Archive for the ‘software’ Category
Marginal cost of making mistakes
In a note to my last post ‘Safety first‘ I promised more on this topic, so here goes… TL;DR As software learns from manufacturing by adopting the practices we’ve called DevOps we’ve got better at catching mistakes earlier and more often in our ‘production lines’ to reduce their cost; but what if the whole point […]
Filed under: code, culture, software | Leave a Comment
Tags: architecture, cost, design, DevOps, economics, mistakes, risk
The compiler will not save you
…at least not in an embedded environment. There’s a commonly held myth in modern software development that compilers are smarter than people at optimising code for its eventual runtime environment. By extension there’s no point in writing efficient code, because your idea of efficient code might not actually be all that efficient, and any time […]
Filed under: code, software | 2 Comments
Tags: binary, c, compiler, microcontroller, msp430, optimisation, size
Do VMs dream of real networks?
With apologies to Philip K. Dick. This post is going to address three topics: The relationship between a virtual machine (VM) and its network connection(s). The changing perimeter The role of APIs in controlling network configuration The common theme is dreams, or perhaps de/re(ams) – as the last two topics touch on whether something is de- or […]
Filed under: cloud, software | Leave a Comment
Tags: cloud, define, defined, deperimiterisation, deperimiterization, networking, perimeter, refine, refined, reperimiterisation, reperimiterization, SDN, software, virtualisation, virtualise, virtualization, virtualize, VLAN, VM, VMs
DevOps is really about design
I the early part of the ‘unpanel’ session at last night’s post Cloud Expo London CloudCamp there was a good deal of debate about DevOps and what it means. Some people talked about new skill mixes, others talked about tools. These are I think simply artefacts. The more fundamental change is about design. At the risk […]
Filed under: architecture, cloud, software | 1 Comment
Tags: cloud, cloudcamp, design, DevOps, maintenance, manufacture, maturity, paas, purpose, saas
My friend Randy Bias very kindly came in and did a web conference presentation at work this week on his views of cloud computing (which are well summarised in a post he did at the end of last year). Inevitably the topic of security came up, and Randy, drawing on his past experience in the […]
Filed under: architecture, cloud, security, software | 6 Comments
Tags: audit, bolt on, build in, cloud, compliance, firewall, gateway, iaas, paas, schema, security, validation, xml
I first drew this chart back around 2004 for my friend Alexis Richardson. At the time I referred to it in the context of a proprietary research methodology, but I don’t want trademark lawyers chasing me – hence the thesaurised title for this post. The point was very simple – we had standards based protocols […]
Filed under: architecture, software, technology | 6 Comments
Tags: AMQP, architecture, middleware, MOM, protocol, RabbitMQ, saas, SOA, web services
email like it’s 1995
The old joke There used to be a joke that people who didn’t ‘get it’ would send an email and then call the recipient up to check if it had been received. Now the joke’s on us Now, I am that joke. I think we all are. Email has reached a point where it’s just […]
Filed under: could_do_better, grumble, howto, software | 7 Comments
Tags: bacn, batch, blackberry, business edition, DNS, email, fail, false positive, GABE, GAPE, gapps, google, Google Apps, IP Lock, Postini, premier edition, quarantine, spam, SPF, support
I often find myself having to rename a bunch of media files. This would be easy if it was just a matter of finding ‘foo’ and replacing ‘bar’. Sadly though I regularly have a list of numbered ‘foo’s that I want to be a different numbered ‘bar’s (e.g. foo_04 -> bar_01, foo_05 -> bar_02). Normally […]
Filed under: code, media, software | 7 Comments
Tags: code, decrement, files, increment, media, python, rename, renumber, script, source
Not Only SQL
No, or Not Only One of the most sensible things to emerge for the recent no:sql(eu) event (which sadly I didn’t attend) was a statement that NOSQL should be expanded to Not Only SQL rather than No SQL. This is an interesting development, as there’s been lots of good stuff going on in the NOSQL […]
Filed under: cloud, software, technology | 3 Comments
Tags: cloud, database, dba, iaas, nosql, paas, rdbms, sql, storage
