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Orange

I went through quite a few thoughts and pictures before I settled on this one for the PhotoFriday theme “Orange.” I went clever-but-not-in-the-spirit picture of a wind-farm in Orange county, then obvious photographs of oranges or orange sweets. But I finally went for this rust on a canon in Rhodes.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Wet.” I’m entry number 64.

Simpleton Explores Microcomputers

It’s easy to forget how much computers have changed over a relatively short. time. A book I found in my old room at my parent house, “Simpleton Explores Microcomputers,” helped me get some perspective.

I don’t know exactly when it’s from, but it’s certainly early eighties. Possibly 1983 or 1984.

It explores the computers that are available at the time and what it’s like to own one. One of the most telling aspects is that it’s written for people who have never owned, possibly used, a computer.

Here comes the crunch

It all starts out with a detailed plan. Then someone says, “Can we deliver by October?” A few features get cut, some of the estimates get revised downwards and everyone gets back to work. Then you get to the end of September and find that someone removed all the contingency and that in the rush to finish the requirements a heap of important stuff got missed.

You spend days, weeks, quite possibly months pushing to get the software developed and, a few months before the real end, a crunch point is reached. It’s missing what’s now realised to be critical functionality; it takes an hour to process something that should be instant; the data doesn’t look like you thought it would; it’s too late for any real benefit to be obtained.

The ‘D’ in ‘DVCS’

Last week, GitHub was the victim of a days long denial of service attack that meant that it wasn’t available reliably despite the hard work of their team.

What surprised me was the number of people on Twitter complaining that they couldn’t work. I was surprised because one of the key things about Git (the tool rather than the website) is that it is distributed, that is there is no centralised server in the way that there is with, say, Subversion. Clearly there are things you can’t do without GitHub – most obviously downloading new repositories – but almost everything else can be done peer-to-peer. The rest of this post explains how.