The funny thing about being a technocrat is the goal is to end my work. Create solutions for everything, but in a true Moving The Goal Post situation. As soon as one has crafted the solution, there are improvements needed. As soon as it is perfect, there are new business processes and objectives. And then…
https://twitter.com/jessfraz/status/942031487809085440 At VSU, my boss got a promotion when his boss retired. Then a shuffling of jobs gave me a promotion, but it also sent my old job to another group. That left the web services group going from 2.5 full-time positions down to 1.5. We did not have that much free time. If anything…
For a long while, I have thought Gmail was smart enough to see emails I receive and make a calendar entry. Apparently, the truth is I forgot about creating an IFTTT applet to look for emails with the group subject tag and make a calendar entry for me. It worked so well, that I guess…
With this specific application, we can import data, but there are limitations due to its 2000-era handling of XML files. HTML forms uploading files have to… Have all the packets be received by the server. Process the file with the browser connection still open. The server has to tell the browser everything was received and…
Automation is here. When I was in college, for most of my time there, I thought Industrial-Organizational Psychology was my career path. It was not until my last semester when I started working as a student for IT that it all changed. Little did I know that people efficiency was dying. Automation, aka the efficiency…
Saw a tweet about and interesting piece in ABC News Australia Digital disruption: How science and the human touch can help employees resist the march of the machines. Basically, many jobs are going away due to automation. W.I.R.E.D. has a similar story: Robots Will Steal Our Jobs, But They’ll Give Us New Ones. One of the long…
Go read “Science Fiction Is for Slackers.” As a rule, science fiction may be the laziest of all genres, not because the stories themselves are too facile—they can be just as sophisticated and challenging as those of any other genre—but because they often revel in easy solutions: Why walk when you can warp? Why talk…
Later this week both of our production systems will get upgraded from Desire2Learn 9.4.1 to 10.2. This will be an epic effort. Over several days a few dozen people will work on various aspect of the databases, application servers, and testing. Good ‘ole clean IT fun just in time for Christmas. Finding the magical gap…
The question of why we run ten clusters came up recently. Off the top of my head, the answer was okay. Here is my more thoughtful response. Whenever I have been in a conversation with a BEA (more recently Oracle) person on Weblogic, the number of nodes we run has invariably surprised them. Major banks…