)

I have yet to delve into the murky world of googleplus - I'm finding it all a bit 'rise of the machines' really.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

The Liz Williams, I take it ?

'Nearby' seems to be the online equivalent of a direct line into a random conversation in the nearest pub. Which is not something I'd choose as a diversion IRL.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The Gareth Powell specifically, but the rest sound jolly good too.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

Ta - clicky clicky.

I see the new Stephenson is out, too!

[inulro.livejournal.com]

So it is. And me with no income. I'll just have to wait till the library can get it to me then.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Bloody Puppet. Great if you're running a MOAB-y type with a reconfigure-on-the-fly thing like what HPCWales are doing, but unless your average job time is of the order of tens of days - and you regularly have people writing code that only runs on Windows - what it is most useful for is deploying patches across the cluster. Decent sysadmin practice will be equally useful, especially when the next great thing comes along and it all breaks.

Come to think of it, Why is sysadmining these days a "install package X, which will allegedly do all the hard work for you until it comes across an unusual case, at which point you open a bug report and spend eight months convincing the developers that there is a bug" thing? Can't people bodge their own scripts up any more?

</curmudgeon>

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Massive Ordnance Air-Burst?

We run a pile of web-malarkey on VMs with it. No-one's yet adequately demonstrated why they shouldn't be stamped out like biscuits. I think it's enforcing some sort of order without needing people to fill in TPS reports.

(Mind, saying that, it's obvious from the mail-list that a resentful mob of admins can make a self-righteous bugger of a Puppet rig just as well as they can with any other technology.)

Hand-building machines is an ideal way of creating 'job-security' and treating the rest of the team like crap. I did a lot of it and thought "Oh, don't worry about that, I'll just quickly fix it.." was a sensible answer.