Being Mark Cohen

I just stumbled across what I think is possibly the worst business website I have ever sen. Check out http://www.administr8.com.au/ and ponder this: They are apparently sales coaches / consultants. Wow. Then check out Seth Godin’s website (not his blog). Seth describes himself as an agent of change. He showcases himself. He keeps it really simple. If I had to get a team of sales guys to spend a week with former or forty minutes with the latter, guess where I’d put my money?

Grrrr…. We have been very carefully planning our upgrade to sql 2005. On Sunday we went in and meticulously executed the steps, one at a time. I was largely a spectator. All cool, no issues, everything went to plan. Until we tried to cut our primary consumer website over.

Traffic was quiet for the site but still significant (many throusands of browsers per hour). SQL 2005 would not play nice. We flipped one web server over at a time, from 2000 to the new 2005 DB server. After a few minutes of all the web servers pounding the database it went mental, and the servers could not get connections to the database. “Server too busy” errors, which come from the asp.net queues being full of requests waiting to be served.

We flipped back within a minute or two, and had to abort the upgrade until we know why this happened. i was sure there was an upper limit set on maximum concurrent connections but the default value was set to zero, which is unlimited. Any pointers would be welcome

Rocks at South Maroubra

I was browsing on Flickr, and I came across a photostream where I found a picture of a “pools closed until further notice” sign at these rock pools. This freaked me out a bit as I take my boys down to these pools most weekends lately. So I emailed the people who look after the site www.nswoceanbaths.info and got a reply back saying

While the South Maroubra rock pools no longer have a sign up to say that they are closed, there is still a sign on the fence around the Commonwealth-owned land that backs onto the the beach, warning against contact with the stormwater. (I’ve posted images of the signs and the stormwater channel up on my Flickr photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nswoceanbaths). That stormwater hazard at the rock pools would be least during dry times and more significant after rain. So on dry sunny days, when you are more likely to be at the beach, the risk is far lower than it would be after a storm/rainy period.

There is a stream flowing across the beach from that land into the rock pools pretty much constantly, ie the water is pretty much always contaminated to some degree. That’s so sad. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the area. And just as worrying is the EPA Report showing that it’s bad pollution and Coogee Beach is not much better.

Aussie real estate website domain.com.au has put up billboards depicting George W. Bush on a laptop, presumably looking for future accommodation. Poor old dubbya’s propaganda machine must be one hard-working team – having to put up with this stuff not only in the US, but globally

The latest in the labour state government’s floundering and flopping around is Iemma’s recent indication that a desalination plant will be built in Sydney.  The story is on the Sydney Morning Herald here.

Premier Morris Iemma today announced two preferred consortia had been asked to tender for the construction of the plant, which will be built if dam levels drop to 30 per cent.

Two big questions stand out to me:  Firstly, in typical corrupt labour government fashion, they must’ve already signed something and now the process to appease the public has begun.  My question is that based on Qantas privatisation, the cross city tunnel, the airport privatisation, and many other examples, how exactly is Macquarie Bank going to own the desalination facility?  Are they going to be the investors behind the winning consortium that gets the contract? Let’s watch and see…

My other question: Has anyone told Iemma about the biggest case of groundwater contamination in the country that is creeping along under Botany Bay directly to where his facility will be situated and under where they will draw seawater from?  Are the engineers and scientists sure that the carcinogenic toxins in the plume that is moving under that area will not be seeping into the seawater?  will Iemma and the engineers be drinking that water?

I think it’ll be bottled water for me and my family, thanks all the same.

I have a cluster of image servers that form an integral part of our flagship website at work. We often need to manipulate / manage the images and the incredible volume of files makes this a difficult task. Being from a development rather than a systems background, my shell scripting knowledge is probably only average compared to what it could (or maybe should) be, so I never knew about forfiles. I discovered this last year, and had cause to use it today again.  The reason I say it is little-known is based on me walking around and polling people in my office.  Not very scientific I know

Forfiles is similar to the "foreach" command in linux c shell scripts, it allows you to iteratively loop all files in a location and conditionally do something with the files.  forfiles has been around a long time and you should be able to type "forfiles /?" and see how to use it on any machine since NT 4.  Combined with the IF statement in scripting, you can do stuff like loop through all jpg files older than a certain age and if they are not in a particular folder, output their path, name and size.  For the same effort you could move or delete them too.  and forfiles iterates through files much quicker than robocopy does.

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Rowan Bunning pinged me and reminded me that the Australian Scrum Community has organised a free presentation by Joseph Pelrine on why Agile works in Sydney, on Monday. 

This talk provides a short introduction to social complexity theory, especially the Cynefin multi-ontological sense-making framework, and illustrates its application to agile software development.

I did my Certified Scrum Master training with Joseph Pelrine.  He’s a very interesting and experienced practitioner.  He comes out of a smalltalk background (we can forgive that   ) and so understands developers and development very well.  He offers a wealth of experience and is worth listening to, I recommend getting to this talk if you possibly can.