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Of Data, Pipes, and Contexts
Apr. 18th, 2023 04:00 pmThe past two days have been taken up with delivering training workshops and the two days previous a hefty proportion of the time spent generating new content and revision for said courses, along with marking assignments for the university's Cluster and Cloud computing unit. From the latter there were a few assignments that made me think "What on earth are they doing?" and a few where the students quite clearly understood what was going on; which I would hope for a master's level course. As for the training workshops, the Parallel Processing was in need of a decent revision and I had new content for GNU Parallel in particular. Alas, this meant that the content that I had for the debugging and profiling part of the workshop was cut shorter than what I would have liked. Then, for the new course, HPC Databases, I delivered pretty good content on the file system, data management and resources, and especially embedded databases with job submission, but when it came to the rather major component of database servers I'd left out a line in the configuration in the midst of a live demonstration - so nothing worked after that.
In the midst of this, the kitchen sink suffered a blockage. I tried the usual methods - plunger, hot water, baking soda and vinegar, wire, caustic soda - before resigning myself to some home maintenance. I'm not afraid of such things having lived in houses with questionable plumbing in the past (ahh, those Accelerated House days), so working step-wise from the drain basket I removed the piping piece-by-piece to discover that there was a fine collection of immovable gunk in the trap that was causing the problem. It's a wet and messy business, so I put it all back together and thought the problem was solved. Alas, my enthusiasm for pipe removal meant that the twenty-year-old plumber's putty had given out and now I have leaking pipes, so a trip to collect some silicone as a replacement is in order.
I've taken both events in rather good humour. It all rather reminded me of one of my earliest forays into this profession (IT in a general sense) when I worked as a volunteer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Timor-Leste twenty years ago. That had more than a few challenging issues, to say the least, given the lack of basic infrastructure or even a semi-reliable electricity supply. In the early months I my time there I had the opportunity to spend some time with one Gabriel Accascina who was responsible for setting up the satellite link so that the (refounded) new country have at least some sort of link to the wider Internet. His previous background included developing a sewerage system in Bangladesh. "It's all shit through pipes", I quipped. But it really is; the data (like the spice) must flow. A lesson plan that doesn't quite work out, a blocked sink. All of these fade into the category of "first-world problems" in comparison to getting just basic infrastructure in place.
In the midst of this, the kitchen sink suffered a blockage. I tried the usual methods - plunger, hot water, baking soda and vinegar, wire, caustic soda - before resigning myself to some home maintenance. I'm not afraid of such things having lived in houses with questionable plumbing in the past (ahh, those Accelerated House days), so working step-wise from the drain basket I removed the piping piece-by-piece to discover that there was a fine collection of immovable gunk in the trap that was causing the problem. It's a wet and messy business, so I put it all back together and thought the problem was solved. Alas, my enthusiasm for pipe removal meant that the twenty-year-old plumber's putty had given out and now I have leaking pipes, so a trip to collect some silicone as a replacement is in order.
I've taken both events in rather good humour. It all rather reminded me of one of my earliest forays into this profession (IT in a general sense) when I worked as a volunteer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Timor-Leste twenty years ago. That had more than a few challenging issues, to say the least, given the lack of basic infrastructure or even a semi-reliable electricity supply. In the early months I my time there I had the opportunity to spend some time with one Gabriel Accascina who was responsible for setting up the satellite link so that the (refounded) new country have at least some sort of link to the wider Internet. His previous background included developing a sewerage system in Bangladesh. "It's all shit through pipes", I quipped. But it really is; the data (like the spice) must flow. A lesson plan that doesn't quite work out, a blocked sink. All of these fade into the category of "first-world problems" in comparison to getting just basic infrastructure in place.
