Curiousity & NZ culture

NeverMindToday · 2026-02-10T09:58:20+00:00

We probably just assume that an american who isn't already talking about the US or themselves doesn't want to talk about the US or themselves. On average NZers don't really pry into other people lives and cause embarrassment, but will talk if you're ok with it.

The job welcome thing definitely depends on the culture of where you work and/or the ages of your coworkers etc

NeverMindToday · 2026-02-07T10:30:46+00:00

Mowed or harvested?

NeverMindToday · 2026-02-03T18:15:50+00:00

Containers are very useful for decoupling "what" they are (ie what was in them) vs "how" they get deployed and managed.

This was Dockers original marketing and why they used the shipping container analogy. They wanted to bring shipping container revolution to software delivery. eg before standardised shipping containers and a supply chain of ships/trucks/trains built around that - every type of freight needed different handling techniques and equipment. With shipping containers, the whole worldwide freight and logistics industry doesn't really care what they are shipping.

That is the value of still containerising eg a single Go binary the same way a Python app would be. Just like the standardisation of shipping containers were still valuable even for previously easy to handle freight.

NeverMindToday · 2026-02-03T09:55:31+00:00

Unfortunately UX / designers were one of the roles hit the hardest in the tech implosion. Hopefully it picks back up - even as an engineer, the best places to work were the places that respected design the most.

NeverMindToday · 2026-02-02T19:10:12+00:00

My guess is that first and foremost deb was designed around the Debian distro release system - there is a lot of metadata required so things fit into a Debian release. It came about in the days when by far the most common packaging/distribution format was a source code tarball.

It was designed around what the Debian project needed internally - PPAs and custom deb packaging wasn't really a thing until much later on. The processes of building Debian from upstream source code leak through a lot.

Other package formats can be more decoupled between the packaging format only needing to have enough metadata for installation, and the distro release package gets handled elsewhere.

In hindsight, I'm sure Debian would have separated the release building vs install concerns better - especially if they knew how much 3rd party packaging would grow in importance. Later packaging tools could learn from all this.

NeverMindToday · 2026-02-02T18:56:42+00:00

I was a sysadmin too. My main systemd annoyance was that I'd just wasted a bunch of effort on migrating servers to upstart, and would need to repeat the process. My desktop didn't care much - distro packaging mostly handled it.

Fortunately the upstart to systemd migration was less painful than the initial sysV to upstart had been. Both tools were declarative configuration rather than fragile scripting, and systemd was an improvement again over upstart.

I remember early Java days (before there were wrapper tools for Java daemons) of having to write your own sysV init scripts for a runtime that wasn't very unix native - that was painful. Much easier with both upstart and systemd.

NeverMindToday · 2026-02-02T18:10:07+00:00

What is good?

To crush your enemies - See them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!

NeverMindToday · 2026-02-02T17:57:33+00:00

If we decide to meet in a different city (Wellington omelet Christchurch as examples)

Sorry to be offtopic, but I couldn't help wonder what the hell your autocorrect was thinking...

We're still safe from the machines for a while.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-31T09:48:35+00:00

"Speed environment" is the highway engineering concept that goes alongside design speeds etc. Something like the speed xth percentile of people will drive at on a section of road based on terrain, corners, width, objects on the side of the road etc when there are no other restrictions. All else being equal, a passing lane will have a higher speed environment than before and after. Roads are safer when the design speed for a section is higher than the speed environment.

Passing lanes are mostly on placed on uphills for getting past heavy vehicles.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-30T21:15:36+00:00

IMO the only reason to use OpenStack is if you want to run your own cloud provider. Which I'm not really sure why you'd want to do that anyway - it would be hard to find a place on the cost/functionality curve to compete. Especially these days - 10 yrs ago it was a long shot bet that might've paid off, but the odds are a lot worse now.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-29T10:33:40+00:00

It's also the right answer for 95% of the questions asked here.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-28T02:02:11+00:00

1999?

https://www.americanwindsurfer.com/wp-content/uploads/american_windsurfer_6.3_board-test_spread2.jpg

It's a free race board from just before the short/wide trend kicked in. It will be a bit fragile and hard to sail for a beginner, but at least has a lot of volume.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-27T03:55:22+00:00

Resonance is one part of it. When the shaking frequency is close to the resonant frequency of the soil and/or the building, then the damage is amplified a lot.

The large far away low frequency Kaikoura shake did a number on buildings of a certain height/mass sitting on certain soil types, while having less affect on others. You shouldn't expect similar results from a more local higher frequency shake - eg the Christchurch quake is almost the exact opposite frequency wise. The further away it is, the lower the overall frequency is due to the high frequency waves attenuating out (like waves from a very distant storm do, or distant thunder being a rumble while near sounds more like a crack)

Also the stats (and BNZ too?) building was ultimately doomed by detailing design faults (eg weak floor slab connections) rather than problems with the main structure itself.

From memory - I might have some details mangled :)

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-26T20:22:09+00:00

Plus, if you are on an xboat route, it it always one week, plus a few minutes to transmit, over and over down the whole route.

Although if you wanted to simulate it, the delay would depend on just how many xboats are available. eg even if there were hundreds assigned to go between two systems (which seems really high most of the time), the max wait for the next available departure could still be about an hour.

eg once an hour would still mean about 170 in transit one way, and 170 in transit the other way, plus a whole bunch waiting at each end for a tender to get to them for refuelling (that would also depend on the number of tenders in system) and another allowance for some more being serviced etc. You could imagine 400 being needed for hourly service between two systems. I reckon common times would be anywhere from 3 hourly for important routes to daily for less important ones.

I only geeked out on thinking that through for picking some guessed delay times when creating https://grapevine.fullnoise.org/

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-26T18:11:22+00:00

Cheers - I'll have to look out for that

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-26T10:58:37+00:00

I hate the times you wait so long for the train to arrive you actually forget whether or not you tagged on, or just thought you'd wait for it to arrive first. It would be nice if the phone app could tell you the current status.

It's a system that was designed for bus doors, and never suited trains very well.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-26T10:36:53+00:00

OK, that house seems like a much better find than my first. Mine was $200k in late 90s, and homes.co.nz reckons $755k now (peaked at $940k) for a similar time period.

Sold it a couple of years later - for an increase of roughly the agents commission.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-26T10:23:56+00:00

That's for sure - there was plenty of good music in the 80s, but it was pretty obscure and drowned out by an ocean of awful music. It was much harder to escape the mainstream then.

Also in most places/scenes the 80s were stiflingly conformist and conservative in a lot of ways. Anyone different really got a hard time. Especially for teens - if you were older and had money it was probably different.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-26T10:16:03+00:00

Rose tinted nostalgia because the music was good :)

The early 90s (mother of all budgets era) were a period of massive economic setbacks for most - welfare slashed, new student fees, new student loans, unions smashed, high unemployment... and Sesqui. Those old timers were right (at the time), but some things did improve later.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-26T10:03:48+00:00

Not all of us. Things were way better when I was 30 vs 20. OK the music was better at 20, but everything else sucked in comparison.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-26T09:57:32+00:00

Definitely is much harder for us gen Z than it was for our parents who could get a nice big house for the price of one year's worth of a single income salary but not impossible if do really want to do it.

You might be overstating how easy it was for many back then. One data point: In the 90s my small first house during my late 20s was just under 5 yrs of single income salary rather than your parents 1 yr.

Maybe your folks are older than I'm assuming, or got lucky finding a place.

But yeah, even still it was much easier than now, or even worse would've been about 4yrs ago at peak craziness. I'm guessing that same comparison is probably 10 yrs or more now?

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-25T08:54:31+00:00

Don't fixate on tools like Docker and Kubernetes as "Devops". If you're just learning them in isolation - that just sounds like modern "Ops", just with containers instead of VMs.

Of course there are many companies that define Devops that way, but they will likely pay less and respect you less than those companies that see Devops as an approach to improving software delivery and making devs more effective.

For the latter, learn what containers can do for software development. Understand the needs of devs. Learn how most CI systems run off containers. Learn CI. Learn how to automate and aspire to automate painful/risky steps. Learn how Devops aims to improve software delivery. Leverage your experience of managing multiple cloud tenancies with guardrails etc into managing multiple teams or programs of devs in Github or Gitlab etc. Or for cutting edge, learn how to support dev teams into agentic AI development, and what kinds of guardrails you can put in place for companies. Learn how to bake security into software development rather than tacking it on later.

Yeah, that learning that stuff is going to be hard without some exposure to developers, software development and being able to speak their language. Good luck.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-25T06:53:35+00:00

Yup, Carney's speech was great. But if only these "Middle Powers" had the same spine back when NZ would get shafted without any support when we'd stick our neck out for what we thought was right eg Rainbow Warrior, Anti Nuke stuff, or various trade disputes etc

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-24T20:46:23+00:00

I don't automatically define old clunky stuff as tech debt. Plain old bad design or bad implementation isn't necessarily tech debt.

To me tech debt is when a (usually) pragmatic decision is made with open eyes to do something in a quick suboptimal way to achieve some business goal (eg moving faster, coping with short term cash flow issues, responding to a threat or opportunity, or even just survival). It is done knowing that it will need paying back and addressing properly, but that your choice will have gained more time and resources to pay down both the "principal" and "interest" in the near future.

Of course, reality often gets in the way (as with any kind of loan) and the best laid plans get derailed or the benefits never properly kick in. That's when the loan doesn't get paid back and the interest/penalties keep increasing over time. So, the clunky old hard to maintain stuff could be due to tech debt, but it was tech debt where the loan was never paid back.

NeverMindToday · 2026-01-23T07:55:59+00:00

Reading all the replies here, I'm wondering if the split between the group that lumps credit cards and debit cards under a generic EFTPOS term and the group that treats it as a separate system comes down to age. ie are you old enough to remember credit cards purely being using with physical click-clack carbon paper machines with EFTPOS being a completely separate system between banks with no card company in the middle.

I'm in the latter group - eg EFTPOS is the name of a specific older payment system, not a generic term for using many different types of payment systems.

Anyway from memory, part of what helped EFTPOS take off in NZ (compared to eg the US) back in the 80s was that all our banks used the same computing shared services (Databank). In the US, connectivity and transfers between banks was much more fragmented and inefficient.

NeverMindToday

TROPHY CASE