Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Rollercoaster of an idea

    Absolute rollercoaster. I've not come across the idea of the abundance movement before. Sounds like a grand idea. Oh wait. "Broad Coalition" to the point of pointlessness. Yeah ... nah.

    There's a nice definition in there from someone by the name of Steve Teles who's taken a bit of a deep dive into various aspects of these abundance movements - of which I was unaware of as a named concept about half an hour ago.

• Science

  • Some musings on the Metric system

    I just watched this amusing video “Why Didn't America Go Metric? Now I Finally Get It [1]” where Busted Knuckle Woodworks goes into the history of the matric system and why the US (United States) doesn't use it. Yes, it goes into the whole “pirates stole the metric system from the US” story, but it also mentions the late 1800s Pyramid Power movement that also put the kibosh on the metric system here in the US (and one I had not heard and sadly, such mystical thinking is still very much in the main stream). And it's interesting that the Imperial System is still in main stream use in the UK (United Kingdom) [2].

• Technology and Free Software

  • Rose-Tinted Windows (and Clippy)

    At this point, using Windows is nothing but a distant memory. It's be- coming a surreal thing and feels quite weird, nostalgic, melancholic. It'll be 20 years soon since it was installed as the main OS on one of my boxes. I sometimes try to keep those memories alive by booting it in a VM or on my retro PC, but it really isn't the same.

    And my memory is beginning to get very fuzzy. I recently found a screen- shot of what I first thought was Windows 2000, because it looks like this shot is from 2002. But no, it's Windows 98:

    http://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2002-01-01--Windows98-date-unknown.jpg

    I could have sworn that I was on Windows 2000 by then. Maybe I switched later that year, maybe not, no idea anymore.

    I'm beginning to see this whole era through rose-tinted glasses. Espe- cially Win2k. I somehow see it as a rock-solid and well-rounded OS now. Was that really the case? I don't know.

    But there was something very different back then. And this leads us to current events. There was this Louis Rossmann video recently:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dtmpe9qaQ

  • Programming

    • Architecture is dead, long live Architecture

      I've been working with a software architect recently. And I'm not impressed. Architecture was for the built environment, and software is building things too, right? Right? Building bridges is fairly understood at this stage, but the requirements are obvious, leading to only sporadically seeing re-work. Building houses, pretty similar, and whilst these grow - seldom do we see it need to expand to fit in 10x more occupants. Software exhibits an uncanny ability to make mockery of any and all assumptions that you through at a system

      For example, I've been working on a DB with a fairly complicated and largish schema, 100 or so relational tables. This is built to scale to add more models, but we are now hitting some table limits about performance, especially when it comes to DDL changes, and deployments. So what does the architect do? He burns it down and starts again of course, this time it's webscale! Datalakes, warehouses, super-complexity. And it's what they are literally paid to do, so it isn't a surprise that this is what they have done. And this leads to a classic second system syndrome

      We aren't doing waterfall in 2025 any more, meaning that requirements not only are good to emerge, we react to them. Architecture therefore must meet changing requirements. But most architects react poorly to changing requirements, seeking instead to solve problems both real and perceived with usually fairly large-scale changes. This yields poor deliverables, and shaky foundations for our software over the long term. Instead there is another way