I visited Bury Court yesterday which claims to have two of the finest contemporary gardens in the country, designed by Christopher Blakely-Hole & Peter Oudolf. It’s been explained to me that ‘contemporary’ means lots of grasses, and a ‘Tea House’, …
Semantic footprints through time
On the oracle blog, I wrote a little piece on prompting for tags and categories. I was very taken with the idea from Elias Torres that there should be Karma rewards for innovating the vocabulary and was struggling with how to cope with words changing meaning. My contemporary example was “High Availability”. I very briefly looked at the way prompting inhibited innovation of the vocabulary. …
Che Guevara: Revolutionary & Icon in London
I visited the V&A’s Guevara, Revolutionary & Icon exhibition. This exhibition is based on the famous photographic image of him and its use, so less political and a bit more design. Lawrence Lewellyn Bownen does socialism. Sadly the V&A prohibited photographs, even of the plaques they made themselves. So here is a re-sized copy from wikipedia and some comments about some of the other exhibits. …
A bit of personal downtime
Originally posted as three articles on my sun/oracle blog, I went to Greece on holiday, and had an exciting journey through Gatwick on my way out as BAA responded to the heightened security threats, I shared my reading, Benkler’s “Wealth of Networks and Younge’s “Stranger in a strange land” and got home safely. …
Vienna & London
I was planning a trip to Vienna, and also wrote a little bit about how to treat London as a tourist, a treat it took me another three years to do. …
My personal planet
I documented the fact I got a planet feed aggregator running. The notes eventually made their way to my wiki.
ooOOOoo
Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, reposted here as a diary/pointer in April 2016. …
The New Statesman, Episode 2006
We, that is Mrs L & I, went to see “The New Statesman, Episode 2006”, staring Rik Mayall as Alan B’stard on Saturday. Marsha Fitzalan also reprises her role as his wife Sarah. Sadly, no new jokes, its the same old B’stard, using politics to make money, and have as much, if a bit too fast sex as possible. He’s joined New Labour and works in No. 9 Downing St now. …
Is Web 2.0 relevant to a systems architect?
On my old sun/oracle blog, I wrote a piece reporting some thoughts about whether Web 2.0 was more than a marketing slogan, and Sun’s decision to market its first storage appliance as web 2.0 server. On re-reading the original article, what comes through is my confusion about the then web 2.0 syndrome and the need and role of systems like the x4500 aka Thumper. This version of the article has been edited; some words about my experimenting with Yahoo’s 1st generation PaaS has been removed. I obviously thought this was part of the future but the reality was that (for that type of application) it fell through the gap between IaaS on which I host this blog, and SaaS, (flickr, google maps and wordpress.com), the first two of which I integrate into the blog, and the latter is a competitor technology. …
Rethinking the ‘Labs visit
On my sun/oracle blog, I reprised my recent visit to the Sun Labs open days firstly by pointing at Ashlee Vance’s article; he had also visited the Labs at the beginning of June, and wrote up his findings more rapidly than me. The link is still live here…. The article covers some stuff I didn’t follow through on, and offers a segue into games serverplex designs. The article is headlined “Sun Labs edges toward practicality”, and suggests his interests were more short-term than mine.
I had delayed the write up and publication, I had a lot to say and these things take time. The original articles in June reflect what I thought at the time. I have since spoken to both colleagues and customers and recognise that some of my priorities were a bit awry and I may not have given some subjects sufficient attention, in particular, I didn’t visit many of the “Virtualisation” projects available and haven’t reported on those I did visit such as “Project Crossbow”, a network interface virtualisation and resource management project. …
Back to Amsterdam
I spent the weekend in Amsterdam, and reported it on my sun/oracle blog. It’s just a travelog, and so I have made this pointer article much shorter. I have posted a full set slide show on this page though, the original only has two photos but catalogues places I and Mrs L. visited. …