I've been thinking about something known in a former (Nets&Comms) life as 'the problem of propagation delay' (the reason for queues at a 4-way temporary traffic light when there's one carriageway out of action, although nobody semms to be going anywhere or doing anything). The reason for this thought process is that for the last 3 or 4 weeks I've been effectively locked out of my O2 account for two reasons:
- my email is an alias (something that looks like a proper me@cantab.net address, but is really just an instruction to cantab.net to forward any mail received to my actual address). This means that whatever my current address is I just have to tell cantab.net and I don't have to waste everyone's time telling everyone in my address book that I've changed.
- O2 have got some deal going with Virgin, which farms out their password management to somerthing called Virgin Media O2 (VMO2). I don't know why they did this. I imagine Outsourcing was mentioned by a bean counter somewhere.
Anyway, what it means is that when I try to log in, four nodes (O2, Virgin, cantab.net, and my actual address) are involved – allowing for delays at every stage. So I enter my @cantab address and O2, in the politest possible terms, says 'Not my problem' (or, to be precise, VMO2 sign-in – preceded after a longish pause, by some false bonhomie along the lines of
Hang on a moment while we get our ducks in a row
).
I enter my password and VMO2 promises to send me a link by email. They send it, in their own good time, to cantab.net, who look up where I am and forward it to me. I click on the link and get this:
This reminds me of a text that, since it was written in 1975 (when I had never set eyes on a computer) has been required reading for any first-year student of Software Engineering :
<gender-neutral-version>The Perennially-Putative Person-Period?<rant>And while we're on the subject, that's my least-favoured bit of dead wood: 'period of time'. What else could a period be of? A period of... aubergine? But I keep hearing it. To quote Tom Wossname (...got it: Thomas Paine), 'Lay then the ax to the root'. Period. [Full stop]
</rant></gender-neutral-version>
There are many reasons for software development to take longer than is planned. Many of those involve the aforementioned 'man-month'...
<prescript>
I've explained before how I feel about uses and abuses of the word 'mythical'.If they want to say it's untrue (a usage of 'myth' that I loathe [sic, and another thing I loathe is being thought to have got the spelling wrong when I use 'loth' to mean 'unwilling'] with the heat of a million Suns, as my little sister knows to her cost*), they're undermining their own argument... [HD '25: which is irrelevant here, except that it underlines how the 1975 book's title is OK – I just think twice before I say 'mythical'.]*In the mid '70s I was studying the idea of myth in the work of Borges, and with the self-assurance of a 23-year-old I thought myself the sole custodian of the word 'myth'. Sorry, old bean.</prescript>
...; because if you increase the number of people working on a software development task by n, you increase the output by less than n, as you increase the communications overhead. To take an implausibly trivial example. If you have Tom Dick and Harry (T, D and H), lines of communication are TD, DT, TH, HT, DH and HD (3!). If you double the team, then lines of communication more than double.
<autobographical-note>Software development teams such as the ones I worked with often had several dozen members, with umpteen interlocking dependencies and a huge communications overhead (although repeated rounds of redundancies reduced that – while, naturally, increasing the number and size of the cracks for stuff to fall through.</autobographical-note>
Harmless Drudgery Sitrep
Ten years ago I wrote this:
<prescript>
...At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day).
</prescript>
Well that 'record month' has just been knocked into a cocked hat.
<etymological-break>In September 2025 the web site has had well over a thousand visits a day (1014.43 to be precise), the highest monthly total in the life of the blog. And the previous record (21357 – 712 per day) was only last June. Here's the picture for the past twelve months:
Presumably this is a reference to office-carpet-golf, in which a hat, tipped-up (or cocked) is used as a target. (This is not the gospel truth, it just seems quite thing-ish to me.)
<etymological-break>
 |
Figures courtesy of Google Blogger, though the graphic is 'mine' (in the sense that I made it, although the IP no doubt belongs to some tech-bro) |
And finally
While looking into the Member Benefits of the Union Society (of which I became a life member in 1971) I was... (uplifted?)...to see this:
It will be anazing once we learn it. Don't miss it.
b
No comments:
Post a Comment