Monthly Archives: September 2011

Scrum

Posted on September 28, 2011 by

Perhaps fittingly during the Rugby World Cup I am now a Certified ScrumMaster. As much as you can be a master of anything after a 2-day course 😉 While I fully agree with the overall Agile strategy of aiming for … Continue reading →

Posted in Business | Leave a comment

Failing Gracefully

Posted on September 22, 2011 by

Let’s say you have a high-performance system, operating beyond it’s design capacity already, and the workload is increasing. What would you like it to do? Keep running, but slow down. This is the default behaviour for most applications, as in, … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Linux, Oracle | Leave a comment

Learning the Wrong Lessons

Posted on September 18, 2011 by

I’m going to start with an assumption here, which I think is pretty reasonable, that when everyone learns to program, or to operate a system, they do so in an environment much simpler than one that is used for commercial-level … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Oracle, Random thoughts | 4 Comments

The Importance of Representative Simulation

Posted on September 14, 2011 by

By now, most serious DBAs and SAs should have a basic grasp of queuing theory concepts such as offered load, even if not actually using the maths everyday. A busy system may have thousands of processes, each waiting for their … Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, Oracle | 2 Comments

Segmentation Faults, TAP and Eclipse

Posted on September 9, 2011 by

This is quite a neat trick. Consider: Referencing that NULL pointer obviously crashes straight away with a terse segmentation fault: By simply linking it with libSegFault, which seems to be documented only very informally, but comes with glibc: Of course … Continue reading →

Posted in C++, Emacs, Linux, Ocaml, Operation Foothold | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

One Year On

Posted on September 4, 2011 by

Re-learning C++ is proving to be something of an exercise in frustration thus far; it seems there is so much you need to know before you can get anything useful done. And choices that need to be made, this library … Continue reading →

Posted in C++, Ocaml, Operation Foothold | Leave a comment