Freesteel Blog » Slow hours on the Easter trip

Slow hours on the Easter trip

Sunday, April 5th, 2015 at 7:26 pm Written by:

I’ve washed up on the annual Easter university diving trip, though my heart’s not in it. There’s a long period of stable weather forecasted, which should mean the silt will have time to settle out of the water ready for when the novices to get good enough to come out to more exciting locations.

sennendive
snakelocks anemone encrusted wreckage in Sennen Cove

It’s a bit of a rehash: I’ve done them all before in previous years in better conditions, with Becka by kayak back in 2010. I’m too tired at the end of the day to do any of the hacking I’d hoped for, so I’m marking time. Maybe I should go to the pub more often and not try to make best use of my time all the time.

Curiously, that last time in Cornwall (but one) also coincided with a General Election campaign, and I remember a big Conservative Party poster in a farmer’s field at the end of the lane. There isn’t one there this year. Either the land-owner is not so keen on Cameron this time, or he can’t be bothered, or he’s sold up to a new owner, or who knows? It’s another metric that could have been noted and cross-correlated over the years if we really had the data. For the life of me, I don’t know why these posters never became a substrate for some time-limited concentrated geocaching game. Geocaching happens on a lot sillier things, and this could have been like tracking down sightings of rare wild animals.

fishinweeds
Fish approach between the boulders and kelp

Meanwhile, the serious programmers are making hay with the ElectionLeaflets.org site and Parliamentary candidates CVs.

Watching them discuss stuff I realize I’m totally lost in the last century in terms of the technology. It’s a full time job just keeping up. (And in the large software company I briefly worked for, nobody seemed to be employed to keep up, so they didn’t.) Nowadays I don’t know much more than the difference between JPEGs and PNGs.

Other projects are pinging up around the net, such as VoteForPolicies.org where they blogged their technical case study like so:

We are using the RabbitMQ messaging system, our queue server is run by CloudAMPQ (Big Bunny instance, dedicated server)…

Our worker servers also live behind an ELB but don’t have auto-scaling enabled; we manually manage the amount of instances based on the size of our queues, we can check using the RabbitMQ management console…

All of our MySQL queries are handled by the Doctrine ORM and written using the Doctrine QueryBuilder. These doctrine queries are also cached in Redis as SQL…

Our application is based on Symfony 2.6.* standard edition.

For Redis we use the SncRedisBundle. For RabbitMQ interactions we are using the RabbitMqBundle.

We’re using the DoctrineMigrationsBundle for database migrations and the data-fixtures and AliceBundle for database fixtures.

Our CI tool Jenkins runs all of our tests and triggers a new capistrano deployment if they pass.

Is it me, or does it feel like I’m in the world of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy reading about how to build a Globular Cluster Information Hyperdrive?

And this, all in the name of electing Members of Parliament, an institution whose daily procedures were already antiquated back in the Victorian era.

Once the process of governance starts getting anywhere near state of the art web technology, it’s going to be awesome.

Or it will be a whole lot worse. You never know.

As the human debacle around the science of climate change has proved, this tech is equally good at spreading knowledge and intelligence or ignorance and stupidity. It’s our choice as to what we want from it.

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