Jack Four by Neal Asher

The author's obsession with vivisection as well as the inconsistencies & weaknesses in the magic system (mostly bad science for nanotech in wet chemistry) did not prevent the thriller elements and story elements from being very entertaining and enjoyable. 4/5 Stars.

I feel the earth move under my feet

Personally, I believe everyone in our solar system should settle upon a single time zone, a single time standard, and we should all stop being so provincial in our thinking. The most-adopted and most-popular time standards in communications, networking and computing are Unix Time in the UTC time zone. Unix Time is the number of seconds since Unix was created (on January 1, 1970) and the time zone called universal coordinated time or temps universel coordonné (UTC) is the standard timezone in which almost all computer system clocks are set. Folks in the military sometimes use "zulu" time, consisting of 4 digits and a trailing z, as in "1655z." The time zone "z" is UTC.  The 4 digits are 24-hour HHMM. If we adopt this standard,  eventually we could all drop the "z" and we would all share the meaning of what time it is in 4 digits. Wouldn't that be wonderful?  The main problem with UTC and our time standards is the "leap second."  Recently, the earth recorded its shortest day ever because earth's geographical poles (not the magnetic poles) moved so quickly. Normally earth's rotation is sped up by tides or earthquakes (tectonic shifts). Leap seconds were invented to add or subtract a second from UTC time to account for these changes in earth's rotation.  What a clumsy hack!

There is a much-better standard than UTC, proposed in the 1970's and created by a now-defunct department of the French government (whose officials were called seigneurs du temps or time lords). The standard can keep track of the number of attoseconds since the big bang formation of the universe in our local general relativistic sphere.  The standard is called International Atomic Time or temps atomique international (TAI). But very few of us bother to install the code libraries and use TAI for our logging timestamps or other purposes because people are lazy; they find it inconvenient to convert to and from the standard Unix Time in UTC that is used in the rest of our software and conventions.  But think about it: Time Lords!  C'mon man.  Conversions are not that hard.

Now Meta (Facebook) has joined the anti-leap second fray.  The discussions in Dubai next year should be interesting.

Hommage to Carol King for the title of this post.

. . . and libyears to go before I sleep

     

A link to this idea appeared in my feed. I have noticed most people gravitate towards single-number summaries such as (shudder) arithmetic mean so the idea does have some merit.  And, the measurement is very easy to drop into any set of repositories.

Apologies to Robert Frost for the title.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,  
But I have promises to keep,  
And miles to go before I sleep,  
And miles to go before I sleep.

Complexity & Chaos, cause Crushing Complications

Do you remember when our production systems were less-complicated and easier to debug?  Production Issues were easy to diagnose and it was always faster to recover.  I remember writing an application in a single page of HTML that used server-side include directives in the web server.  The entire application (order form, order acknowledgment receipt, order processing)  is 200 lines of HTML, 4.6KB. Sigh. Pete Hodgeson at Honeycomb wrote an interesting analysis of the giant leaps backwards we have made in the last 25 years because we have piled on so much unneeded complexity in our systems.  Someday I may create a conspiracy theory based on the cui bono (who profits) from this ridiculous inefficiency.  I recommend browsing through Hodgeson's article but not my HTML code or my article.

Wakers by Orson Scott Card

The master still has great stories left to tell.  I enjoyed this one; the ending was somewhat abrupt; 5/5 Stars.

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

I enjoyed this one.  It's a fun thriller with a fantastic wish-fulfillment magic system worthy of the Marvel universe.  5/5 Stars.

Backups are much worse than useless

In information technology (IT) and software engineering, operators and DevOps folk define their "backup" systems and policies.  However, they infrequently or never state their data restoration service levels.  The only measurement that an end-user cares about is: how quickly, and from which times in the past, can you successfully recover the state of my data?  And, if no data restores are needed, how do you test that your recovery service levels are met or exceeded as my data volume grows?

Making many copies (backups) of data frequently and storing all of those copies (or differences) costs a significant amount of network, compute, and storage, especially for longer retention periods.  Therefore, the IT or DevOps team should discover and deliver only the restoration requirements their end-users need, and for which they are willing to pay or be cost-allocated.

We are in the recovery business, not the "backup" business.  I consider the term "backup" to be a terrible word because it normally means only "untested, expensive copy."  Therefore, I personally never use that word and instead talk about our recovery capabilities and service levels.  And I always try to implement an automated test system that verifies these data restoration service levels are correct.

Alerts & alerting again

Dan Ravenstone published a refresher on Alerting that's worth a quick listen or skim.  Alerts are supposed to help us improve a service by enabling us to detect issues affecting our customers sooner and should also be useful to help us diagnose the issue quickly so that the issue can be mitigated, alleviating customer pain.  Most alerts are false positives -- paging us out of bed for a problem that does not exist.  Other alerts have no information about what is causing the issue, just some vague alarm that something is wrong.  And, of course, the absence of alerts is the most frequent reason customers tell us when our service is not working instead of our alerting system.

3Zekiel by Peter Cawdron

The science & magic system are not very good but I liked the characters. 3/5 Stars.

Hitch Hiker & Hotshot by Peter Watts

I enjoy Peter Watts' "Sunflower" universe; Watts publishes some short fiction on his web site and the fan site, so I read a novella and a few stories.   These two are good, worth reading, 4/5 Stars.