Sheep Guarding Llama – Page 690 – Scott Alan Miller

March 31, 2010: Final Day Alone

We didn’t manage to get anything figured out but we know that I can get down tomorrow night to get Dominica, Liesl and Oreo so we are just stuck doing that. I have Friday off from work so I have a lot more flexibility tomorrow night than I do the rest of the week.

Again, nothing to report today. Worked in the office. Went home and got dinner from Mike’s Jersey Subs. Off to bed early. Long day ahead of me tomorrow.

Dominica has been telling me all of the new things that Liesl has been doing since I have been away. She has said her first sentence now! “I get down.” She has been learning a lot from hanging around her older cousin Garrett. She has started acting like a toddler now rather than an older baby. She is quite ahead of schedule in many ways now.

I really miss my family.

March 30, 2010: Home Alone

It is Tuesday morning and I am back in Irving, Texas but unfortunately Dominica, Liesl and Oreo are stuck down in Houston without having a way to get a ride back to Irving so I am stuck without them. It is really crappy to get back home after being away from everyone for so long and to have them be so far away that I am unable to get from Irving to Houston and back within any window of free time that I have available to me!

This morning I am back to the office. Back to the grind. The lonely grind. I went out for lunch, obviously, since I am all alone.

My evening was spent sleeping. I pretty much went to bed as soon as I got home. I am exhausted from this past week and all of the driving.

Sorry for SGL being so completely out of date. I am working hard to get caught up. I am behind on a lot of things these days.

Latency and Software Developers

I was recently having a conversation where someone asked me to compare real time and low latency Linux kernels. I used the phrase “real time is the enemy of low latency.” This caught some attention and I was asked to explain what I meant. In order to accommodate the needs of real time processing we need to add a certain amount of overhead so that we can accurately and reliably predicate the amount of time that a procedure will take to complete. In order to do this we incur a certain amount of overhead and this overhead contributes to latency. In order to move as quickly as possible we would have to remove this overhead and thereby decrease latency but without having the predictability for which the overhead had allowed.

Today I was reading a paper on Agile development and traditional software development methodologies and it occurred to me that we were essentially talking about the same concept. Programmers are a lot like organic, squishy CPUs chugging along churning out data. The concept behind traditional development methodologies (or schedulers, if you will) was to make sure that developers were able to turn out a project or a piece of a project in a predictable nature – so predictable that projects could be projected years in advance with meeting rooms scheduled and the caterers hired for the release party. This predictability is provided by the inclusion of a large amount of management overhead that hinders rapid development. All of those status meetings don’t come for free and incur large amounts of lost productivity in exchange for keeping management up to date as to the release schedule.

Agile development takes the opposite approach. In Agile the idea is not predictability, at least not to the same extreme level. Agile really focuses on producing software with minimal latency – getting it done and out the door as quickly as possible even if that ends up surprising the marketing and sales departments and no box art has been approved yet. It does this by lowering the management overhead and reducing artifacts that interfere with the actual job of producing a product allowing the team to move more quickly.

March 29, 2010: And on to home…

Got a good night’s sleep last night and I am ready to hit the road today. Unfortunately I have to work for the office this morning so I can’t hit the road nearly as early as I would like. So I was up around nine and worked from my laptop in the hotel until two in the afternoon which is when my gold membership with Choice Hotels entitles me to stay.

Jen was on the road early hoping to be off to Mississippi to hook up with a friend there before continuing on her way to Houston today. So we parted ways this morning. The last, long day is a lonely one. Before she left we went over to a restaurant right next door to the hotel called the Farmer’s Market or something to that effect. It was a southern style buffet (a la Golden Corral) but much nicer. The people were very friendly and the food was good. There was not much in the way of vegetarian as we had missed breakfast by fifteen minutes or so but being a buffet and as they had an all day omelet bar I was able to make due quite well.

I worked until two and was in the car and on the road around two thirty. It is a long drive from Dickson to Memphis, on to Little Rock and across Texarkana and on to Dallas. I did the entire route yesterday without the GPS and I did today as well. I really hate using the GPS unless it is absolutely necessary. Using it makes you sloppy and makes you stop paying attention to where you are going. I like learning my way around.

The trip went pretty well. I mostly listened to my iPod – catching up on IT Conversations podcasts as best as I can. I was very glad that I was able to drive almost all of the way across Arkansas today in daylight. The last time we came through it was dark and I missed out on seeing Arkansas on my first time through it. This was far more interesting. I got to see Memphis in the daylight and then a very large portion of Arkansas. It is actually a very beautiful state. But it is also very large and takes forever to drive across which is rather misleading. The trip across Arkansas runs from the northeastern corner all the way to the southwestern so it is incredibly long and gives a rather complete survey of the state.

By the time that I was going through Little Rock the sun was starting to go down and it was completely dark an hour or two before I reached Texarkana. Then I had to drive through East Texas and it was quite late by the time that I finally pulled in to Las Colinas and got into the apartment which I had not seen in over a week. It was great to be home but awful as the family is not here and we have no plans as to how I will be able to get down to Houston to get them. I don’t have enough free time in any given day to be able to make the trip. It is over ten hours round trip and I am worn out from lack of sleep and too much driving. We are going to start working on a plan tomorrow as to what we are going to do to get them.

March 28, 2010: Chalfont to Nashville

Today the driving begins. Another long, long stretch of blacktop stretches out before me. I can’t believe how much driving I am doing this week. This is definitely a life record for me. In total, not including the extra several hundred miles that I have not figured out when I am going to do yet to go to Houston to pick up Dominica and Liesl, I am going to have driven approximately 4,400 miles or 7,100 kilometers in about eight days!

We were not up all that early this morning. Sleep was more important than an early start. We are cutting the drive to Texas in half which makes it not really all that bad, considering. Driving from Chalfont, on the north side of Philadelphia, to the west side of Nashville should actually be quite easy.

I don’t know exactly what time we got onto the road but I am guessing that it was around ten this morning when Jen and I headed out the door from Tara’s house to start out journey south. Jen is driving the Mazda and I am driving the BMW.

The weather was perfect today and we made awesome time as we worked out way south down towards Knoxville where we had scheduled to meet up for dinner and to get our picture taken at the new Spice Rack Cantina which is a new restaurant in town. SpiceWorks is running a photo contest for the Spiciest photograph and we are guessing that that can be had by stopping in there. We have our SpiceWorks nylon bags from SpiceWorld 2009 to use for the photo. We figure that there is no way that we can lose with a picture from there.

We got into Knoxville pretty late considering that it was a Sunday and we were definitely worried that Spice Rack would be closed by the time that we got to it. It was not although it was quite slow and seemed like it would not be open for much longer. We got dinner there and then asked the crew if they wouldn’t mind getting a picture with us for our competition. They were happy to oblige and when the picture was posted to SpiceWorks we were told that we pretty much have the competition in the bag, so to speak. It will certainly be hard for anyone to beat out this picture for the spiciest SpiceWorks picture!

After dinner it was back on the road for several more hours. We drove through Nashville and started looking for a hotel on the far side so that when we hit the road in the morning Nashville would be behind us as would its traffic. We ended up finding a Comfort Inn in Dickson, Tennessee which was very cheap and worked out great. Tomorrow night I will be home in Dallas.