Posts by breakfast

Who is it for?

I've been working on some cloud stuff recently and been around a lot of other people working in various associated areas and the point that I have reached is that I just don't know who it is better for.

It is hard to develop for the cloud- way harder than regular client-server or application development - and debugging any code running in the cloud is a massive pain in the ass. You have so little control on your application's environment that you need constant fault-tolerance.

It is hard to maintain applications in the cloud- most of the things that matter in terms of system maintenance are outside your hands so if something isn't working you are stuck with raising support tickets for your friendly local provider to ignore and then in a few weeks time tell you it was fine anyway. When the service goes down ( and it inevitably does ) then your product is unavailable.

As a consequence of these, applications developed and hosted in the cloud are often fragile and inconsistent. This makes the end-user's experience less pleasant and it is easy for hard-to-reproduce situational bugs to arise.

So it is hard to develop for, hard to maintain and tends to create unreliable user experiences.

I'm not saying that there is no benefit to a cloud-style approach for some applications, but in most cases I can't tell who the cloud is supposed to be for.

Another no-show

Just in the market for a new laptop now and Lenovo have definitely put themselves out of the running for me. That said, I'm not sure whether this isn't the ideal time to buy- normally after a company has been caught doing something intensely unethical, they are well behaved for a few months until their marketing departments decide that everyone has forgotten about it.

Google becoming the new Microsoft

As was observed in that neat TechCrunch piece a week or two back, Google are very much becoming the new Microsoft and when you look at where the majority of their new hires come from it is absolutely self-evident why that is to be expected.

" You have to hand it to Ali; he’s been kicking against the pricks for so long, he knows his subject like the back of his hand and goes straight for the jugular.

I don't even want to think about how going for the jugular constitutes a kick against the prick.

Big news for the arms trade

Coming up next: Limpet mines made from actual limpet.

Timely...

Around that time the human population bottlenecked to a few thousand individuals. Coincidence, or set-up for a future sci-fi epic?

Another point of view...

Alternatively, if you went by the "Current Status" message for the Azure service it ran perfectly the whole time.

Really annoying during a massive outage with services unavailable and customers on the phone to go to the status page and see "Everything is running just fine" staring back at you like a big, massive, lie..

Where can I get one?

This sounds brilliant- Microsoft's version of Single Sign On appears to be based on the concept of constantly logging in to everything you ever use the whole time. Something that let me log on once and then do my freaking job would be amazing. I'll take two!

This has amazing prank opportunities- figures visible out of the corner of your eye that disappear when you look right at them, drawing the classic artist's "cock and balls" motif over entire office buildings.

Possibly many of the games I have been played have been set in these environments, which explains why half the doors in the walls were totally unopenable- it didn't make sense at the time, but now I realise I was in an e-ink environment and the doors were actually just drawn on the walls...

The story that has it all...

The classic combination of affluence and effluent.