Letter to Anneliese Dodds MP: Support for the Labour Left

Dear Anneliese Dodds MP, 

I have voted for you in the last two elections, as a proxy for my support for Jeremy Corbyn, though your attendance and performance at the hustings arranged by the Stop the War Coalition was a reason for my support for you personally. 

For me to vote for you again I would need to see your support for the left of the Labour party,  and the mass movement built by Jeremy Corbyn; should you instead side with the faction which has suspended him you will lose my support. 

best wishes 
Tim Pizey

Victory in Europe (VE) Day in Churchill's Toyshop

My grandfather, Norman Angier,

worked at Churchill’s Toyshop (M.D.1) as the head civilian engineer during WWII.

On VE day “Norman Angier felt it was an occasion for fireworks. He therefore acquired a large batch of quite big rockets and proceeded to poop them off, selecting as his firing site a point at the summit of a concrete road which led down to the ranges and the CMP’s camp. Unlike the Guy Fawkes day rockets, these were not provided with sticks for poking into the ground to keep the bodies upright ; but Norman had fixed up some sort of stand for doing this. All went well for a while and the show was most spectacular. Then Norman got careless. A rocket he had just initiated was not properly secured. It fell over, and instead of going up vertically proceeded at speed in the near horizontal plane. A weary CMP was walking along this road on his way back to the camp. The rocket struck him right on target. Luckily, he was not seriously hurt and we soon whipped him off to hospital . The trouble was to make him believe that the attack was not intentional. He had been the victim of a 1000 to 1 chance.”

Clean git blame history

Place the following in a command file, run it within your repo:

#!/bin/sh
 
git filter-branch --env-filter '
 
an="$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
am="$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"
cn="$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME"
cm="$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL"
 
if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "timp@paneris.org" ]
then
    an="Tim Pizey"
    am="timp21337@paneris.org"
fi
 
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "timp@paneris.org" ]
then
    cn="Tim Pizey"
    cm="timp21337@paneris.org"
fi

export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$an"
export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$am"
export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$cn"
export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$cm"
'

Then git push -f origin master Note that this process is very slow so do not repeat for every change: add all the changes you want to make and perform in one pass.

Disaster Recovery: A Dynamic Redundancy Approach

The problem with disaster planning is that it is not rehearsed. When you need to retrieve a file from backup is when you discover that your backup has been broken for three months.

Modern cloud systems, based upon software defined infrastructure and redundant, auto-scaling fleets of micro-services, come with disaster recovery built in. They are designed to be resilient against DDoS attacks, unexpected peaks in usage and continent wide unavailability.

Some systems have yet to migrate to outsourced infrastructure, some never will migrate. For these systems we need a Disaster Recovery Strategy which can be implemented within reasonable costs and ideally does not suffer from the fails when needed feature of many backup systems. One answer is to do regular fire drills. No one would dispute the importance of fire drills in saving lives and ensuring that people know what to do in the case of a real fire, however we all know there is a big difference between a rehearsal and the real thing.

The key insight in the modern cloud architectures is that every version of a system is the same (at a particular time).

We can reduce this to a minimal redundant system: a pair of identical systems with one designated Primary and the other Secondary, with a standard data mirroring link from Primary to Secondary.

To ensure that both elements of the pair really can function as the Primary you could rehearse a cutover one weekend.

But if the two systems really are identical then there is no reason to reverse the cutover at the end of the rehearsal. The old Secondary is the new Primary, the old Primary is the new Secondary. The Primary can be swapped at a periodicity the business is comfortable with, say twice a year.

This Dynamic Redundancy strategy ensures that your Disaster Recovery works when you need it to and can be adjusted according to the business' appetite for risk.

Direct access to SonarQube Postgresql Database

I want to change to change the name of a sonarqube project. This cannot be done without performing another analysis. You can just do it in SQL https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30511849/how-to-rename-a-project-in-sonarqube-5-1 but you have to be able to login to the database. Postgresql is very secure. A quick fix is to edit /var/lib//pgsql/pg_hba.conf change local connections from ident to trust:

# TYPE  DATABASE    USER        CIDR-ADDRESS          METHOD

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all         all                               trust
# IPv4 local connections:
host    all         all         127.0.0.1/32          trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all         all         ::1/128               trust

Now you can edit:

psql -U sonarqube -W sonar

and finally:

UPDATE projects
SET  name = 'NEW_PROJECT_NAME',
long_name = 'NEW_PROJECT_NAME'
WHERE kee = 'PROJECT_KEY'

Thames path improvements - Letter to Oxfordshire County Council

I have sent the following letter to LTS.Team AT oxfordshire.gov.uk in response to https://consultations.oxfordshire.gov.uk/consult.ti/OxfordRiversideRoutes/.

 

Hi,

 

I have submitted the following via the questionnaire:

 

The Oxpens bridge should move upstream to parallel the railway bridge with a path extension besides railway to station. Getting from Thames/railway station to canal towpath and up to Kidlington Airport and Kidlington new housing extension needed. Second bridge, again parallel to rail bridge needed to access Science Park.

 

I have used the Thames towpath for commuting to Osney Mead industrial estate for three months and for work on Cornmarket for three years. I also used the path for three months to commute to Kidlington (Oxford Airport) but it is too arduous and much to my sadness I now cycle on the road, so have trenchant views on the difficulty of cycle commuting in Oxford.

 

I understand that there is a plan to build many new houses in the Kidlington gap, between Summertown and Kidlington.

 

These new commuters would very much appreciate a functioning cycle route into the centre of town.

 

The new Oxford Parkway should be integrated into this cycle route.

 

The problem facing cyclists is not how to get from the towpath to the Centre, this is served by the pipe bridge, the pedestrian crossing down stream and Folley Bridge. What is needed is easy access to the railway station which could be easily achieved by a bridge parallel to the railway bridge and then along railway land to the station itself.

 

Cyclists wishing to get from the Thames to the canal have to continue to Osney, cross the road and then fiddle around the Thames onto the canal path, which is in a very poor state, then up to Kingsbridge and all the way through Kidlington to the Oxford Airport.

 

Finally the Thames path should connect the Science Park, and the planned new housing at Littlemore. This again could be achieved by a cycle bridge parallel to the existing railway bridge down stream from the bypass underpass.

 

I really welcome the proposals but would urge you to consider extending its scope and vision. This could be such a good route and would show that Oxford is a cycling city.

 

best regards Tim Pizey

-- Tim Pizey - http://tim.pizey.uk/

Tell, don't ask

More than twelve years ago Tim Joyce passed on some programming wisdom:

With programs tell don't ask, vice versa for people.

This was a bit abstract for me at the time but last night it came back to me as what is wrong with the code I am currently working on. We store our application configuration in a table in the system's target database and whenever some configuration is needed it is looked up in the database. There was no problem with this approach when the code was written because JUnit had not been invented and testing was not the main part of our discipline. However to write a test we would need a database present, which is an obstacle to fast, distinct, unit tests and has been a blocker to writing tests.

Noncompliant Code Example

public class Example { 
  private String path;
  public void logPath() {
    try {
      path = CachedSystemParameter.getInstance().
                 getParameterValue("PATH");
    } catch (SystemParameterException e) {
      logger.error("[BUSINESS] Error while retrieving system parameter PATH", e);
    }
    logger.info("Path: " + path);
  }
}

Compliant Code Example

By adding sftpPath to the class constructor we can test the business logic without the need for a database fixture.

public class Example { 

  private String path;

  public Example() { 
    this(CachedSystemParameter.getInstance().
                 getParameterValue("PATH"));
  }

  public Example(String path) { 
    this.path = path;
  } 

  public void logPath() {
    logger.info("Path: " + path);
  }
}