David, what have you been up to, where have you been?

Work seems to have taken over my life. The product that my team has been working on for the past year has a business requirement to be "high availability," which means that our product has to be insulated from all manner of hardware failures. What this means is that our product will be placed on a complex architecture with lots of redundancy. Then we will test all the failure scenarios that the engineers who designed this architecture can think of. We're willing to write off "in-flight transactions" but everything else has to operate seamlessly if a server, switch, site, or application server fails. This testing will take a great deal of time and before it begins we have to make some design changes to our app to get it into the HA environment. We're in the midst of designing the test cases for our app to go into HA, and I am my team's technical representative, so I've been spending a lot of time in meetings. The last (and only) app to have gone through this HA process has so far spent 20 months in testing and isn't yet finished. We're hoping that we can apply the lessons they learned and get our app in and out in eight months, although six would be a lot better. So this is a bit of a challenge all of itself. And then we have to throw into the mix the fact that our app underwent a fundamental design change a few weeks ago and isn't yet complete. HA testing starts June 1. (I'll believe it when I see it, though.) So work has been eating up nine or ten hours a day the past few weeks.

But what about when you're not at work?

Most of my time these days is devoted to packing up my stuff for all too imminent move to the new apartment that michael, Jim, and I found in Clayton. I've filled about ten boxes so far, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. This next week, leading up to the move a week from Sunday, which I suspect will be a bit of a bear.

Anything else you want to mention?

Well, I wrote a book review that's been published in "The Rational Edge." Here's the link.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 22 May 2004 at 12:40 PM

Who would have guess it? At the same time that record companies are accusing consumers of stealing from musicians by downloading MP3s, they've been stealing from musicians by not paying royalties. (More information here.) So lets see, the record companies have practiced price-fixing and they've stolen royalties from their artists, but Joe Downloader is the one who ruined the music industry? I don't think so.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 May 2004 at 1:11 PM

Last night had the chance to go to my first Blast game in a year. This was the championship game and both the Blast and their rivals, the Chiefs, and large, vocal groups in the stands supporting them. I arrived with Chris and Eileen about four minutes into the first period and the Blast were already down by one. The Blast managed to tie it up at one point, but by game's end the Chiefs were up 4-1. The Chiefs were playing a more physical game than the Blast, but this should have helped the Blast as they played most of the third period in power play mode, often with a two-person advantage on the ice. Nevertheless, they managed only one goal during all of this power play time, and that goal came during a one man advantage on the ice in a one-on-one breakaway situation. The loss, in my opinion, rests firmly on the shoulders of the Blast's power play line, who seemed stretched thin by late in the third period. All of the power play time had left them visibly tired, and despite the presence on the bench of fresh players, the power play lines stayed on the ice. I understand why the NHL has power play lines -- they use different techniques during power plays and these lines have practiced those techniques -- but I don't think they make sense for the Blast. The Blast don't seem to run plays and if you trust a player on the ice when the numbers are even shouldn't you be able to trust them out there with a numbers advantage? Anyway, Ron played no more than thirty seconds in the final period because of the power play lines, which is a shame for a recreational league. Everyone ought to get even time on the ice or what is the point of the whole thing?

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 5 May 2004 at 10:44 AM

The most impressive thing about the future as represented by Star Trek is the fact that humans have greatly increased cognitive abilities. A case in point. In Star Trek: Nemesis Captain Picard uses a nine key keyboard of unlabeled buttons to send an encrypted, text message to one of the other stations on the bridge. This impressed me quite a bit. I have enough trouble using 26 keys to represent 26 letters, so I can't imagine using nine and remembering all the combinations necessary to generate 26 letters. Plus, this is a society that relies heavily on voice recognition, and we rarely (and I mean very rarely) see Picard use the keys on his command chair. So I'm assuming he doesn't get much practice with them. But during the heat of battle he had no trouble remembering how to use them. And they're unlabeled, so he can't even peek at the keys as he types. It's nice to know that in future not only does everyone look like a movie star, but they have the minds of geniuses.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 3 May 2004 at 9:56 PM