Covid-19: The New Variant and the NHS December 29, 2020
Posted by mwidlake in COVID-19, ethics, rant, science.Tags: COVID-19, rant, science
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<<- Long term hopeful, short term worried
As I said in my blog post a couple of days ago, I’m very concerned about the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 that has been spreading through the UK and is now being found in countries all over the world. My main concern is that this could be what pushes our health services beyond the limit of what they can stretch to and, as a result deaths will jump up – and not just from Covid-19.
New Variant Impact
In my last post I highlighted the new variant of SARS-CoV-2 that is more infections (spreads more easily), but said that there was little evidence that it was any more fatal. Understanding what was going on was hampered at that point as we had hit the festive period and, with the best will in the world, everyone needs a break at some point. New data on hospital admissions, virus sequencing, case numbers were all missing or affected. Scientists studying aspects of Covid-19 were reminding themselves what their partners, kids, and pets looked like after what must have been a heavy year. Now the new information is coming out, as is the analysis by relevant experts.
There is a paper detailing this new variant by Public Health England which was published on 28/12/20. Much of the below is derived from that, but is backed up from many tweets and bits of evidence from the scientific community.
This new variant is know by a few names:
- VOC 202012/01 – Variant of Concern identified in 2020 month 12, number 1
- B.1.1.7 – the phylogenetic name of the variant (I think!)
- 20B/501Y.V1 or simply 501Y.V1 – the identifier given by Nextstrain
B.1.1.7 has many mutations from the original SAR-CoV-2 virus (this STAT article states 17 mutations, the tracking page I mention below lists 17 SNP mutations, this overview by the CDC on VOC 201212/01 lists 20 SNPs and 3 deletions and seems to be the best source of information on this. I’ll explain all the mutations better in a later post) . Mutation is not unusual, viruses change all the time. Each time a virus is copied (and that is how viruses like coronaviruses reproduce, there is no sex, they are identical clones of their only parent) the RNA is copied and occasional mistakes are made and thus changes, mutations, happen. The most common change is a Single Nucleotide Polymorphism, or SNP. One letter of the 30,000 in the viral genome changes.
A single SNP change to the SARS-CoV-2 RNA does not seem to be enough to change the virus into a significantly more infective version (or more lethal, or more likely to infect children, or change it’s behaviour in a way to make it more dangerous). If it did, we would have seen this already – the virus has been so successful in spreading in humans and thus reproducing and so those SNPS occurring, that most individual SNP mutations that are possible will have happened by now (there is evidence for minor change by them though, but that’s for another time). It is going to be a combination of two or more changes I think that has altered the transmissibility.
B.1.1.7 has several changes to the gene that creates the spike protein.
The paper from Public Health England I reference reviews the data that was initially presented to the UK government (on around the 19th December I presume) and resulted in their initial analysis of the 21st, which this paper links to. This review considers the degree to which the new strain transmits more easily and possible reasons why. It can be summed up as saying:
- This new variant is indeed spreading faster.
- it is becoming the most dominant strain in all the areas it is in.
- It’s ability to spread to others (secondary attack rate) is increased by about 55%.
- It is not spreading faster as it is more successful in re-infecting people who have already had Covid-19.
- There is no evidence it results in more hospital stays or is more fatal.
I’m not sure the evidence is yet firm that this new variant does not also increase the severity of the illness a little as there are too few cases to go on, but it does not like there can be a huge increase. Usual caveat, I’m no epidemiologist.
I’ve also looked at a paper by Nick Davies’ team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
They considered 4 possible methods by which the new variant (they use the VOC202012/01 name) could be causing the rapid spread of the new variant
- A) Increased Transmissibility
- B) avoids current immunity
- C) Children being more susceptible
- D) shorter viral generation time
As you can see from the graphs, the model based on (A) Increased Transmissibility fitted the date better than anything else.
You may be aware of the new variant in South Africa that is also more transmissible. This is not the same as B.1.1.7, for example, it does not have the 69/70 deletion mentioned in Public Health England paper that is used as a proxy to identify B.1.1.7 in the UK population (again, more information later on the details of the new mutation). So this deletion either is not key to the increased transmission or else there are two methods by which the transmissibility can be increased (now, that’s a worrying thought).
There has been a lot of other analysis and commentary from the scientific community to back up the hypothesis that B.1.1.7 spreads 50%-55% faster.
Why Is 50% Faster Spread So Significant?
Why is this significant? Wouldn’t 50% more lethal be more of a worry?
No. The reason an epidemic is so scary and has such an impact is down to exponential growth. To use an extreme example such as exists before a new disease is recognised and steps taken to control it, If 1 person infects 2 people who infect 4, 8,16,32… Ten duplications later and you are at 1,024 infected people. If each person infects 3 then it goes 1 person, 3, 9,27, 81…ten tripling’s is 59,049. If you know how many people each infected person will infect (the R number) and how long it takes for an exposed person to themselves become infectious, then you can calculate how quickly the disease will spread and grow. So the transmissibility is key.
Adam Kucharski put it better than I can (if you are on twitter and you are interested in Covid-19 science, if you are not already following Adam then I highly recommend you do, and then follow some of the people he follows). This is how he explained it:
Here in the UK the number of cases and, more importantly, hospital admissions have been shooting up. You cannot compare case from the spring to now as testing now is orders of magnitude improved compared to the shambles back in April. But hospital beds occupied is a very powerful metric and can be compared. Up to a point.
I showed a graph in my last post about how many people are ill in hospital with Covid-19, going up to 24th December. The below is the graph up until the 28th December. We still don’t have data for Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland beyond the 22nd December – but England on it’s own ( 20,426) is not far off matching the UK peak of 21,683 back on 12th April. If we optimistically only add on 1,727 for Wales, 1,045 for Scotland, and 451 for Northern Ireland (their figures for the 22nd) we are at 23,649. I’m seeing a lot of stuff on social media and the BBC news about hospitals running out of capacity, cancelling routine work, calling staff in from holiday (and remember, this is staff who have nearly all been pulling extra and double shifts for 9 months already). We suspect are approaching 100% hospital capacity for the NHS.
Patients in hospital with Covid-19 across the UK, 28/12/20
Update, 30/12/20 – we now have the Welsh & Northern Irish data to 28/12, Scotland & England to the 29th . The UK total for the 28/12 is 23,771 (slightly above my optimistic lower threshold of 23,649, as is to be expected. Northern Ireland shows a modest increase that could just be random variation, all three other nations show an increase.
Patients in hospital with Covid-19 across the UK, 29/12/20
100% Hospital Capacity is a Really, Really Bad Thing
I said that hospital beds occupied is a powerful metric up to a point. Why up to a point? At some point that metric stops increasing so fast or even at all – but not because of a lack of patients to treat, but because you are running out of capacity in your hospitals.
I’m sorry, I’m going to go on a bit of a rant here. The below is why I get so vexed at people saying “I need to go on holiday” or “I must have my nails painted” or decide it’s OK if they have a party or that we don’t need a lockdown.
If you get Covid-19 and are badly affected, you may well need supplemental oxygen. You may also need treating for various blood clotting conditions, or to stop your immune system over-reacting, and several other things. That can only be done in hospital. If it is done, most people treated survive (though some of course still sadly die). If you are not treated, you will die. As some of you know, I had personal experience of this late last year when influenza type A and pneumonia landed me in intensive care for a week, on very powerful CPAP ventilators. If I had not had that treatment, I would not be typing this (or anything). So we can (and do) treat and save many people with compromised breathing and the other things that come with Covid-19. Until we run out of trained hospital staff. It’s not beds per se that are the issue, or ventilators, or really any equipment. It is people who have the skills to run that equipment, monitor you, keep you ticking over and otherwise not-dead whilst supporting the broken parts of your body until they heal. Once the capacity of the health service is exceeded, they have to pick who dies. And of course, we do not just have Covid-19, hospitals are dealing with all the other sick patients we always have – car accidents, cancer, influenza, septicaemia, heart attacks…
I’ve seen the stuff by some people about how “only” 377 or so healthy, young people have died of Covid-19. Part of me can’t be bothered explaining to them why they are selfish, clueless idiots right now but what I can say is if we run out of hospital staff capacity, you can be as young and fit and bloody callous as you like but you will die if you need oxygen treatment and do not get it.
I’ve seen some tweets by people who say things like “well, just get more nurses and doctors”. I checked, they are not made in a factory. Training to be a nurse is not like going on a week-long course to learn to use a chainsaw. Doctors and nurses and radiologists and lab staff (and all the others people forget about who are vital to the NHS) are trained for many years. Being an ICU doctor or nurse is particularly technical and needs months or years of training ON TOP of being a standard doctor or nurse.
The UK was desperately short of all NHS clinical staff before Covid-19. One of my closest friends organises the lab rotas for a very large hospital and she never has enough people to fill the rotas. She has to beg and hassle people to do more than their fair share of weekend and night shifts. They constantly have not just one or two but a dozen or more open positions for staff. I’m not getting political here but there was a crisis in care long before the pandemic.
If you see figures saying ICU capacity is at 90% you would probably naturally think “well, they still have 10% spare, it’s fine”. It’s not. One of my first jobs was writing bed management software for hospital systems and teaching hospital staff how to use the software. The software was a god-send for them. A hospital bed is not just a bed. It’s a type of bed, and there are several types in hospitals. Some are for children, most are for adults, some are powered to help move the patient about, some are specialist for ICU (such as being able to pass air around incapacitated patients to reduce bed sores)… And beds move. For my spell in ICU I was initially admitted to A&E and held in a storage room as there was no spare capacity. They brought a suitable bed to me and squeezed it into the storage room. About 12 hours later, 6 or 7 nurses took the bed with me and a shit load of equipment through the hospital to the ward.
You have to know who is in which bed, the consultant & specialty treating them. For very, very good reasons, the specialist or someone in their group needs to approve a lot of what is done to you in a hospital. To administer a drug to a patient you have to find the bed they are in and you have no time to go wandering around the ward as you have 101 other things to do. The same is true of feeding the patient. You have to track when a patient moves (either with their bed or moving from one bed to another) and you need to know where you can move them to, so you need to know what beds are spare or, more likely, probably going to come spare. I worked on another part of the hospital system, “notify patient as dead”. It was horribly complex, lots of stuff has to happen when a patient dies, for example some lab tests get cancelled, others get created. The bed is noted as empty pending a deep clean. Sometimes, heartless though it sounds, the staff need to know when a bed is likely to become available via that route.
The people in charge of beds need to know ASAP when a bed is free so they can try and do all the juggling above that I mentioned. The fewer spare beds they have the harder it gets to make use of the few spare ones you still have and move people around efficiently. Or even inefficiently.
When I moved out of ICU it was a rush job. Someone needed one of the very most critical ICU beds (yes, there are tiers to what we non-medics think of as ICU), they felt able to move another person into my intermediate dependency bed as they were improving – IF they could get me out of it and into the Respiratory Medicine ward. Which they did, at about midnight. The sticking point was I needed to be isolated to I could not give someone with COPD influenza and finish them off. Another complication. It being night there were fewer staff so only 2 people could be spared to move me. Admittedly, less equipment came with me but half of it (including a heavy oxygen cylinder) was on the bed with me, I had hold of something on wheels, the 2 nurses somehow corralled the bed and other equipment.
The point I am making is that the closer a hospital gets to 100% capacity, the harder all that juggling becomes, and you actually end up having to move patients to other hospitals – and moving a sick patient to a different hospital is generally not in the best interest of the moved patient – or discharge patients who could really benefit from being there longer (but don’t need it as much as the person who is dying that they can’t find a bed for).
I’ve only ranted about beds. I have no idea how they keep track of other equipment, plan who is allocated to do what, how to cover for say a member of staff going ill, a major road traffic accident when all ICU is full…
If we do not see some sort of miraculous downturn in hospital admissions (and all indicators are against this happening) I’m expecting the UK to be in full national lockdown in a week, kids returning to schools cancelled. If we hit 100% hospital capacity and are not in a strict lockdown, then our government will have failed us in this crisis once more.
Even more distressingly, we may see avoidable deaths.
Friday Philosophy – My First Foray Into I.T November 13, 2020
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions, Private Life.Tags: behaviour, Humour, perception, private, rant
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This is the first computer I ever used. The actual one. It is a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. It was at the heart of a long, terrible family feud – the source of much angst, anger, and even fist fights. Blood was spilt over this machine. Literally!
The actual first computer I ever used
Anyone who lived in the UK in the early 1980’s and is currently about half a century old will recognise this box with the grey, rubber (sometimes called “dead flesh”) keyboard. It was the model that came out after the Sinclair ZX81, which is itself a classic of early home computers, and sometimes the ZX Spectrum was called the ZX82. The Spectrum could put colour on the screen (up to 8 different colours at a time!), had a resolution of 256*192 pixels, the Z80A CPU ran at 3.5MHz, and it could make a sound. A beep, basically (for a wide variation of too few hertz to hear to too many hertz to hear and all tones in between, and of any duration – but it was still just a beep).
The Spectrum was initially a rival in the UK for the Commodore VIC 20, BBC Micro, Atari 400 and, later, the Commodore 64 (C64). They all had their advantages, the Spectrum’s was it was cheap! Even the more expensive 48K version (as opposed to the basic 16K) was cheaper than most rivals. Sinclair Research even tried to make out it was superior to it’s rivals as it was simpler and had fewer chips inside it. That was pure marketing BS of course. But the Spectrum and the C64 were probably the most common home computers in the UK in the early 80’s and they remainder popular even when more capable machines came out. They might not have been the best machines technically, but they both ended up having a huge number of games you could play on them, and that’s what counted. In my local computer games shop most games were for the Spectrum, then the C64, and all other machines got lumped together in a corner at the back.
The Spectrum was the first computer in the Widlake household. My dad agreed to buy it for my older brother Simon, who made a strong argument that it was an educational tool – and the early advertising material for the machine made a lot of it’s suitability as a such, with lots of worthy software for doing graphs and learning computer languages. About the only game available for it on release was chess. Dad was of the opinion Simon was the genius in the family – Simon was going to go to University! (At the time no one in the family had ever gone into higher education, only about 5% of people in the U.K. did then. As it turned out, all three of us kids went into higher education). So Dad felt it was worth spending the money, as he felt computers were going to become something. He wasn’t wrong.
But before Dad agreed to get Simon the Spectrum, he made Simon agree it was something the whole family was to have access to. He was to share it with myself and Steve, the eldest. Simon agreed.
The spectrum needed a tape record and a TV to be used
So the Spectrum arrived. Back then, home computers almost never came with everything needed to use them. The Spectrum, like several rival computers, needed a cassette tape record to save and load programs from tapes, and a TV on which to show the image. Simon had his own tape recorder and he was of the firm belief that, except when Dad wanted to watch the news, he could use the family TV whenever he wanted. As he was a genius after all.
He quickly lost the TV argument, the last thing our parents wanted was to lose the power of distraction that the TV provided for the other two kids – especially me as I watched a lot of TV and was a right PIA when I wasn’t. Steve did not watch a lot of TV but as he wanted nothing to do with the computer, it would have been really unfair on him to not get to see the few things he wanted.
However, Simon had a back-up plan. I had a portable black & white TV (so much for those 8 colours) and Simon was older & bigger than me. So he took possession of my TV. I complained to the court of Mum & Dad but the Tyrant justified his acquisition of the resource on the grounds that he was going to have to share his Spectrum, a far more valuable resource, with me – so it was only fair?!? “Yes” I agreed, but only when I was not using MY TV for MY watching of what ever (probably crap) I was wanting to watch. The court came down on the side of the Tyrant, but with caveat of the plaintive upheld. Tyrant could use the TV when Plaintive was not watching it. It turned out that the reality of the situation was that Simon was still bigger than me and to my considerable surprise “I didn’t want to watch anything” whenever Simon wanted to use his – err, sorry, “our” – Spectrum.
The next blow to the plans of Tyrant bigger brother was that it turned out his tape deck (the one in the picture) was crap. Most games would fail to load from it. But my tape recorder worked just fine for this purpose, it was a really quite nice JVC model… So, yes, you guessed it, another possession of mine was now to be treated as his – sorry, “our” – possession, still on the basis of shared access to the Spectrum.
So Simon used my stuff as and when he wanted, but did he share? Well, sort of…
Those of us of the correct vintage who got into early home computers would buy magazines like (in our case) “Your Spectrum” or “Sinclair User”. Inside there would be long code listings of programs. Simon “let me” read the text of the code out to him to help him type it in more easily. Or, if he was in a really good mood, he would let me type the code in on my own – whilst he was doing something else (like seeing his friends or watching the colour TV or picking on the cat). If I finished typing it in I was not allowed to play it until he got back. Yeah, like I paid any attention to THAT rule…
These games you laboriously typed in often had bugs in them, especially if they had a lot of code. Some were down to entering the wrong code in, more were down to the actual code really being wrong – quality control was non-existent. And, to give him his due, Simon was really very good at finding and fixing the bugs. Once there was a flight simulator in the magazine, spread over a couple of issues. I think it later got developed further and become “Psion Flight Simulator”. But the version in the magazine did not work properly. Simon found and fixed the bugs and even got them published in a later copy of the magazine. It taught us both that software could be wrong and that it could be fixed. I did fix some of the games myself, especially if I had been left typing it in and got it finished. And sometimes Under Orders from the Tyrant (who was out setting light to papers in people’s front doors or something…)
But I was not allowed to play with the computer myself without permission, and certainly not if he was out. Apparently I was old enough to enter code for him unattended but not to load up “Meteor Alert” or “Ant Attack” and have fun. You’d think from this I was maybe 8 or 10, but I was actually about 14 and more than old enough to recognise hypocrisy and injustice. I would say that’s what older siblings are primarily for, to teach you about these philosophies. Not by saying “this is something you should not do, oh younger brother of mine” but by amply demonstrating for real what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such bullying and unfair treatment. But my oldest brother felt no need to deliver such life lessons, so I could be wrong.
Simon would let me play “with him”. This usually took the form of him playing the game and, once he lost, letting me play until I lost – and then we would swap again. Sounds fair? Not really, as a lot of the time he would be playing on his own or with his friends and I was not invited. He would be using “our” TV and “our” tape recorder but it was still His computer and he was not letting me join in. So given my lack of practice and that I was younger and not so good at computer games as him, when he did let me join in his go would last 20 minutes and mine would last 2 minutes. Basically, he liked to be beating someone. I was better than him at a couple of games, one being “Attic Attack”, as I had learned the layout. We never played Attic Attack. Oh, he did play Attic Attack. He played it on his own, trying to get better, good enough to beat me…
I could beat the Tyrant at Attic Attack
After maybe a year, 18 months, things came to a head. Simon was never going to play fair, in his mind it really was his Spectrum and also now his TV and his tape recorder. After all, as he kept telling me, his computer was the more expensive item. Only, in reality, it was less expensive than my contribution combined. I started playing on the Spectrum when he was not in, as far as I was concerned I’d put more into this pot than he had and I was not going to accept this shit. I could not use it against his will when he was there but once he was out, I damned well was going to get some of my fair share. As you can guess, this did not go down well with him when he found out and the Tyrant did what all bullying, older brothers did and he physically asserted his authority. He’d hit me. I was not really pleased about that, so when he’d go out I would absolutely bloody well would play on it if I wanted to or not, out of spite & defiance (and also to keep my edge in Attic Attack) – and it would repeat. It came to a head when he made my nose bleed – and it dripped on the computer. That was, of course, my fault… “If you’ve damaged the Spectrum I’ll kill you!” Oh, I’m so sorry for bleeding on things after you hit me. Maybe that should teach you something…
It was now warfare. Screw you, I said, you’ve never shared as agreed, keep your Spectrum, it’s useless without my bits. I banned him from using my equipment. A ban which he now ignored of course. I went to the court of Mum & Dad, but not only was Simon “the genius” but he was, back in reality, a lying & manipulative sod and he made out he was sharing and I was being a spoilt child and I was told I had to share as he was (!!!!). So I took things into my own hands – and I started hiding the cables to my tape recorder and taking the plug off my TV. Yes, I physically removed the plug from the cable and hid it. He tried to work around my sabotage, one day I came home from somewhere to find he had plugged the Spectrum into the family TV and he’d got hold of a spare power cable for my tape recorder and he was using it, despite me banning him from it, playing games with his mates.
I went utterly, lost-the-plot nuts. I demanded my stuff back and an apology or something or let me play too and he was having none of it. So I tried to take my tape recorded back and he tried to stop me, but I was so mad I got hold of it (I think I was finally getting strong enough to fight back a bit) and, shouting something like “and you used it to load that game, so I’m taking THAT as well!” I kicked the power plug out the Spectrum. Game gone, no tape player to load one up, games afternoon with his friends was over and there was nothing he could do about it. He went BERZERK, trying to wrench the tape drive back off me and hitting me but I was so furious I held my own and I think I even kicked his computer again. He was straight off to Mum saying I was trying to break his computer. And this time, the Court of Mum & Dad finally realised Simon was being a little shit. He could not deny he had used my things, even though I had told him he could not, and he could not claim I attacked him first (his usual stance), as his mates backed me up and said Simon had hit me first. Yeah, his mates dobbed him in it! I think they found it all hilarious.
This led to a full judicial review and this time the voice of the Plaintive was heard. I might have been a little sod but I had never tried to break stuff before and I utterly refused to accept it when The Tyrant lied that he shared at all – why would I be this mad and and even taking the plug off my TV? Simon had not helped himself in other ways as he’d been caught bullying me by Mum recently and been in trouble at school. Timing was on my side. He was told to play fairly or else… have his precious Spectrum removed. Dad would monitor.
This was my Amstrad, I bought it, Simon was not using it.
After that, it got a bit more equal. I did get some time on the Spectrum myself (though I did sometimes have to get enforcement from the judiciary) and I did not just play games. I had typed in a lot of programs for Simon and fixed a few of them, so I slowly learnt how to program. I wrote a couple of my own simple games and put in stuff from magazines I wanted to try but Simon had no interest in.
But it never did really completely end. He could no longer stop me using the Spectrum. But if I was using it and Simon decided he wanted it, he would just bully me, or tell dad I was stopping him “learning” (I am not so sure what you learn from playing “Jet Set Willy”). That Spectrum came, for me, to represent what a selfish, lying, bullying, devious shit my older brother was. I swore one day the Spectrum would be mine.
And then it all changed, I got my own computer, an Amstrad CPC464. I bought it with my own money I earnt from months of back-breaking fruit-picking work (Simon was “too good” to do manual labour, so he had no money). It had not been bought by Mum and Dad, it was in no way a shared resource, it was totally mine. And guess what I said to him when he asked (well, demanded) to use it?
Yes, he could Fuck Right Off. He had his Spectrum.
And if he tried his old tricks of hitting me, it would be a more equal fight (he was still taller and older than me but manual labour had made me a hell of a lot stronger), so he decided against that. He could keep his crappy Spectrum.
The irony was that, even though my Amstrad was a much more advanced and capable piece of kit, the Spectrum and it’s vast library of games was still the best option for fun.
Well, the Spectrum is now mine. I picked it up from Mum’s house this week. Simon passed away many years ago, so it’s been sitting in a drawer for almost 2 decades. Being a Friday Philosophy I guess I should now tell you what the Spectrum now means to me, the healing process, what we can learn from this? How family, in the end, is more important than mere possessions? Stuff like that?
Well, I can.
I learnt that Simon was always a bullying, nasty, selfish, self serving sod and he got no better as he got older. So there.
And the Spectrum is now mine I guess.
But I don’t have a TV with the right socket to plug it into, and I know already – that tape drive won’t load games…
Friday Philosophy – Is The Problem The Small Things? August 7, 2020
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, off-topic, rant, User Groups.Tags: behaviour, perception, rant
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Something has been bothering me for a while. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s been depressing me. It’s you. Well, many of you.
Well, it’s not MY problem!
What do I mean? Well I’ll give you an example. A week or so ago I went out in the car to get some shopping. A few minutes into the journey, as I go around a gentle bend, I see there is a car coming towards me – on my side of the road. I had to brake to give it space to get back over and I see it has swerved to avoid a branch in the road. As you can see in the picture, it’s not a huge branch, it covers less than one lane. I’m past it now so I go on to the shops and get my stuff.
30 minutes later I’m coming back. And I’m thinking to myself “I bet that branch is still there.” And it is. I can see it from maybe 300 meters back. The two cars in front of me barely slow down and they swerve past it. An oncoming vehicle that *I* can see coming, let alone the two cars in front of me, has to slow down for the swervers like I did. That slight bend means you get a much better warning of the obstacle from the side of the road it is on and as it is on your side, it’s really your responsibility so slow or even briefly stop, but the people in front of me just went for it. They did not care.
I did not swerve. I slowed down. And I put on my hazard lights, and stopped about 20 meters back from the branch. I double checked that no car has appeared behind me and I got out the car. In 20 seconds (including taking the snap), I’ve moved the branch off the road with no danger at all and I’m back to my car.
I know, you would have done the same.
Only no. No, you would not have.
Some of you would like to think you would have stopped and moved the obstacle.
I suspect most of you would claim, if asked, that you would have stopped and moved the branch.
And of course all of you would have slowed to avoid inconveniencing others.
But reality shows that nearly all of you would not.
As I left the scene, I was wondering how many people would have passed that branch in that 30 minutes I knew for sure this small branch had been an obstacle on the road. I’m going to let people going the other way off, as they would have to do a u-turn to come back to it, so how many people would have had to swerve past it?I know that road well, it would have been hmm, 4 or 5 cars a minute going past in one direction – certainly more than 3 cars, less than 10. So well over a hundred drivers would have seen that branch from a distance, most would have been able to safely slow and stop – and yet not one of them had. I have no idea how long the branch had been there, it was not too beaten up so maybe not long, but it could have been a couple of hours. It was easy to avoid – especially if you swerved with little concern for any on-coming traffic…
It turns out I’m the one in a hundred.
Are you thinking “well, it’s not my job to move branches of a road!”
So who’s job is it? And if you could label it as someone’s job (let’s go for someone in the “highways agency”) how do they get to know it needs doing? I don’t know about you but I see dozens of highways agency maintenance people on every journey I do, just cruising around looking for things that need doing. {sarcasm}.
When was the last time you saw something that needed doing in a public place and took the time to think about who should be told, try to contact them, get told to contact someone else, find out it’s not their job but are asked to ring Dave, who you do ring and he says thanks (before making a note to think about it, whilst probably muttering “this is not my job, I’ve got major roadworks to look after”). Hell, it’s easier to stop and move the branch.
Generally in life, in so many situations, I am constantly wondering why someone has not done X (or has done Y). Why don’t you reach for the jar in the shop the old lady can’t quite reach? Why don’t you hold the door? Why did you drop that litter when the bin is JUST THERE! That person in front of you buying a parking ticket can’t find 10p in their purse to make the correct change? You have loads of 10p pieces… some in your hand already.
This is what is depressing me. Even though nearly everyone likes to think they are the nice person who will do a little for the common good, the reality is that most people won’t when it comes to it – but most people think we all should, and you tell yourselves you do the little things. You are telling yourself now, aren’t you? You are trying to think of the little things you have done for the common good. If you can think of a half dozen in the last month then you really are one of the good guys/gals. If you can only come up with a few…and actually most of them were ages ago… well, sorry but you are the problem.
The strange thing is that, having just insulted you all, as a group you lot are much more likely to be in the 1% than normal. Even though out of the general public not even 1 in 100 people would put in a little effort to move that branch, out of the people reading this, I’d say 10% would. Because I spend a lot of time in the Oracle user community, packed with people who give up their time, knowledge, even their holidays, to speak at conferences, help organise meetings, answer on forums, write blogs, answer questions on twitter, and all that stuff. Many of you reading this are active members of the User Community doing not just small things but often large things for the community. That’s why the community works.
To the rest of you, instead of liking to think you would move the branch or claiming you would (as everyone wants to be thought of as the nice guy/gal) just occasionally move the branch. Or pick that piece of litter up. Or do something small that cost you so little but it just would be nice if someone did it.
No one will thank you.
But you will know you did it. And you are becoming no longer part of the problem but part of the solution. I’m not asking you to give 10% of your salary to charity or give up an important part of your life, just do a bit of the small stuff.
If more of us do it, we will have a better world. If someone had moved that branch soon after it fell, I would not have had to avoid some swerving dickhead, and the person I saw later would have not had to avoid people who could not even be bothered to slow down or stop briefly. And, in the worst case, that needless accident need not have happened. It really is as simple as spending 1 minute moving a branch.
Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution. It’s really, really, really easy.
Friday Philosophy – Brexit July 26, 2019
Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, off-topic, Private Life.Tags: perception, private, rant
3 comments
I don’t really do politics on this blog, it’s often just too damned divisive. But not only am I angry (and vicariously ashamed) of Brexit but I have a strong suspicion of how things are going to go from now…
I’ll lay my cards on the table first. I did not vote for Brexit. Like the vast majority of people I get on well with in the UK, I wanted to remain part of Europe. Half of my anger with Brexit is that I feel there should never have been a public vote in the first place, for three main reasons:
- It has been heavily speculated that the issue of us remaining part of Europe was offered as a public vote as the Conservative party wanted to shut down the growing popularity of the more right-wing, xenophobic parties such as UKIP. Thus it was a waste of time, money, and effort to prove a point that I think could have been done in other ways. There was never any expectation by the people who instigated the referendum that a large percentage of the population would vote for leaving…
- Whether we are better off being within the EU and what we lose/gain from it is a very complex issue. I’d say 99% of the population knew nothing like enough about it to make a sensible decision. I think I understood more about the influence of the EU on us than the majority of people in the UK. This comes from me having an interest in environmental matters, workers rights, health & safety, and control of big business. An awful lot of our legislation in these areas came from the EU and were good for the majority and poor for the rich and powerful. However, I don’t think I had enough knowledge to make an informed decision, it was more a gut decision. And the political fight over the vote was almost devoid of sense, reason, even honesty, and was more a campaign based on fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It was a vote by the ill-informed on the ill-defined.
- The final reason is that our media and politicians have used the EU as a “distant enemy” to blame or ridicule for decades. It’s almost a national hobby. We had stupid stuff like claims the EU said we had to sell straight bananas or that barmaids would have to completely cover their bosoms. Neither were true. But there has been a consistent blaming of the EU for things that UK politicians thought would be unpopular or that the tabloids felt they could sell copy on due to outrage. It’s just like how businesses blame “the computer system” for anything that goes wrong (“Computer says No! – *cough* “) whereas in fact it’s often nothing to do with the computer system. Thus the EU already had an unfair bad press due to all this political cowardice and media tripe. In many respects, we reaped the crop grown from the seeds of our own stupidity.
Anyway, we had the vote, it was really tight, it gave “the wrong” result. And it seems that far more people have swap from “let’s leave” to “let’s stay” than the other way around, when they got a better understanding of the impact – but we are not getting a second vote. That is despite 6 million plus people signing a petition for a second vote and the biggest public protest march we have ever had in this country.
So what do I think will happen from here on in?
Something I have expected to happen for a couple of years now, but has not really, is an attempt by UK politicians to start trying to blame the EU itself for the mess the UK are in. Basically to start saying “Well, we could leave the EU and it would all be fine – but the EU are being mean to us! The EU won’t let us do X or let us have Y! Because they hate us now and they are not being fair!!!”. We are going to see an escalating number of occurrences where the Conservatives will tell us that the EU negotiators have blocked an utterly reasonable suggestion or are making demands that threaten our sovereignty, or are trying to control us. They will announce that the EU is trying to stop us being the great nation we know we are. I fear that Boris will start turning to Trump to be our best friend in the playground.
From what I have seen so far, I think the rest of the EU have basically been “You want to leave? Are you mad? OK, if you wish, off you go. But I’m sorry, if you are leaving the club you no longer get the club discount at the shops, you no longer have access to the club house, and you don’t get any say in the club rules. And yes, you do have to pay your outstanding club membership until you actually leave.” Which is all very, very reasonable and, if tables were turned, it is what we in the UK would be doing.
I predict that from here until Boris and the Tories do whatever they do in respect of our fundamentally xenophobic “we are still a mighty empire and are too good for you” walking off in a huff, more and more they are going to try and blame the innocent party, the EU. We are going to hear endless stuff about how they won’t be reasonable in negotiations and are bullying us. I don’t think the EU will do that, but really it’s what we actually deserve for our childish behaviour.
End of Rant
Friday Philosophy – Smart or Smart-Arse? October 20, 2017
Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions, rant.Tags: behaviour, Humour, perception, rant
1 comment so far
(Note – this post is intended to be humorous, and also partly laughing at myself. Imagine a tone of “British, self-deprecating irony”…)
Many of you know what a “Smart-Arse” is. For those who do not…
A “Smart-arse” a person who is irritating because they behave as if they know everything or try to catch you out by misleading you.
A smart person will look at your problem and say something like “have you tried checking the array size?” and, 8 times out of 10, their input will help you solve your problem. It may not be THE answer but it makes you think about root causes.
A Smart-arse will say something more like “well, I would never have your problem as I would not have joined a company full of Java Nerds!!!”. Yeah, maybe that would have avoided my specific problem #1, but it is of no practical worth right now. .
You can usually pick out a smart-arse just by the tone of their voice. Think about the two situations above. The Smart person probably gave their advice in a quieter voice and with a passive or supporting manner. The Smart Arse person will usually have a higher, louder voice with a slightly sarcastic tone. Basically, in a superior or attention-seeking manner.
Another “Smart-arse” thing to do is to try to catch you out, in the misguided belief it makes them look cleverer than you.
In these situations always ask – “what is a Smart-arse hoping you won’t spot”
I’ll put my hand up right now. Sometimes, especially looking back on my past, I have been the smart-arse. (And, as humans, we hate the fault in others that we see in ourselves). And I bloody hate smart-arses. And I keep seeing smart-arse crap all over the internet. Let me give you an example. Look at the figure on the right.
This is the perfect example of the “Smart-Arse” question. You are faced with what looks like a simple logic puzzle and normally the tag line is something like “93% of people will get this WRONG!!! – Only Geniuses can solve it!!!!!!!”. They never cite a basis for the “93%” as it is as utterly made up and is as asinine and bloody annoying as whatever trick is in the post. What they are doing is giving you what looks like a genuine puzzle that needs a bit of thinking about but most of us can solve (though not you Dave, you really are an idiot). BUT! But they have hidden a detail. The are purposefully leading you astray so they can go “Aaa-Haaaa!!! Noooo! You forgot to check for the closed pipes!” (check tank 5 to 2). Or whatever the trick is.
This is “Smart-Arse”. It is not checking if you can solve a problem, if you are smart. It is checking if they can con you. Checking if they can give you a load of information and then go “Ahh HA!! Got ya!!! You did not check for the tiny bit of info we hid from you!!! O-hohohohho we are so clever!!!!”
Well, I have news for you, Smart-arse. You are a bloody idiot. Your answer is wrong, as any fool can see. (Bear with me on this…)
More boxes, same smart-arse shit
You may have seen other “tests” like this such as the one to the left – a bit more complex but the question is the same, which one fills up first.
In my head my response is always “which one fills up… *first*????”.
First! That is my response. Not which one but the fact that the question itself is wrong. It should be “which one fills up” full stop, as “any fool can see”. Not which one fills up first.
I better justify that claim.
Look at this second example, clearly labelled with the icon of utmost smarts Mr Einstein (who, I bet, could not plumb a toilet let alone all these pipes as, back in his time, there were no push-fittings – just copper and solder. I think he once said he was rubbish at practical tasks). They think the key “got ya” is that the pipe from C to D is blocked so water goes from C to J. And then from J to L, as the pipe to I exits higher than that to L. One sneaky trick and then a bit of good physics – it is not the input but the output that counts. So water pours into L and then to F – but not H as, again, a sneaky block has been inserted. So F fills up.
And only F fills up!!!
As as soon as it is full it overflows. It overflows below the height of any other buckets the fluid had flown through – and so no other bucket will fill. Their initial question is flawed. “Which will fill first” indicates one will fill second. No other bucket will fill second. The question is not logical! Bloody idiots.
I can’t say why I initially was struck by the fact that only one bucket would fill when I saw the first example of this, even before I spotted the blocked pipes, but we all think in different ways. It does not make me smarter, just different. I’m interested to see if any of you can point out a flaw in my logic above though as I have a sneaking suspicion I could still be wrong.
However, this is not the major flaw… (I told you that I was also an utterly insufferable smart-arse).
Figure 2 has a drip filling the A tank, figure 1 has a gushing tap filling tank 1. Now ask a simple question. No matter if the tap is gushing or dripping, can the pipe out of tank A (or 1) empty the water faster than the tap supplies it? Well, if the tap is dripping you would say “yes” – but if these tanks are 5mm cubed and the pipe out is less than 1mm thick then no! No scale is given. And in fig 1 the tap is gushing. Have any of you had a shower where the plug hole drains slower than the shower produces water? After 2 or 3 minutes your feet are in a shallow bath and if you keep the shower running it overflows into the rest of the bathroom.
With figure 1, the one with the gushing tap, my brain says that tank 1 will fill as the tap supplies water faster than it will exit through the pipe to tank 5. Tank 1 will fill and piss water all over the shop and whatever goes down the pipe to 5 will eventually fill that tank. Which of tanks 1 and 5 fills first is “it depends” (the classic answer to most I.T performance questions). The question is how much slower is the flow out of the pipe from tank 1 – if it is, on average, above half the rate of the tap flow then tank 5 will actually fill first. In any case, you have soaked the bathroom floor and the people in the flat below are banging on the front door…
With that new idea in your head, if you turn up the tap in figure 2 you can now see that which tank fills first is probably A or.. C – depending on the max flow out of the pipes (all pipes are the same bore so flow rate is the same, increasing header pressure in each tank as they fill allowing…) I think it might be C as it’s outflow is higher in relation to the tank top than B or C…
So depending on the tap flow rate, the drain pipe flow rate and the relative height of the clear output pipe it could be…. absolutely NOT the answer of the Smart-Arse original poster. That is the problem with smart-arses! They are so fixed on their clever “gotcha” answers that they stop thinking of the real world.
And don’t get me started on those images where bananas are added to cans of beer and divided by a plate of cakes, designed to look like some sort of Algebra test. Always they are being smart-arse. They try and hide the introduction of multipliers where all the first examples are addition, or you need to count the number of items, or yellow is 3 and green is 6, or it is in base 23. I was going to include an example (again, a really wrong one) but I’ll save that for another week when I am also in a bad mood.
And, of course, I am a “smart-arse” for pointing this all out. Did I say how much I dislike smart-arses?
I promise you, when you start looking for the smart-arse aspect to all those “are you smart enough” bollocks things on social media it just turns into so much blargh and you can either answer them easily or just decide you can’t be bothered being misdirected. And you can use that saved time for looking at funny kitten videos or, I don’t know, doing some productive work?
Is there any other relevance to your working life? Maybe. Next time your management structure asks you a seemingly benign question about what you are doing this weekend or when you think you are on leave (hang on, “think”?), or how minor will be the impact of a small change to how the business functions to the application you are developing – just switch on the bulb with “smart-arse” painted on it. They are asking you a question where they are expecting you to think in the clear, simplistic way most of us would. Now ask what the bloody hell they are up to.
Friday Philosophy – Robots Rising & Tech Taking Over? July 7, 2017
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, future, Perceptions.Tags: behaviour, ethics, perception, rant
7 comments
Today I saw some cracking photographs of a lighthouse. How many of us have at some point wondered if it might be nice to be a lighthouse keeper? The solitude, the scenery, the stoic fortitude in the face of the storm – quite literally. (Thank you Brendan Tierney for the photo I’ve stolen from him).
No one lives here anymore
It’s an odd job lighthouse keeper, it holds a special place in Western culture and literature. A job to be held by those a little apart from society and yet with a dedication to the betterment of mankind. I suspect a lot of people in I.T. (and the wider community) find a resonance in that, as so many of us are a little bit apart and yet intelligent & care.
Well, you can’t be a lighthouse keeper anymore. At least, in the UK you can’t. Check out This web site about UK lighthouses and lighthouse keeping. That job, that vocation, was handed over to automated I.T. systems a few years ago, effectively handed to robots & technology. You might think you know where I am going with this, and initially you will be right, but bear with me.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the last 2 or 3 years about the increasing use of technology and robotics to do tasks that we humans have been doing. An obvious one is autonomous driving vehicles, where The I.T. smarts and sensors are leaping along incredibly fast. I am in a long-running “argument” with a friend about when fully autonomous vehicles will be a reality on public roads. He says under 5 years, I think it is more (I started saying more than 5 years to him in 2016, so, giving some leeway, I say not before December 2021 will we see fully autonomous vehicles driving from a town centre to another town centre, sharing lanes with human drivers – specific enough Neil?). But self-driving vehicles will be safer than humans “soon”, and cheaper than employing humans, so companies will swap to it. That will end a lot of employment.
I know others have pointed this out and it is not as if history isn’t almost a continuous tale of technology assisting or replacing human effort. Tolpuddle martyrs, dark satanic mills and all that. Industrialisation of farming has put a lot of farm labours out of work but we could not feed the current mass of humanity without it. People move on to new tasks.
But the difference now is not that we are handing jobs to a slightly better automated system where we still need some human control, we are removing the human element. And we are doing this in a lot of areas in a very short space of time. Factories are becoming far more automated, we order our goods online and huge conveyor robotic systems are being built to do the packing, with fewer people involved and lower long-term costs.
But it’s not just physical tasks that are being automated. Genetic algorithms, neural nets, deep data and machine learning is starting to replace tasks that have needed human interaction. Chatbots are getting smarter, to the point where they are used by companies as first-line support {often laughably poorly at present, but it is getting better – and Oracle do have an interest as was covered in Oracle Scene recently {sorry, that link might not work for long}. Expert systems have been developed that can judge simple court cases such as parking fines and beat humans at spotting pre-cancerous cells in tissue samples.
Oracle and the Bots
We now see expert computer systems breaking a lot of barriers and doing things that until now have been deemed uniquely human cerebral tasks. Computers won at playing chess 10+ years ago, they triumphed in “Go” last year and now they can win at versions of Poker where you are not sure of the data and have to read the play of your opponent – in effect second guess a human. Currently all these systems are very expensive, highly focused and specific to a task, built on huge data sets and using fine-tuned sets of algorithms, to do one task. We have nothing as generally capable as a 5 year old child or even a dog.
Only, we keep building systems that are better and better at specific tasks.
So why do I say this bothers me but not in the way you would expect? It’s because I keep seeing “thought leaders” present the same denial of these impacts on us in I.T. of the systems we as an industry are developing, platitudes that we are a special case and will be OK. Several times over the last couple of years I see some utter pillock in a suit from upper management telling a crowd of I.T. experts that we will be just fine as we are smart and we can stop doing the easy tasks and concentrate on the harder ones, use our brains more.
This is balls for two reasons. Firstly:
What about everyone who is below smart?
Most of us in I.T. are not only above average intelligence (probably IQs of 125 and upwards), we are surrounded by similar smart people. Our life partners are generally above normal intelligence, we work in teams who are above-average smart, we probably mostly socialise with generally intelligent people (as a raft of psychological studies show, we gravitate to those at a similar IQ to ourselves, irrespective of where we are on the scale). Even the end users we abuse tend to be above average intelligence. I suspect that most of us somehow don’t “get” that well over 60% of people are not only less intelligent than we are but they have few options if our society passes the jobs they can do to computers and robots. And they are not that likely to be philosophical about having no point to their lives and being poorer. They’re probably going to be very angry, very poor and pretty pissed off with smart-arses who say that “we are OK” – and there are a lot, lot more of them than us.
And that leads to the second reason it is balls.
The smart work will also be doable by Tech
As I’ve said already, we can already create technological systems that can beat us at specific cerebral tasks and there is going to be a small and smaller pool of work for highly-intelligent workers. Let’s face it, a lot of what we do now in I.T. is drudge and boring, there is not really that much smart work needed doing, even in this industry stacked by us smart people. And doing work that really needs you to be smart is tiring (well, I find it tiring!). And our work in I.T. tends to be logic-based and what are computers good at? We will just have a breathing space before our work is also more cheaply done by computers.
I’m annoyed as I think those of use who are involved in this revolution are being told a deluded lie that we will be OK if it pans out like I have just said. Those extra 25+ IQ points are not going to keep us special for very long.
So if computers can drive the taxis & lorries, manage the steel works and build the cars, derive the best drug treatment and give the perfect injection (yep, theoretically a robot already wins on that) what do we as humans do?
Only a few people can be “utterly human” – artists, poets and philosophers. And we do not need 7 billion of them anyway.
We could try and legislate against it, tax robots hard. But those who make a lot of money already run the “free market economy” and will continue to do so. If Robots and computer programs do tasks more cheaply, companies that uses robots will rise to the top of any monetary-based society, i.e. a capitalist society. What will change what has been in place for 100+ years? I can’t see the currently rich and powerful objecting to working methods that increase their wealth. Even if it means more and more poorer people.
Some argue for a basic living wage to keep us all alive – fed, warm and basic healthcare whilst machines do the work. That would give us that often cited nirvana of being free to do “what we want”. But if you have no job, what do you do? Again, for those of us with high IQ we can maybe come up with things to do. Maybe. I seem to be relatively happy being semi-retired, but I’ve done a lot of stuff and had my time of striving to achieve. And still do. But how about those who are IQ 100 and below? I suspect entertaining yourself is not as easy. I think anger, resentment and the feeling of being disenfranchised is just going to continue increasing. I think it’s why the UK is leaving Europe and why the US has an egotistical man-child as president. More and more normal people are unhappy with their lot and see no good future – so they vote for a change. ANY change. Even if it is crazy change.
I know, not a very happy Friday Philosophy. Will someone please tell me it will all be OK? And I mean OK for everyone, not just us “smart” people.
Friday Philosophy – The Singular Stupidity of the Sole Solution April 22, 2016
Posted by mwidlake in Architecture, Exadata, Friday Philosophy, Hardware.Tags: Architecture, perception, rant, system development
13 comments
I don’t like the ‘C’ word, it’s offensive to some people and gets used way too much. I mean “cloud” of course. Across all of I.T. it’s the current big trend that every PR department seems to feel the need to trump about and it’s what all Marketing people are trying to sell us. I’m not just talking Oracle here either, read any computing, technical or scientific magazine and there are the usual adds by big I.T. companies like IBM and they are all pushing clouds (and the best way to push a cloud is with hot air). And we’ve been here before so many times. It’s not so much the current technical trend that is the problem, it is the obsession with the one architecture as the solution to fit all requirements that is damaging.
No clouds here yet
When a company tries to insist that X is the answer to all technical and business issues and promotes it almost to the exclusion of anything else, it leads to a lot of customers being disappointed when it turns out that the new golden bullet is no such thing for their needs. Especially when the promotion of the solution translates to a huge push in sales of it, irrespective of fit. Technicians get a load of grief from the angry clients and have to work very hard to make the poor solution actually do what is needed or quietly change the solution for one that is suitable. The sales people are long gone of course, with their bonuses in the bank.
But often the customer confidence in the provider of the solution is also long gone.
Probably all of us technicians have seen it, some of us time after time and a few of us rant about it (occasionally quite a lot). But I must be missing something, as how can an organisation like Oracle or IBM not realise they are damaging their reputation? But they do it in a cyclical pattern every few years, so whatever they gain by mis-selling these solutions is somehow worth the abuse of the customer – as that is what it is. I suppose the answer could be that all large tech companies are so guilty of this that the customer end up feeling it’s a choice between a list of equally dodgy second hand car salesemen.
Looking at the Oracle sphere, when Exadata came along it was touted by Oracle Sales and PR as the best solution – for almost everything. Wrongly. Utterly and stupidly wrongly. Those of us who got involved in Exadata with the early versions, especially I think V2 and V3, saw it being implemented for OLTP-type systems where it was a very, very expensive way of buying a small amount of SSD. The great shame was that the technical solution of Exadata was fantastic for a sub-set of technical issues. All the clever stuff in the storage cell software and maximizing hardware usage for a small number of queries (small sometimes being as small as 1) was fantastic for some DW work with huge full-segment-scan queries – and of no use at all for the small, single-account-type queries that OLTP systems run. But Oracle just pushed and pushed and pushed Exadata. Sales staff got huge bonuses for selling them and the marketing teams seemed incapable of referring to the core RDBMS without at least a few mentions of Exadata
Like many Oracle performance types, I ran into this mess a couple of times. I remember one client in particular who had been told Exadata V2 would fix all their problems. I suspect based solely on the fact it was going to be a multi-TB data store. But they had an OLTP workload on the data set and any volume of work was slaying the hardware. At one point I suggested that moving a portion of the workload onto a dirt cheap server with a lot of spindles (where we could turn off archive redo – it was a somewhat unusual system) would sort them out. But my telling them a hardware solution 1/20th the cost would fix things was politically unacceptable.
Another example of the wonder solution is Agile. Agile is fantastic: rapid, focused development, that gets a solution to a constrained user requirement in timescales that can be months, weeks, even days. It is also one of the most abused terms in I.T. Implementing Agile is hard work, you need to have excellent designers, programmers that can adapt rapidly and a lot, and I mean a LOT, of control of the development and testing flow. It is also a methodology that blows up very quickly when you try to include fix-on-fail or production support workloads. It also goes horribly wrong when you have poor management, which makes the irony that it is often implemented when management is already failing even more tragic. I’ve seen 5 agile disasters for each success, and on every project there are the shiny-eyed Agile zealots who seem to think just implementing the methodology, no matter what the aims of the project or the culture they are in, is guaranteed success. It is not. For many IT departments, Agile is a bad idea. For some it is the best answer.
Coming back to “cloud”, I think I have something of a reputation for not liking it – which is not a true representation of my thoughts on it, but is partly my fault as I quickly tired of the over-sell and hype. I think some aspect of cloud solutions are great. The idea that service providers can use virtualisation and container technology to spin up a virtual server, a database, an application, an application sitting in a database on a server, all in an automated manner in minutes, is great. The fact that the service provider can do this using a restricted number of parts that they have tested integrate well means they have a way more limited support matrix and thus better reliability. With the Oracle cloud, they are using their engineered systems (which is just a fancy term really for a set of servers, switches, network & storage configured in a specific way with their software configure in a standard manner) so they can test thoroughly and not have the confusion of a type of network switch being used that is unusual or a flavor of linux that is not very common. I think these two items are what really make cloud systems interesting – fast, automated provisioning and a small support matrix. Being available over the internet is not such a great benefit in my book as that introduces reasons why it is not necessarily a great solution.
But right now Oracle (amongst others) is insisting that cloud is the golden solution to everything. If you want to talk at Oracle Open World 2016 I strongly suspect that not including the magic word in the title will seriously reduce your chances. I’ve got some friends who are now so sick of the term that they will deride cloud, just because it is cloud. I’ve done it myself. It’s a potentially great solution for some systems, ie running a known application that is not performance critical that is accessed in a web-type manner already. It is probably not a good solution for systems that are resource heavy, have regulations on where the data is stored (some clinical and financial data cannot go outside the source country no matter what), alter rapidly or are business critical.
I hope that everyone who uses cloud also insists that the recovery of their system from backups is proven beyond doubt on a regular basis. Your system is running on someone else’s hardware, probably managed by staff you have no say over and quite possibly with no actual visibility of what the DR is. No amount of promises or automated mails saying backs occurred is guarantee of recovery reliability. I’m willing to bet that within the next 12 months there is going to be some huge fiasco where a cloud services company loses data or system access in a way that seriously compromises a “top 500” company. After all, how often are we told by companies that security is their top priority? About as often as they mess it up and try to embark on a face-saving PR exercise. So that would be a couple a month.
I just wish Tech companies would learn to be a little less single solution focused. In my book, it makes them look like a bunch of excitable children. Give a child a hammer and everything needs a pounding.
Friday Philosophy – Content, Copying, Copyright &Theft February 12, 2016
Posted by mwidlake in Blogging, Friday Philosophy, writing.Tags: behaviour, Blogging, rant
13 comments
There have been a couple of things this week that have made me think about the stuff that some of us write and what other people do with it.
I’m writing a book with 4 other people at the moment (the 4 being Arup Nanda, Brendan Tierney, Alex Nuijten and Heli Helskyaho, all experienced book publishers already – I’m the new kid) which is on SQL & PLSQL. It has been a very interesting experience. I knew writing a technical book was hard work, took a lot of time and that, frankly, the direct financial return on the effort is very, very poor. I know a few authors of Oracle books and I’d talked to them about it all, so I was aware. However, it turns out I did not really know how hard it was, I still did not understand how demanding of time and effort it was! But I had written technical blogs and a couple of articles before I started the book and I had developed the strong opinion that you do not take other people’s work, and you certainly do not take it without citing the original author – because you are actually stealing a lot of someone else’s time and effort.
Probable front image of “the book”
As a result, at the very start of writing my chapters I was determined that my content was going to be My Content. Me, my experience, the official documentation , my test databases – and a word document to receive the end product from those ingredients. I was not going to read what others had written recently on or around the topics I was covering as I did not want to be even subconsciously borrowing from other’s efforts {I say recently as I cannot unread what I had already read!}. I certainly did not want to be accused of doing so. If I was going to object to people stealing my content, I’d be hypocritical to actually commit the crime.
How very noble of me. How very silly of me.
A couple of months in I was talking to someone about the first chapter I was doing and how I was struggling to decide how to structure what I wanted to say. I knew the facts and features I wanted to cover but was unsure of how to make it flow so that it would make sense to the reader and build up their knowledge in steps. They asked me how other people had handled it and I gave them the little opinion piece I’ve just given you. And they laughed at me.
Was I including new stuff? Yes. Was I using my own experience? Yes. Was I going to cut lines, paragraphs, even pages out of other sources and put it in mine? No! Of course not! Well then why was I purposefully making life hard for myself?
Then they asked me the killer bit – Did I know every last thing about the topic? Hmm, no, probably not, but then no one knows every last thing and certainly has not used every little aspect of an oracle feature for real. So I was only going to put into my chapters parts of the topic? Well, I guess so. And that is what someone trying to learn about the feature wants? An expert opinion full of holes? That bit stumped me.
I was kind of writing my chapters to show how much I know. I was certainly limiting it to what I knew well. But the reader does not give a fig about how much I personally know, they are not hiring me to do a job. They are reading about a technical topic so that they can do their job. So I should be making sure I know as much as I can about the topic in order to describe it and I should describe all of it that I think could be useful to others, even if so far it has not been of use to me and the specifics of the problems I was solving. And how do I learn about technical stuff? I read the documentation… and blogs… and books… and play with it.
It also got me thinking about what I will feel like if people use my chapters in a couple of years to help them write about a topic (be it in a book, a blog or an article). If they simply copy my stuff, steal my words, I’ll be angry. If they copy it but just change a few bits to hide the fact I’ll be furious. But if they are writing this as they initially learned from me and then added their own experience and knowledge, I’ll be chuffed to bits – because I taught them. And now they would be teaching others.
So I started reading my modern books on the topics around what I was writing and looking at blog posts and articles more. I know I am doing a better job for the audience since I started doing that. However, the list of people I will need to thank in my bit of the acknowledgements is going up & up and I suspect that for years I’ll be meeting people at conferences & meetings and going “here’s a pint for the help you gave me! And, no, you did not know you had!”. {One thing that did worry the pants off me is that when I read around, it turns out that in my first chapter I uses an example very extensively that turns out to be the exact same example at least two other people have used – it’s convergent evolution, honest! But I’m sure someone at some point is going to point a finger… Oh well, the deadlines are too tight for me to change it now. I don’t even have time to write this blog really…}
There was a specific incident this week that made me think again about copying. I noticed (as I was checking out a relatively unused aspect of a PL/SQL tool and what I did not know about it – but others might benefit from knowing) that the same information was in two places. Exactly the same, word for word. Someone had stolen content from Tim Hall’s excellent Oraclebase site. And it was not just one article, it was dozens, with no citation of the original author anywhere and a copyright sign on the pages of stolen content. You can read about Tim’s ire in this blog post he wrote. He got more annoyed than I think he normally does as this guy had stolen stuff before and Tim was suffering from a cold. He got about as annoyed as I would get in that situation, in fact.
I also noticed as I investigated my currently-obscure aspect of PL/SQL that most of the content on the topic elsewhere was mostly chunks just taken from the oracle official documentation with a few lines wrapped around each chunk. Was that stealing content? I’m still not sure about that, but I think that if there is more borrowed content than original content, it’s at best Poor Effort and probably is Theft. If they do not even write their own demo code for the feature but take Oracle’s – it’s theft. Bad people.
I did nearly comment on Twitter that I never got my stuff stolen, as my stuff is mostly just opinion pieces like this and of no technical worth! But the very next day – Yep, you guessed it, someone stole one of my blog posts. There was a single link back to my original post at the very end but it was not a citation, it just said “reference Link Martin Widlake’s”. In fact, initially I think it just said “Reference Link”. He also has a copyright sign on his web pages. I currently don’t, maybe I should add one so that I can simply say “copyright, take it off else i’ll issue a Take Down request to your service provider”.
I’ve emailed him to say I’m not happy to have a word-for-word copy stolen and presented as his and I am certainly not happy that the pieces is appearing on the front of his web site advertising his services! It seems he is just one guy trying to make a living in rural Northern Pakistan. Should I be concerned about the theft of my article and ask him to remove it? If it is helping him make a living thousands of miles away and he has at least added a small citation at the end? Yes, because it is still theft. And if I do not highlight to him how much this annoys people, he will probably steal other stuff. If you don’t challenge bad behaviour you condone it.
And besides, if he does steal more stuff this will certainly include Tim’s material as his site is often on the first search-engine page on any Oracle Topic. And when he pinches Tim’s stuff, Tim’s gonna be angry…
The IT Blight of Working During Holidays December 24, 2015
Posted by mwidlake in humour, on-call, Private Life, working.Tags: behaviour, rant
7 comments
I’ve been thinking today about those people in IT who are going to have to either work or be on call during the festive period. Twitter has become a lot more quiet today and most of the activity is not-work-related. My blog traffic is now a trickle and there is a general feeling of doing more family, non-work things for a couple of days, which I think is good for all of us from time to time. Maybe more times than current working culture and practices allow for.
The endless daily grind – even at Christmas
But in the IT industry, especially if you are an administration-type (DBA, Sys Admin, Network Admin, stuff like that) there is often a need to do work at this time as systems are quiet or can even be shut down. Some places do release and upgrade work over the quiet period, so developers and designers can be pulled into festive-season work too. Even if you are the sort of organisation that has a code freeze for Christmas/New Year, there will be a rota of people who need to either monitor systems or respond if something goes “Bang!”. Those of us “blessed” with those roles will be on the on-call rota, tasked with at the least staying sober and often with monitoring duties. For some people in some organisations, you know you will in fact have an endless stream of “why in the heck am I having to do this” tasks to do.
I’ve done my share and I feel for those who are made to work over this time who really would rather not. In fact, I’ve done more than my share. Actually, A lot more than my share. You see, I do not have children – my wife and I established very early on in our relationship that producing new versions of me was a damned bad idea, even if new versions were leavened with her better characteristics {and if they got her worst ones along with mine, ohhhhh terrible consequences}. So as someone with no children there has always been more pressure on me to take more than my 1/number-in-team share of the Christmas, New Year, Easter, Bank Holiday etc work. I’ve also come under pressure not to take time off during school holidays, to cover for those who need to do so for the sake of fitting in with the kids. Now, I don’t want to go away on holiday when everywhere is covered in kids as kids are too self-centered, noisy and annoying (ie very like me) for me to put up with. But I would like occasionally to have a week off, in the summer, to sit in the garden. But the biggest pressure has always been over taking more of the Christmas work. Because, I am told, it is important family time – it’s for the kids
I get that, I do. But then, if you have kids they are actually your fault. You did things to have them. Trust me, I’ve got a degree in biology, I know where kids come from :-). At the start of my working career I was fine to take on more of the work/monitoring/staying sober duties. But as the status of not-having-kids lasts a lot longer than having-young-kids (or more recently, with people my age, young-grand-kids) it had been a constant expectation of me for about 20 years – until I stopped playing. I stopped on the grounds, after 2 decades, that I had Done My Bit. I threw my toys out my pram and said I deserved my share of time off at Christmas (to pick said toys up, of course). I solved the problem more recently by trying to be unemployed at such times.
Anyway, forgive the rant, I feel better now. But my extra-Christmas-Duties have made me realise more how much of a pain it is to have to work when most people are enjoying themselves. So I feel for those that are having to do it and do not want to. I truly know how it is and all I can say is “thank you for doing your bit”. Especially if you have done it despite having young kids. And especially if you have had to do it for 20+ years to cover for all those damned work-shy parents (joke!).
The ironic thing is that this year I will be working over Christmas. But I don’t mind as it is my choice. And I am doing so in warm sunshine, with a glass of wine, and in fact I can stop whenever I like. That is the joy of writing over doing stuff people need to be done now.
Merry Christmas everyone, especially to the unwilling workers.
Return from The Temple of Apple June 22, 2015
Posted by mwidlake in Private Life, rant.Tags: hardware, private, rant
4 comments
I doubt many of you are on tenterhooks as to how I got on with my phone today {after my << rant last Friday}. But I’m going to tell you anyway.
Overall, Apple have gone some way to redeeming themselves.
I got myself down into Cambridge this morning to visit the Apple Store, at my allotted slot of 10:10 {I later witnessed someone attempting to be 15 minutes early for their slot – and they were asked to go and have a coffee and come back. The customer was unimpressed as they had lugged some huge Apple monitor in with them}.
I have to say, walking into the store was somewhat like entering some form of modern temple. The clean lines, the two parallel runs of “desks” with precisely & spaciously laid-out items to worship, lit by discrete banks of lights in the ceiling. Down the center was a clear path to allow you to move deeper into the hallowed space, with a scattering of worshipful believers moving between the icons. And, at the end, a cluster of acolytes in blue tops gathered around and before the “Apple Genius Bar” alter.
I approached the alter…err, service desk… and was very soon approached by an acolyte holding a prayer tablet (iPad mini 3) in front of them. My name was on the list, my time was now. I would be granted an audience. I was directed to a stool to one side to await my turn.
Thankfully, the wait was short and ended when Dave came over, Dave turned out to be a friendly, open and helpful chap who managed to take the edge off what was frankly a bit of an OTT ambiance if you ask me. So far my impression had been that (a) you can see why the kit is so expensive to support this sort of shop frontage and space-to-item ratio, something I had only really come across before in Bose shops & car dealerships and (b) it’s just a shop selling I.T. kit, get over yourselves. Dave (not his real name, I’m afraid I forgot his real name, but he looked like a Dave – and had a great beard) listened to my potted history of the battery woes and upgrade deaths, looked over the phone briefly and then plugged it into one of the banks of MACs. It pulled up the ID of the phone and {Huzzah!!!!} set about blatting everything on it and reloading the OS I think. It took a few minutes (I read my paper magazine – “New Scientist”) and then the phone rebooted…. and put up the Apple icon… and thought about it. I could see Dave thinking “this is taking a bit longer than normal”. Anyway, the thing finally came alive.
We chatted about what the root cause could be as he said he had not heard of anyone having multiple upgrade issues and it just locking like this. He went and asked a more senior acolyte (perhaps already in the priesthood) and his opinion was that it might be a faulty motherboard – in which case all bets were off and I’d have to basically buy a new phone for £200. Dave said I might as well not bother and put the money towards getting a nice, new iPhone 6, as they were only £500 or so. I wonder what the Apple shop staff get paid to think £500 is no big shakes.
Meanwhile, Dave had verified the phone battery was indeed covered by the recall and it would be two hours to complete the work. Was I happy to get that done today? Sure, I’m happy to drink coffee and eat a bun somewhere for 2 hours. So off I went. And came back (witnessing the taking to task of a customer arriving before their time – they did let them leave the monitor behind in the end). My phone was presented back to me, working, and I just had to sign on a tablet. Sorry about using the indelible marker pen, guys. I took a photo of the temple and made a quick test call outside the shop to ensure all was OK – and it was. And apart from the brief suggestion of buying a new iPhone 6, no financial cost had been incurred (except the park & ride in, cost of coffee & bun and a lost morning).
I was soon back home and ready to restore my backup from last week. I plugged in the phone, iTunes recognised it, ran the restore… and the phone is no different – none of my contacts, no change to icons, layout or background, nothing – but now iTunes says it does not recognise the device. Ohhhh shit. Oh, and the photo of the Apple Temple is gone (it was going to be at the start of this update). A couple of hours later and trying many things, I think I know what the issues are and maybe were:
1) The device is just a bit dodgy and sometimes/often the connection with iTunes just ends (I’ve swapped cables, I know it is not that) .
2) It would not restore the backup with “Find My iPhone” running – but due to (1) it usually did not get so far as telling me that. I wonder if updates would fail for the same reason? They were very insistent I turn off the feature before I went into the shop, but of course with a locked up phone I could only do this at the web end.
I turned off the feature on the phone, ran the restore again and this time it completed and left me with a phone that worked and looked like it did a week ago.
So I eventually got the phone restored and it works as well as it did – but hopefully with more battery life. It will be interesting to see if the reception issues are any better. I kind of doubt it. It’s now at iOS 8.3 as well. Deep Joy.
My final conundrum now is that, given that my phone contract that partially paid for the phone in the first place ended a couple of months back, do I stick with this device and hope all is now OK? Or do I spend more money replacing something that is only just over 2 years old? And do I get anything but an iPhone? After all, both my wife’s iPhones have worked OK and they are nice when working. But I’m not a member of the Apple Congregation and have no desire to join.
One thing I do know. I won’t be putting the old Samsung phone I’ve had to fall back on away just yet.
Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog 