Ham radio is still like this. ;)
242 karma · joined December 15, 2013
- https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/regulations/sor-96-484/F...
So … you just wouldn’t be able to talk about the tools you build and charge money for… on the hobby you built them for?
Seems kind of ironic. And, imho - missing the point of the hobby.
That way you'll learn about propagation, what makes a good radio cost 10x as much as a Baofeng, antenna systems, signalling modes, communication protocols, handheld channel programming, what local repeater systems are around and what their capabilities are.... You'll also learn who are the other hams around you, and where and what time they tend to be listening.
Or, assuming a 911 call from your cellphone isn't an option, you could pay for a Garmin InReach device.
Radios don’t work like in the movies. There’s a lot to know. You’re not likely to get help in a timely manner by slapping 146.52 into that shitty Baofeng spurious emissions potato.
I lost a Kobo in an airline seat pocket and had enjoyed it for only a year. While it was a bit slow to render Transmetropolitan, it made time go by quickly between YYZ and HND.
I haven’t replaced it yet but I just might, now that I’ve learned the Kindle can be jailbroken.
Get an e reader and take it everywhere. I love my iPad Pro for other media, but your eyes really need eInk to get in the mood. Just accept it - an eReader is a special device meant to provide slow food for the brain. It’s worth having.
Agree it's not fair to be on-call for things you can't fix. That's silly.
But, you're surely not saying when you push a change to a 24/7 mission critical system, and you're on the "git blame" - you're not interested in taking responsibility if the consequences occur after 5pm? And now an SRE has to learn everything you know, in order to fix it, instead of asking for your help?
Also - think about it a different way, you personally, are not the one I'd ask to participate in on-call. It's your whole team, maybe even your whole department. You and your team/department should work out how to field that together because you have more context into each others work/life balance, projects, skills, risky commits, etc. Your team would manage your own rotation.
> Secondly, how many organizations allow developers to prioritise solving pages over other forms of revenue generating work? How many teams demand negotiation with a "product owner" before a piece of work can be added to the board?
Tell me about it. Totally agree. This is where I focus much of my energy as a part of leadership teams - making other leadership realize they're over-promising on feature delivery without concern for their poor operations.
Frankly, fuck sales-driven development for this. I even work with marketing departments to value-stream map so we include good ops & security as part of our core prop to customers and investors. If they don't get it? Well, I guess the fish is already rotting from the head, as they say.
> Thirdly, how many pages are truly easy or tractable to fix?
If they're repeated ad nausea? Then those alerts need to go. Now. And if they can't go, because Management don't see the pain they're causing? See my response to #2. Culture change first.
> Fourthly, how often is the Real Problem™ for the reliability and uptime of a given system, actually at the program level, and not at architecture or system level?
Depends on your industry/platform. Good SRE sysadmin troubleshooter types will do everything they can before they push the escalation button to engineer tier. At least they'll get all the data and metrics they can and document the situation at hand before the engineer comes online.
Sometimes you don't really know what caused a problem until you all get together and retro it. Better to stay blameless even beyond when you have consensus on the technical factors.
One time, it was a leap-second messing up some 3rd party vendor software, with consequences for our code base that nobody ever expected.
Another time, it was a tired SRE combined with a lack of proper procedure combined with a code mistake with no test coverage.
Another time, it was a binder that fell on a customer's space bar effectively DoS'ing a system that had no rate limiting.
Some of those got fixed pretty quickly by an SRE.
BUT - whatever the cause... the times that our MTTR got truly trashed? (We're talking DAYS...) It was because the person who wrote the code and had all the context, had already quit long ago - leaving us with no proper logging and no one to help us. The organization had never prioritized replacing their code or hiring someone who could understand it.
> Really, this "shitty on call incentivises robust systems" argument is facile.
You're right in the sense that, considering all of the above, I would need your buy-in. To get it, I'd seek to eliminate the "rot". I'm truly sorry you got burned in the past. I have also been there. When it was too much for me, I quit, and found somewhere more ideal. Now I just keep trying to work with people I trust as they move around in the industry, to avoid all the org B.S. you've rightly brought up.
1. I'd give you 2x the amount of time off immediately, the next morning. Minimum 2 hours. More than that, I'd ask if you'd prefer to shift your workday later or find some other flexible arrangement.
I have fought management at some places really hard when they said a word about someone's planned work bucket not getting done after being paged as much as OP has in a week. I've made it clear it was management's fault, not yours.
2. Absolutely not. You'd be given the option to get rotated off Pagerduty as soon as your life was disrupted. I'd personally take over your shifts if I couldn't find someone on our team who was willing to take over.
3. This is SRE priority #1 and I felt terrible for OP. We cannot run a marathon if we're always sprinting out of bed for crap. Alert Fatigue is real https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/lets-talk-about-alert-fatigue...
4. Bingo. So, the whole organization has to reduce velocity so we can pay back the debts. If the CTO doesn't totally empathize with this, they're going to trip over their own shoes.
First of all, I appreciated this diary because Anna took the task with a positive attitude and as a learning experience. Thanks for writing this. To see an old problem through new eyes is inspiring.
I have numerous, "hot-take" criticisms of your current organization's practices, but I'm not sure I have all the context yet. The one suggestion I will make is: if you're not already using it - clone https://github.com/pagerduty/incident-response-docs/ and modify it to meet your organization's needs. Then, have it blessed as policy by management and train SREs and Devs on it.
To the other comments: I see there's a lot of people here who say they'd never do the SRE job, or return to doing it. I'm not discounting your fear or feelings of burnout. Been there. But, hear me out:
DevOps is not just about CI/CD pipelines and monitoring and Pagerduty. It's about having a culture where developers don't throw operational or security poop over a wall of confusion at sysadmin types as well as at their peers. This kind of organizational dysfunction can be devastating to a business.
DevOps at it's best is about about empathy. One of the best places I ever worked was filled with developers who had true empathy. They realized that an error or omission in their work could would wake up their Ops team at stupid o'clock in the morning, repeatedly - leading to all the things that drive SRE's and on-call folks literally insane. They practised strict TDD.
These developers volunteered to be second-tier on call after the ops team did triage, out of the kindness of their hearts for their coworkers. Management also led a culture of defending time to find permanent solutions to drive measured improvements in SLI.
SRE isn't about waking up at stupid o'clock every night to press buttons. It's about having a culture of driving permanent fixes and compensating by using cost-effective and appropriate cloud architectures. It's also about leading the working agreements with engineering teams to do blameless post-incident retros together and making the work bring your teams closer instead of pushing them apart.
I can't help but take away that a lot of you feel like On-Call heroics are what SRE is about. It's more difficult than that, but also less stressful, and simultaneously more rewarding when you get it right.
From Amateur Radio: Maidenhead grid squares + NATO phonetic alphabet are technical but adequate for purpose. It's hard to confuse "Foxtrot November Zero Three" with "Delta Mike Zero Four" even if you're communicating over a VHF/UHF satellite flying overhead in LEO.
You can get more or less specific by adding or removing symbols. Eg: "EK64ab" or just "EK". It's a challenge to log radio contacts from all of the major [AZ##] grids. https://twitter.com/GridMasterHeat
From April, Japan has been on top of this for a little while. Impressive science imho.
Should keep you busy and learning!
> ... In previous reports, we estimated the likely epidemic size in Wuhan City based on air traffic volumes and the number of detected cases internationally. Here we analysed COVID-19 cases exported from mainland China to different regions and countries, comparing the country-specific rates of detected and confirmed cases per flight volume to estimate the relative sensitivity of surveillance in different countries.
> Although travel restrictions from Wuhan City and other cities across China may have reduced the absolute number of travellers to and from China, we estimated that about two thirds of COVID-19 cases exported from mainland China have remained undetected worldwide, potentially resulting in multiple chains of as yet undetected human-to-human transmission outside mainland China.
They've also got a Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkIEEtcYxyshaVZ9ViNuAZA
And I've noticed a lot of the contributors on twitter are R developers.
Thanks to everyone on their team.
Caveat: I have not attained reception yet, because of obstacles.
The North America kit comes with:
- Low Noise Block Downconverter (LNB) antenna, capable of Ku-Band reception of the SES-2 satellite. Must be pointed very accurately: elevation, azimuth AND rotating for polarization
- Crappy little tripod, good enough to get started
- An acrylic laser-cut LNB collar to hold the antenna on the tripod, which I immediately snapped.
- A 1GHz arm based board with embedded software defined radio.
- An 802.11n dongle.
Here's a youtube overview of the desktop environment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TuNVC0Vw2Y&t=281s
Basically, the board receives compressed tar files in the data stream and caches them on a secondary microSD card. You access that content with various linux desktop apps served over a webdesktop.
Now I can run Terraform automatically when I get home to provision some tea! /s
At this point, I think we're all looking to the initial actors for some clarification.
Later, when I saw that Adafruit's revenue is about $22M a year, and the acquisition price was a $29M debt accrued prior, I started to doubt myself yet again!
It's fascinating to see the intense online waves this has made. People are truly fond of RadioShack's brand, and AdaFruit as an underdog.
Whatever the outcome, perhaps it's a good reality check for all of us in the age of "fake news".
Sources:
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-radioshack-kensingtoncapi...
- http://ubidestates.hibid.com/catalog/103245/radioshack-aucti...
Yet, the same phenomenon seems to exist in Berlin, where public drinking is tolerated if not encouraged and bottles can be returned to supermarkets.
In general, I wouldn't direct any condemnation upon individuals for scavenging... instead it's worth scrutinizing systems that encourage this waste.
"Keep America Beautiful" was founded by Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola...
I've been a sysadmin for 16 years. My experience, is that Toronto is extremely liberal and militantly tolerant. A bigoted insult upon someone on public transit or in the streets will not go without being criticized by the public. Even if you cast it in french.
We are proud of welcoming and integrating people.
https://nulogy.com/who-we-are/careers/ - Here are my company's core values. I think they're uniquely Canadian, in a way. Empathy is pretty much #1. Our HQ is downtown. I've never been happier and further from burnout as the ops manager at this gig.
Check out our local music scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IWZWo6IByM#t=53m44s techno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPZvNqNFaU8#t=50s hip hop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uev2J_cBHjQ rock
Lots of people want to live here, evident by rising rents :(.
The OP highlights an up and coming tech sector.
Kitchener-Waterloo (KW)... Yeah... The University of Waterloo has a great funnel system for cooperative intern students in Ontario. They put a lot of effort towards a kind of Mittelstand model. I'm nonplussed. Better self taught hackers are drawn to the urban core after failing out of post secondary.
RIM was a thing, once. Now it's a joke. I heard someone throw shade about RIM's big brother nature the other day.
I've coded puppet & chef for over 200+ startups. Startups are huge here and the culture is very social and enjoyable! Meetups are big! I regularly run into other new hackers in unrelated social settings. It's fun that way.
Uber is big. Dispensaries are big. Nightclubs are great. You can get food of any origin.
Cycling is huge here. Incorporating cycling into your transportation means living downtown is affordable, if you plan.
OH! Speaking of incorporating, in a business sense, it's trivial. You can do it in 30 minutes at city hall.
Toronto, in my experience, has been the most exciting, happy and loving city to call home. I'm truly in love with this city. It's safe, fun and full of opportunity. I love walking down the street and hearing eighteen different languages in one hour. I love seeing any world famous artists who would drop by Canada.
Anybody who's seriously interested in the Toronto scene should drop by http://techmasters.chat/ and talk to us. The tech scene is on fire here! It's so exciting! ...and very welcoming!
"I agree."
The audience laughs it up. Disgusting.
I used to work for the CBC and I think most of my colleagues are utterly ashamed of this outside the context of looking back on the wrong parts of our history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPIscmaIt8U&list=PL02T0JOKYE...
A couple of points to answer your questions:
- We do centralize our product strategy and portfolio planning, but we decentralize our release and iteration planning.
- We focus on building strong teams of diverse talent sets that are becoming more self managing. Teamwork is big for us, flying solo on any task is rare-r than in other places I've worked.
- Our management (and everyone else) are really accessible for a medium sized company. I have faith that if I sent a calendar invite to our C*O for a 15 min chat on a free timeslot, they'd show up. Of course, respect goes both ways and I wouldn't book their time unless I really needed them specifically and it couldn't be handled asynchronously.
Thanks for the questions!
We're even hiring. https://nulogy.com/careers
The "bad for humanity" thing this author is talking about is called "reality" in some circles. An economy is supposed to transmit the pain of dwindling resources by the proxy of dwindling money, so as a society we then act to conserve. The last decade of the US consumer and several US-led invasions of other countries probably wouldn't have happened without so much easy credit.
When the US borrows money from others, it burdens them with an eventual default risk. When the US makes unfunded future promises to americans like social security, and medicare, and inflates their dollar with QE, their people's pain is merely amplified and delayed.
I don't believe there is an absolute right or wrong answer to Keynesianism. A little is okay, too much is catastrophic. The US has been borrowing continuously for decades. I don't think you can really call that Keynesianism.
Sure, limited liquidity on exchanges like Cryptsy suggests that DOGE currently holds some* "real value" at present. I think it's best described as a high score contest. You can't sell a million USD worth of Doge to anybody right now, but that's not a bad thing! If a crypto-currency-game with a cute mascot gets more kids and teens into learning about computer science and math, we should find ways to keep it innocent and fun!
I remember running Distributed.net as a teenager, just to see how much processing power in keys per second I could personally muster. It was exciting because it taught the power and limitations of parallel computation.
To anybody who has managed to search and hack their way to mining their first Dogecoin (or anycoin) using only source code and blogs? Well done!!! You should consider this a great computing merit badge and maybe even a hacker rite of passage.
I hope future generations will have the same opportunity, community and incentives necessary to participate in the excitement of a gold rush, even if they can only make a actual pennies a day doing it. Having fun while learning at a young age is priceless.
(Looks like about 1.5 million DOGE / 1 BTC?)