test please delete

[NickFitz]

Finally taking the time to sit down and go through the training materials for Amazon OpsWorks, which is basically Chef specially adapted for AWS. As ExClientCorp invested so much time and money in getting me au fait with Chef, it makes sense to put that to work for the benefit of my own projects

[Alias]

Home! What's more, with petrol!

Surprisingly good run today. Though it got off to a bad start when, literally as I was standing up to go, the bloke who hired me said "Oh by the way I wanted to ask you, what's a good way of doing {complicated explanation of thing he wants to do}", which is something he keeps doing. To add to the annoyance, it often takes a couple of minutes to work out what he's trying to achieve, and it often turns out that he'd probably be better off going about the whole thing in a different way.

But there, helping them out with stuff like this was part of the deal, as they're really ops people who are having to turn themselves into a dev team on the fly

I just wish he'd ask this stuff when there's half-an-hour to go, as it would help pass the time. Ho hum

Maybe get up to go half an hour before so that he then stops you thus filling that half hour?

[NickFitz]

Maybe get up to go half an hour before so that he then stops you thus filling that half hour?

Might be worth a try

[NickFitz]

So once again it goes: get home, recover from the commute enough to make dinner, eat dinner, start working on something, get just far enough to begin to feel like I'm making progress, and look! it's time to get to bed so I can set off early in the morning again

Ah well, I'll be glad of it when the self-invoice generates

Goodnight all

[vetran]

Home! What's more, with petrol!

Surprisingly good run today. Though it got off to a bad start when, literally as I was standing up to go, the bloke who hired me said "Oh by the way I wanted to ask you, what's a good way of doing {complicated explanation of thing he wants to do}", which is something he keeps doing. To add to the annoyance, it often takes a couple of minutes to work out what he's trying to achieve, and it often turns out that he'd probably be better off going about the whole thing in a different way.

But there, helping them out with stuff like this was part of the deal, as they're really ops people who are having to turn themselves into a dev team on the fly

I just wish he'd ask this stuff when there's half-an-hour to go, as it would help pass the time. Ho hum

and you need the overnight to think exploit.

That sounds interesting, can I have a think about it tonight , do some research and put something together for you in the morning?

[NickFitz]

and you need the overnight to think exploit.

That sounds interesting, can I have a think about it tonight , do some research and put something together for you in the morning?

Yesterday it was all about representing hierarchies in a relational database using adjacency lists. I explained the problems and recommended switching to nested sets, but he was dubious, finding them a bit complex. I explained the only alternative was to do most of the work in Python, but that was the problem - the contractor I replaced (he didn't like being away from home) had already written the entire thing in Python and it was taking about ninety seconds to construct its tree.

Today I took my copy of Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties in to help him out - it has an entire chapter about each approach. But in the meantime he'd determined that the previous contractor's code had been written with great elegance and purity of style, but in such a way that it loaded over three million rows of data into memory, then whittled them down to the couple of hundred items that actually formed the tree. By the simple process of selecting the required nodes first, then getting the metadata necessary to arrange them into a tree with about three or four queries, he got the time down to a few milliseconds without any further help from me

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Grey and damp out

The rain overnight was so heavy that it woke me up at around four o'clock

But it looks as if most of it has passed over now.

[Alias]

[BrilloPad]

[WTFH]

Morning all . Dog walked - it's muddy out there. Lost cyclists helped. I'm now all out of good deeds for the day.