Posts by Robert D Bank

My teams role involves design, estimation, testing & development environment config and running support, recoveries, production config and implementation support, and system configuration. We have continued to develop a lot of semi or fully automated process to make it easier, quicker and better quality. We understand support each other out of necessity to reduce the stress, 'try' to keep people off our backs, with bureaucracy doing it's best to hinder at every stage. We have to evolve, you can't keep still because nothing and nobody else does.

Now with all this back-ground you might think it would qualify us somewhat to contribute to ideas and discussions (even peripherally) around 'DevOps' given that it seems to roughly fit how it is described? Well you'd be wrong it seems. Since the Agileisters and DevOps mania has invaded we've been sharp elbowed and talked over or totally dismissed. Not because we did anything wrong or failed to deliver within the tight parameters we work within. It seems more that it's because we don't speak their smug condescending 'inclusive' (except us) language which they endlessly foist upon us. We don't tremble like breathlessly excited children and wet ourselves every time a new Agile or DevOps 'bible' book hits the shelf, or some LeanAgileScrumDevOps 'guru' gives yet another presentation.

Now, all the chancers are jumping in, being given massive budgets to buy off the shelf solutions for processes we had to painfully develop ourselves because there was 'no budget, we're cost cutting'' whenever we asked. You realise there is an entirely parallel operation evolving that is the favoured one, while the yours is left to whither. You see endless rounds of conferences you're not invited too, and nauseating self promotion from the talking heads and their sycophantic side-kicks. You see wild often unfounded optimism all around, like protesters in front of the tanks in Tianamen Square.

The chancers, despite these canned solutions manage to often make a mess of it because of lack of experience, and the fact they never ask for advice at the early stages where deep knowledge helps embedding of standards that will set you up right for all that follows. Oh no, they want all the glory for themselves. 'I have my new 4x4 and I know how to mount a kerb thank you very much, I'm the expert here'. 'Mind the people and bollards though' you say as they accelerate on. Regularly you find they're on your shoulder all friendly for a 'minute' (which often becomes a considerable amount of effort), wanting you to help when they're floundering, even if you're working your bollocks off to support stuff that is actually working. ('Yes you're busy with that old stuff, but MY stuff is so much more important'). There will be no mention of your contribution to fixing it. Ever. But if you don't help, you'll marked down as 'negative', 'not supportive' and even further side-lined, if that is possible.

Eventually the parasite will consume the host, and find they have rely upon themselves, suffering the consequences of whatever they created, good or bad. In later years the ones that actually stay will become disillusioned as they're no longer the bright young things getting all the attention because the 'next best thing' will appear. They will then be at my paragraph two above. .

Of course the more 'Agile' parasites will have fled the ailing host well before this. They always do.They leave well sated, looking up at the maggots scrotum as they pass to a new host and start again.

SopraSterius breaks out in Whitehall...shit

DEFAULTS

Every manufacturers settings for photos should include a mandatory meta-data tag with the creators choice of encrypted password set on the device creating the image whether meta-data is available to viewers of the image regardless of the viewing technology. So it should be by conscious CHOICE that any meta-data is shareable or not, with 'not' being the default, hardcoded as an industry standard, so it cannot be accessed unless the creator has tagged it as shareable. It must, if necessary be supported by legislation with harsh penalties for non-compliance. This 'choice' tag MUST be carried over by any copy technology so that if the meta-data share flag is missing the default is non-shareable. If the creator is doing the copy then they know the password and can again make the choice on sharing for the copy.

They're the smart ones then

I've worked in IT since the mid seventies and believe me it has changed beyond recognition. It used to be a really enjoyable but challenging job, even if hours were sometimes difficult. We had a good degree of autonomy and were trusted to innovate (remember being trusted?), and from my experience really good co-operation between colleagues regardless of gender or disability etc (without being coerced). You could end a day knowing you have achieved something.

Now, apart from it being quite reasonably paid, it has become a shit job most of the time and getting rapidly worse. Apart from just having to fight to keep your job which is always in danger of being off-shored or outsourced, you have the situation now where 'doing' is outweighed at least 60/40 with having to wade through endless regulatory and other internal process crap just to try and change 1 bit in a file for example. It is soul destroying. IF you finally get past the hand-wringing by several layers of lame management and have the go ahead to 'shudder', change something, you have to do it at the time of night when you're at your lowest ebb and most likely to cock it up. Quiet often this is done under the spotlight of management constantly asking what you're doing, how long will it take etc etc to the point of distraction. If it goes wrong then your life is not your own anymore until you've explained the same thing 100 times to different people in writing, on the phone conference and to yourself in fitful sleep several hours later. And then it starts again the next day and carries on through the route cause analysis, waterboarding and re-planning and extra hyper governance nightmare on steroids to the point where you try again. Great. And it affects your home life as well. Getting calls in the middle of the night doesn't just wake you up but those next to you as well. And then the grumpiness from lack of sleep and stress just carries it on, often resulting in illness.

And don't get me started on dealing with off-shore people. With seemingly few notable exceptions they are fucking useless, and I mean moronically stupid. The number of times every day when myself and colleagues can be seen holding heads in hands just aghast with the ridiculousness of things they come out with. For example, a simple request, 'please do the needful and copy the dataset'. That's it. Nothing else, just that. No file names. So you start on that forlorn process to prise out something meaningful to work with. You think you finally get there after several inane to's and frow's and you start working on it, and then they'll chuck in something completely left field such as 'the copy is not a copy actually'. FFS! What does that mean? Response after an hour, 'to create file that just looks like other file'. But it WILL look like the other file if I copy it! Silence for 2 hours. 'I have asked my senior, we want the new empty file and no data'. Grrr. Look at the source file, which is you've guessed it, IS empty, so same result. Head explodes. Every fucking day, several times a day, for year after fucking year until you have trained someone else to take your job, off-shore.

Rrs

Can't restore Excel 3.1 onto my Vista laptop...wants some registry update. So much for that investment

the big red button

I worked at a place which had two main processing centres and a number of satellite mini-centres around the country. One of the mini-centres at the time actually shared the building of one of the main centres, albeit on another floor, but was being decommissioned. It finally reached the point where decommissioning was complete, and all the dayshift operations staff were standing in the main centres machine room talking about it with our manager 'Terrydactyl' (he was a bit old fashioned in management style). He took it upon himself to push the 'big red button' on the pillar next to him to officially power the satellite centre down. Everyone around him shuffled nervously in their shoes. The whole main processing centre went down immediately. Funniest thing to see his face when the lights came back on!

ffs

Agile - with knob in hand

DevOps - Agile with a sledgehammer in hand

Agile

a look into the future, 40m Indians doing Agile development on their phones, deploying from the toilet. Oh..

One great stride to privatisation of the NHS

I wonder if that Mr 'unt has invested in this firm?

BT, awful, just awful

had months, literally months trying to get BB dropout issues resolved. It was blindingly obvious it was a water ingress issue because it was worse every time it rained without fail, which was confirmed only recently when a decent engineer finally turned up. But try and explain this to the robotic script repeaters on the help lines, NFC. And then all the false promises of follow up calls etc. If 4G providers could price more sharply they could take a huge slice out of the physical BB market I'm sure.

Annoying either way

Such a boring merry-go-round of twattery, headed by state actors/crims of near-do-well intent. I class them all the same, they just dick wave each other to see who can wave the biggest 'wand'. Fucking twats. Let honest people live their lives without constant threat, get a life FFS.

cultural exchange?

I'm old enough to remember when DevOps ACTUALLY existed, when a Dev programmer would come around to Operations at early design stage and actually talk over their proposal and explain the customers requirements. Very quickly a consensus and understanding would be reached to provide the optimal outcome, perhaps talking to the customer again to ensure their expectations are suitably met. And no management would be anywhere near it most of the time. They would be there to defend and support you for the decisions taken using your experience and skills in each relative area, and otherwise leave you to it. Because you'd all been a part of this you would own it and make every effort to ensure it was a success, and then celebrate it together. This is what DevOps really is, and it did exist up until perhaps the mid 80's.

From around the mid 80's the world changed. It became the world according to bean counters. And as things have scaled up it has been ripe pickings for the ladder climbers to create all their little fiefdoms and shutdown open communication, collaboration, innovation, risk taking, ownership. Finally, perhaps they realise that these were things of value. But, they they want to try and bring this back packaged as 'Agile' or 'DevOps' with no effort or understanding of how to get there. The newer recruits have never experienced the wonders of actual, real DevOps so cannot really understand it. For all the wonders of communication tools etc today it is still an almost impossible task to bring together people across hugely different geographic and cultural divides to create true DevOps. All they'll do is meet via some 'tool' and 'process' foisted on them and which they have to slavishly follow. Great.

Intelligence is not consciousness

so without consciousness AI is only an I/O supervisor, making decisions in isolation based on it's inputs. It can iterate many possible outputs and learn which might be optimal within certain parameters, but is not aware whether those might not be optimal for those using it for whatever purpose. If a self driving car for example decides to drive off a cliff to save driving over 30 cyclists that cannot be avoided, is that optimal or not? From a conscious drivers point of view a whole slew of decisions would flood their mind, taking into account a lot of 'unconnected' things that an AI wouldn't. Should I sacrifice myself for the greater good? Should I steer into the rock wall on the other side so I might have a chance of surviving? Do I actually care about the cyclists that much?

Just a thought.

Arse up!

New logo looks like someone bent over ready to take one from behind, how Agile.

applied elsewhere

Data Protection Act - I bet a lot of those pontificating here have been involved in copying/testing using personalised data either unwittingly or otherwise. When the people you have to 'trust' who say it is not personalised are offshore and out of DPA jurisdiction and basically don't give a toss, where do you stand then? There could be a lot of testing of this under the new EU laws...and an awful lot of people are going to be feeling very uncomfortable

nothing new here

I've been involved in two datacentre moves involving trucking disk in 1998 and 2001. It was the only feasible option. First used IBM dual copy and the next used IBM XRC. The second one had 3 dry runs abd worked a treat.

its not our decision to make?

I suggested some time back on el reg that the web would likely fracture into perhaps three parts. Its a logical progression, even more likely with all the increased security risks emerging. There'll be gov't and mega-corp and essential services web, business level web and a pleb web. There may also be a comms web to allow more granular control over data exchange. TPTB are not going to allow their plans to be compromised as clearly revealed here.

www.monbiot.com/2017/07/21/missing-link/

I wonder if there's a brown out when it opens?

Look closer to home

The reality is there's more tinkering of voter registration going on internally to the states than from any external player. The journalist Greg Palast has been pursuing this since the 2004 election when he found out about these 'scrub lists' that each state maintain. Thousands of people's votes are illegally nullified through these lists, certainly enough to swing election results. And the people affected are completely unaware of the fact.

QUOTE: 'We estimate that before the last election, 1.1 million voters were removed from voter rolls in sates where Crosscheck was being used. Crosscheck is the flawed-by-design, racist vote purging system instigated by Trump’s Vote Suppressor in Chief, Kris Kobach, who this past week was appointed as the Vice Chair of the Presidential Commission for Election Integrity'

Big money influence..

just finds a new vehicle...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

News only where it's 'favourable'?

RSF’s latest World Press Freedom Index highlights the danger of a tipping point in the state of media freedom, especially in leading democratic countries.

https://rsf.org/en/2017-world-press-freedom-index-tipping-point

"The rate at which democracies are approaching the tipping point is alarming for all those who understand that, if media freedom is not secure, then none of the other freedoms can be guaranteed," Deloire added. "Where will this downward spiral take us?"

Reject

A very dangerous idea. Wouldn't be surprised if the equivalent has been in use by state agencies for some time.

But, if any of my banks want to exploit this or ANY other biometric technology it's bye bye from me.

Targetting

I expect by far the greatest use of any of these exploits is for gaining advantage in international trade or other negotiations, for corporate commercial advantage and to some extent criminal and terrorist tracking, in that order. And by the above I wouldn't align this to any particular state, there are those that happily sit way above that level that feed off this.

May their pubes catch on fire.

AlgoRythm

It is another step toward algorithms making our choices...drip drip drip

There's some really fascinating discussion of this in Yuval Noah Harari's 'Homo Deus - a Brief History of the Future'. Trust me, read this and you won't feel at all comfortable by these sort of developments. It is truly one of the turning points in human history.

Algorithms are able to make much more accurate choices for you, from doctors diagnosis to choice of partner, if you want them to. Currently that is a choice. For how long, who knows. People are very willing to give up on making difficult choices. Take religion for example, for thousands of years people have 'followed the book', whatever one it might be. This is no different. People so often take the easy route because they don't want any make any effort themselves.

One thing that occurs to me is that ALL of these sort of algorithms that can have such a massive potential effect MUST be in the commons, open source if you like, and able to be influenced and updated my everyone with an interest. Unless that can happen we'll be at the behest of the exclusive owners of these algorithms, and you can be certain that their interests will be well apart from yours. Unfortunately I can't see any Gov't having the balls or the will to go down that route.

Obvious?

Why can't the Gov't just insist that the drones include GPS and other technology to automatically make sure the drones will NOT fly within the restricted zones or above acceptable heights? You can't reply on idiots making the right decisions so do it for them.

Z/OS

haven't heard of any cases of z/OS being hacked this way, probably because it's not really possible without access run authorised programs.

Squeak..

There's absolutely NO WAY I'd submit biometric data, except begrudingly for a passport as there's no option. Any institution I deal with that demands it will lose my business immediately. There are enough data sets out there being hawked by data whores that allow your whole life to be pieced together without providing them the final piece to close the circle (around your neck).

Biometrics can be all revealing and if it becomes 'normalised' they'll inevitably expand it further. With finger print recognition for example, whose to say they won't eventually include something to analyse the oils or sweat from your finger at the same time? This can provide enormous amounts of data about you that the likes of insurance companies etc would relish. Imagine it detecting presence of alcohol, cigarette smoke, illicit drugs, and various other health indicators. Meld that with data from the movement sensor, location etc and bang goes any illusion of privacy because as well we know, the data seems to always escape. It only has to happen once.

MultiNet anyone

I've often wondered if we'll end up with more than one 'type' of internet. I know nothing about it so probably barking up the wrong tree.

One would be a Gov't and business internet for inter and intra-business/Gov't activity only. It would have access to all the premium routing/resilience/hardware and security measures. It may even have it's own unique proprietary protocol.

Another would be for business interface to customers and academic interchange. As a commercial space they'll insist on any user being registered and identifiable and open to monitoring to reduce fraudulent activity. It would have 2nd level premium routing/resilience/hardware and security measures.

There will be more 'island' internets emerge that have hard borders to ward off the intrusion of the state actors like US, UK, China and Russia.

Then there would be the general purpose web, the poorer cousin with non-premium routing and hardware, a free-for-all approach to security, essentially what we have now. Businesses operating here are more likely to be using crowd-funding and digital currencies. The elites will attempt to let this internet wither and die by making it more attractive to sign up to the 'business' internet. But it may end up evolving in unexpected ways through clever innovation and peoples general desire to not be dictated to by business and Gov't.

with early IBM mainframes we'd also have 'issues'. They were to big to hide but still some interesting things would happen despite being in a controlled environment.

First one I worked on in 1976 was a 360/40 (48k main memory) for a well known soap manufacturer. As an operator one duty was to vacumn the computer room, but as I learnt the hard way, don't fire up the vacumn within about 10ft or the CPU would die. Literally a whole panel of red checklights (no screens in those days, only a golf-ball typewriter). Same machine, which had carbon core memory and valves, no silicon, had some sort of pressured air cooling. Sitting there one night shift and this hissing noise starts, quickly followed by the check lights all going red and it dying. Searched around, opened a side panel and tracked down this square metal block, some sort of air valve had come off a plastic tube which continued hissing. Managed to push it back on to the plastic tube, set the dials to the boot address and it booted (IMPL'd) fine. This happened more than once..couldn't fess up to the engineers what I'd done. Eventually had to wind some wire around it to keep it in place. Also had to replace hammer fuses on the impact printer at times because we'd print 6 part lineflow which would just kill the printer. It was that or wait 2hrs for the engineer to arrive. No contest, despite the dangers of high voltage power supplies.

Next one was a popular phonograhic company (look it up). Sitting in the machine room one night with the trusty IBM 370/125 and next thing within seconds the entire machine room is filled with choking white smoke. Didn't even have time to power it off. Turns out it was a large capacitor had decided to burn out. Hate to think of how many PCB's I consumed from that smoke. Same place...one day had to swap one of the 3340 hard-drives (they're look like the starship enterprise), but the switch that prevents you opening the cabinet while the disk is still spinning (think 16-17inch disk) wasn't working, so I proceeded to lift the sealed unit disk off the drive and it just takes off due to the gyroscopic effect. Nearly broke my wrist before I could get it on the floor and hold it down 'til it stopped spinning.

whatever

One thing that is undeniable is that there is change in the climate, whatever the cause.

People I've met and spoken to all around the world, especially older people in poorer countries involved in agriculture or fishing where it is most keenly felt are very aware of it. They do understand that there are longer term cycles at work like El Nino because their parents and grandparents pass this knowledge down. But they're now seeing dramatic changes that are happening in very compressed timeframes.

So regardless of the cause, it is still worth paying attention to this as it will affect everyone at some point either directly or indirectly.