Author Archives: Jacques Chester

Review: Drift into Failure

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While having lunch with Ken Parish last week, I chatted a bit about a very long book review I wrote a few weeks ago, published on my personal blog. He asked me to cross-post it to Troppo. Enjoy.

Drift into Failure, by Sidney Dekker, is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while.

“Thought provoking” is usually a shorthand used by buttered-up friends of the author to mean “I agree” or “he/she provided a great blurb for my dust jacket and now I’m returning the favour”.

But in this case, I found that the book provoked a lot of thought on my part. It tied to a lot of other books I’ve read in the past year or so, some of which I’ll name check.

So … what’s it about?

Dekker discusses how complex systems ‘fail’ in unforeseen ways. He characterises some of these failures as ‘drifts’. The system didn’t visibly zoom towards failure; there was no massive perturbation, no onrushing catastrophe, not even dark clouds on the horizon. In a drift-failure, the failure just happens, and only afterwards is there any chance of diagnosing the whys and hows.

Drift essentially crosses two fields of work. The first is reliability / failure studies and the second is complex systems. I’m not very familiar with reliability studies except through a Chinese-whispers version that has been transmitted via software operations literature. I feel that I have a more-than-nodding acquaintance with systems theory through a uni course and my own reading in that area.

To a reader unfamiliar with either body of thought, this book might be a bit difficult. Dekker isn’t really addressing the book to the layperson, it’s really addressed to practitioners reliability/failure field. Dekker’s ultimate hypothesis is that a “Newtonian-Cartesian” approach to failure does not and cannot address failures in complex systems.

If you’re not from the reliability field, Dekker’s writing is a bit like being an atheist at a theological debate. Interesting, but a little hard to follow in parts. But boy does he have lots of points to make.

I respectfully disagree

I don’t think Dekker quite nails his case down. For the rest of the review I will try to explain why. Hang on, because it’s a long, circuitous ride.

Continue reading →

Planned Outage Tonight

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Hello everyone, it’s your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant here.

I plan to migrate our servers to a different data centre tonight. There will be some disruption during the move, and it may take time for your DNS records to be updated.

We’re moving from the Fremont data centre, which has turned out to be about as reliable as a Ford Pinto, to the Dallas data centre (I look forward to your big-hats-and-oil jokes).

Comment subscriptions

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As some of you know, we’ve had a hit-and-miss experience with comment subscription plugins. The plugin we were previously using broke when we upgraded to 3.2.1 and made it impossible to unsubscribe.

We’ve switched to another plugin which requires “double opt-in”. I’d be interested in any feedback Troppodillians might have on their experience so far.

Planned outage this Sunday

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Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan tyrant here.

To perform some important maintenance on the site, it will be necessary to deactivate all Ozblogistan blogs temporarily on Sunday afternoon. I am expecting to take the site down around 2pm, central standard time, for up to two hours.

Ozblogistan will grow larger

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For some time now I, your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant, have been considering expanding the Ozblogistan family. For my thesis research I require a larger pool of blogs under management.

To that end, I have opened up a second server for Ozblogistan. Shortly, one server will handle the database while the original server handles the web side of things.

This will (theoretically) speed up performance and make it easier for me to grow Ozblogistan.

This decision is unrelated to the recent stoushing (though the stoushing may lead to other changes in future).

What this means:

  1. All Ozblogistan sites will be offline tonight while I make the transfer. I will begin at 5pm Central Standard Time. The upgrade is complete.
  2. I am looking for more tenants. I wish to continue hosting high-quality Australian blogs. While I don’t mind more blogs like the wonkish ones I have, I would also like to diversify as well. If you have a good blog you want to live alongside Club Troppo, Larvatus Prodeo, Catallaxy Files, Andrew Norton and Skepticlawyer, send me an email. If you have a favourite blog who you think should join the network, tell me (and them). The more the merrier, I’m building a big bus.

To keep discussion of this matter centralised, I have disabled comments everywhere except on the main Ozblogistan entry.

Thank you for your attention.

Updates

Taking the plunge:

Face palm (now with added crow-eating)

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Quoth (someone apparently imitating) Bronwyn Bishop:

Mr Assange should be aggressively interrogated until he reveals the location of the stolen cables, so they can be retrieved.

This is wrong on at least two levels. Given Australia’s record in matching MPs and ministries she’ll wind up as Attorney-General and Minister for Communication.

Update: That said, I might be the victim of a most excellent troll.

Bravo, trolls. Bravo. The art of high quality trolling demands that the trolling be entirely believable. IHBT. IHL. HAND.

Ozblogistan News, Part Deux

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Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan Overlord here.

Last week I wrote briefly about slowness being caused by attempts to debug a comments plugin used by several Ozblogistan blogs — Brian’s Latest Comments — in the context of Larvatus Prodeo. It transpires that LP’s database of comments was too large to process without causing errors and slowdowns. During the week I worked on various modifications; these ‘work’ in that they have the correct behaviour and don’t crash, but in actual use they have proved to be unacceptably slow.

Consequently I have asked our blogs to deactivate the offending plugin for a few weeks. Our busiest, Catallaxy Files and Larvatus Prodeo, have done so, which should for now improve performance for everyone.

Why have I asked them to deactivate it for a few weeks? Because yours truly is moving to Darwin to take up a new job. I won’t have my usual computer for 3 weeks, according to the removalists. Once I am settled in I have another plan of attack to try, but until then I will not be in a position to easily fix things. Until then, enjoy the blogging.