Jim's Journal

Loneliness and love, I have long believed that we need to be able to love alone before we can love with other people.  Tanya Davis expresses why so beautifully and clearly in her poetry and music.

This is just sick on so many levels

Been a while since I posted anything politcal or economic here but since I am on a roll today enjoy.

I am not a cruiser let alone a Harley rider, enjoy the mickey taking.

The new bike been very, very busy having fun.

There has been way too much tech and not enough Bikes and art.

I have been following the development in Devops with increasing interest and understanding over the last few months and found that applying the principals and practices that is it’s gestalt consensus to be a generally good thing. However one things is niggling away at the warm, smug, self satisfied glow of new love.  Process frameworks seem to be re-inventing the wheel of UNIX tools and in most cases the functionality isn’t as complete.  As a long time sysadmin I tend to use the power features of my UNIX tool set probably more than most and I am wondering if that is problem.  As a traditional system admin I tend to look to leverage an existing tool to perform a task and if the task is complex I tend to kludge those tools together with Shell and Perl.  The developer on the other hand reaches for the IDE and adds the functionality to the application in this case the process framework and the result is Reinventing the square wheel.  It takes more than working together, it takes more than lowering of the walls between us. I takes a fundamental understanding of the reasons we do this task, this way and the power and flexibility a sysadmin and his tool box brings to a task and problem.  Just as I have to think like a developer the inverse is equally true.

Got my self a Spotify premium account and have it running with Wine on 10.04 Lucid.  Following the instructions on the Spotify site for 9.10 Karmic didn’t work, However changing the following setting do when setting up your sound environment in Wine do.

Select Alsa as your sound driver and also full hardware rather than OSS and emulated In 5 days now I have had no crashes or issues.

I really appreciate articles like this CPU roundup from Behardware.com, I always want to get the best bang per buck from a CPU and it is always tempting to go for the biggest and baddest processor you can find but best system for a given job isn’t necessary the most expensive. Unless you are a dedicated overclocker or gamer the choices seems to be an AMD2+ with a DDR2 memory set and a 1-15TB hardrive.

My friend Matt sent me this and I love it, what is it about Triumphs that they attract the bad boys?

Yes they can play nicely together, I started a nice little thread on subject and got back plenty of food for thought.

Although ITIL is heavy, the change management processes and boards do make a lot of sense in the Ops stage of a project.  A question could a software process have its change management and board entirely automated?  Can it once passed through the relevant unit tests, functional tests and finally load testing be ready for live?  I think the answer to this is no the final test of any item of software unless something entirely widget based and internal is how well can a user use.  The final decision on that has to be human but that decision can be fed back, to close the loop, into the testing stage of a project.

The James White Manifesto raises a lot of interesting questions most of which is very sane advise, however all works on the manifesto I have read to do not explain why something is bad, me I want to know why?