Choosing the services to compare

I’ve tried to select VPS and Cloud instances specifications that are broadly equivalent in terms of RAM, disk space, and bandwidth offered for this study. What’s not so obvious is the computational power offered, and I’d like to state that I’ve benchmarked nothing at all, so don’t take this as a scientific recommendation, just my take on a big topic.

The VPS baseline is comprised of some tried and tested, and trusted, services.

• A bottom of the range 512MB Memset miniserver VPS, which is a low cost baseline I’ve used for years.
• A comparable 512MB Slicehost VPS.
• A Brightbox Nano VPS, which is comparable to the Brightbox Cloud instances I’m trialling.

Things weren’t so simple in the Cloud.

Most VPS services come with a fixed amount of monthly bandwidth included in the price, but their Cloud equivalents exclude bandwidth. Cloud bandwidth is charged by unit of resource you use, per GB for example, and often at a different rate for incoming and outgoing traffic. These costs are largely independent of the type of instance, so happily for my analysis they don’t reduce my options.

Rackspace make the point that the AWS offerings are much higher specification than needed by most web applications, and I found that it’s a valid claim that ruled out all but the Micro instance.

So, in the end I chose these options for the Cloud team.

• AWS Micro On Demand instance
• AWS Micro Reserved instance, which is the same but incurs a booking fee upfront in exchange for lower hourly rates.
• A 512MB Rackspace instance that’s hopefully comparable to the Slicehost VPS above.

Unfortunately Amazon have complicated the economics of the Micro instance by removing all storage. This is provided by attached EBS – bless Amazon and their abbreviations – which is priced according to it’s own model based on volume size and the number of requests: another cost to consider alongside bandwidth.

My analysis

To simplify things, I’ve used the baseline Memset VPS service as the benchmark against which to assess the other options, but something to note is that some of these services were prices in USD and others in GBP. Attempting to make this as consistent I drew up a list of assumptions for this analysis.

1. Production has 8760 hours of annual use.
2. Staging has 1152 hours of annual use.
3. Exchange rate of 1.6 (USD/GBP).
4. I/O request rate of 1.3 requests per second.
5. Production traffic is split 90% outgoing and 10% incoming.
6. Staging bandwidth is split evenly between outgoing and incoming traffic.

I then tried running my model at under three traffic conditions that I consider to represent low, medium and high volume. These were 10GB, 50GB and 100GB per month respectively; trust me, I don’t need to worry about anything higher at the moment.

OK this makes Brightbox seem very expensive, and it is, but I should point out that their Nano VPS is backed by a separate MySQL cluster and includes a New Relic standard account. None of the other providers do any of this, but since they’re one of my current hosts I’ve added them anyway. After all, I did this analysis primarily for my own benefit.

Oh, and the step change you can see in the cost for Memset under high traffic was due to a one-off fee for increased bandwidth, the base allowance is 50GB/month. The other VPS services had sufficient allowance for all my test cases.

So how does the Cloud stack up in production?

It seems that these bottom end instances are relatively competitively priced against these VPS services, with only Memset offering me a better deal. The costs also scale directly producing a nice smooth progression in expenses as traffic increases.

As mentioned before, an AWS reserved instance requires an upfront commitment that’s a large proportion of the total annual cost. That’s fine if you’re sure you’re going to use it throughout the year, as a production server probably, but it’s not very Cloud-like. Still, under these conditions it does appear to offer overall savings relative to all the competition except Memset at intermediate loads.

If you can afford a production Cloud, testing is even better

The real advantages come if you’re in a position to use an identical platform for production and testing. If the cloud is competitive with a VPS at your routine levels of traffic, then it’s going to offer even better value as a pre-production testing environment.

I decided that the best way to investigate staging in the Cloud was to reduced the number of hours I’d need the instance for each month, scale the bandwidth proportionally, and rerun the original model. I chose an arbitrary 96 hours (4 days) each month for testing purposes, it could be more, but could quite easily be less depending on the type of project.

This chart shows the effect of reduced usage for each of the Cloud instances in the analysis above, and the advantages of the hourly Cloud contract are obvious as the cost scales directly.

If I’m using a VPS then I’m forced to use another VPS on a monthly contract if I want an identical staging platform, and this is much more expensive than using any of the Cloud alternatives presented here.

Conclusions

Will I be moving to the Cloud? I’m certainly tempted, especially with my own projects. It’s interesting how there seem to be cost sweet spots at both really low loads and higher ones.

Being able to use identical staging environments is something I’d love. I’ve tried local virtual machines, but they’re never really identical, and I dislike having a VPS that hardly does any work. Unfortunately to realise this dream I’ve got to move all my production to Cloud instances, and concerns about reliability – especially given the highly public problems at AWS – make me reluctant.

The key is to be able to quickly spin up new instances, and rapidly destroy them once the testing is done, so that I can keep costs down. Most services allow you to save custom images from which you can create servers, so may be I need to play with this in the Brightbox beta some more.

Long term, I think there’s no question that this’ll be the basis of my development workflow.

This quote from the iCon official website suggests, large businesses aren’t the target market,

…the iCon is more than just a prestigious place to locate your business. It is an opportunity to grow your company, alongside other green and progressive businesses.

and environmentally biased startups and small businesses are.

I can’t help feeling that the pricing and layout are at odds with this goal, and it’s missing real startup incubation spaces, or perhaps a coworking environment.

There aren’t many one man operations that can afford to jump out of a room at home and straight into a 160ft² serviced office, and I’m certainly not one of them, my home office is closer to 30ft².

And renting meeting space by the day isn’t a great idea. Sure it’s easier to administer, but it restricts the clientele, since not everyone has meetings that last all day – god forbid – and £90 is a lot to pay for a single meeting.

So price is a major consideration, but I think it’s missing something more important: the opportunity to network at an early phase in your business development is crucial.

I know shared office space isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, or coffee, but it’s a good way to minimise overheads whilst meeting other people that are in a similar sector, the same situation, or may be able to provide services.

That’s the emphasis placed on the iCon, and fostering this kind of community will provide it’s management with clients that’ll graduate to the larger offices, in addition to helping them fulfil their claimed objectives.

I like the sentiment behind the iCon, but I worry whether Daventry’s as innovative as they’d like.

Most of all I hope they’re not relying on the build it, and they will come concept, and I think that tenants are going to be harder to find than the developers business model suggested.

Eventually they may have to modify that model, then may be it’ll be a more enticing prospect for a solitary consultant.

I’m a single developer working for myself on small client projects and a few personal ones too. To date I’ve extensively used virtual machines from a number of providers and been quite happy with most.

I rarely need to configure a new VPS, and regular maintenance isn’t a major headache since they’re few in number. So beyond the light use of Amazon S3 for backup storage, the Cloud seemed to hold little of interest.

But then the afore-mentioned problem cropped up, and it’s origin was a mystery. I’ve setup Linux systems for years now, but the cryptic application errors and the server logs were distinctly unhelpful. I ended up created a new web app just to debug the root cause, and it all took time.

I was lucky, I could afford it since this VPS wasn’t hosting client projects. Had it been I’d have felt obliged to rent a new VPS to maintain continuity, and the experience would’ve cost me, so this is where I revisited the idea of the Cloud.

Developmental benefits

Staging on an identical platform without the cost of a permanent staging server was the first benefit that struck me. It’d make ironing out deployment and dependency issues much more cost effective for the small developer.

Operational benefits

In the context of my recent problems, there’s the option to rapidly spin-up and configure a new server instance from a saved image. I could have skipped fixing that broken server configuration and just replaced it with a fresh one.

Switching a public IP address to another server is quick and easy so if one of your servers does fall over you can switch to an alternative without messing with the slow to refresh DNS.

Cost benefits

When it comes to cost, apart from the hourly versus monthly pricing, the main difference lies in the way bandwidth is charged.

This complicates things a bit, in fact with AWS instances it’s even more complex, but overall it seems that for light traffic applications the cost of Cloud servers is very competitive with their VPS cousins.

Still it’s in my nature to fire up a spreadsheet when things get messy, and that’s a topic for another post.

So may be that’s why there was a distinct them and us vibe about the programme’s portrayal of humans and their selfish genes which I can’t help feeling misses the point again.

There’s a tendency to speak of genes as if they’re thinking conscious beings, rather than molecules simply doing what they’re chemically inclined to do in their immediate surroundings. Genes do what physical laws dictate – no thought here, just physics – defining our physical form, including that of our brain, and I’m of the opinion that it’s the complexity of our physical manifestation that results in our consciousness, and all subsequent impressions of free will.

Now that’s not entirely an illusion because humans – and may be other creatures – have evolved consciousness that way, so presumably there’s a genetic advantage to this unusual trait, something for natural selection to work on. The free will that allows us to override our gut instinct just might be part of this advantage, but so might the concepts of wealth and power.

On a side note, if consciousness is dependent on physical manifestation it may support David Attenborough’s comments about the gorillas shown in the programme. Sharing almost identical senses and perception it’s no wonder we’d start to think the same way, or that there’d be the feeling of understanding he expressed.

The overall impression I’ve gained from this series is that Curtis’s really got it in of computers and mathematical modelling. More precisely perhaps he finds this analytical approach to the World and especially human interactions distasteful, even disturbing. Most probably he was just trying to sell a series to the BBC and the general public by invoking these feelings, and it worked, well done.

I enjoyed each of the three film comprising the series, which is the main point I guess, but was left feeling that our desire to reduce life to something tangible has little to do with machines, they’re just the latest excuse. I’m not sure it’ll have that effect on everyone though, and I’m no closer to understanding why people craved stability in the first place.

I think it’s the unpredictability of our Universe that makes it interesting and life worth living, but it doesn’t lessen the applicability of a scientific approach, just makes it more essential.

Ayn Rand

She struck me as an intelligent woman with some very interesting ideas, and despite her delusional belief in her own rationality I believe that the basic elements of her theories are sound.

Proper democracy

I also believe that the networked world can lead to a self regulating and stable system without the need for central government. As suggested such a system is based on the composite actions of individuals pursuing their own interests. However, I’d suggest some limiting conditions.

The first is that such a system must have universal coverage, everyone can play, but doesn’t have to. The second is that each individual must carry the same weight in the decision making process regardless of their abilities. With these conditions in place we have the essence of true democracy.

Emergent behaviours

And the programme certainly exposed the absence of these conditions in the system implemented by Greenspan and others, but it failed to pick up on the most important features elucidated by the multi-player game of PONG early in the show.

This experiment placed the participants on a level playing field with a clear goal in mind, and importantly one that inspired and motivated them. This required outside innovation rather than it emerging by group interaction, but I’ll skirt round that one for now, because what I’m really interested in is that you could clearly see that the initial attempts at the game were less than successful. The team on the left were particularly poor, sorry if you were on that team, but the self regulated performance radically improved over time until the two sides of the room were playing as if they were a pair of individuals.

Applying this observation dynamics of the experiments in the global economic system, it’s clear that you’d expect a period of irrational exuberance or unstable dynamics before the component parts of the markets learned to regulate themselves through an understanding of how exuberance affects their bank balance. This comes with an obvious caveat regarding market bias for the two reasons I gave above.

I’d say the same would be true for any application of this philosophy, but I think the basic concepts would work given time and iteration. In the meantime individuals, and social structures would suffer: all part of building a brave new world.

Transition is the key

It’s clear to me that in any emergent system, transition is the key process: complicated in a game of PONG, but in the transformation of the human society and governance… I think you can see where that’s going. It’s not something I felt that the programme recognised.

Still I’m tempted to read some of Rand’s writings now, but I’m a little concerned it might turn me into an evil genius bent on using the World to realise my demented selfish desires. Her ideas are interesting, sadly she and her followers were somewhat naive about the realities of practicing what they preached, but you can’t really pin the economic disasters of the last two decades on Rand alone.

That’s not to say her vision will never emerge, after all the ball is already rolling, and I suspect stability is a function of the rate of change, so give it a few hundred years and who can knows.

The problem in addressing that question is that I’m not an Arab, and I live in a country where wealth and relative freedom are ubiquitous, consequently I have very little basis for comparison. None the less it’s prompted me to consider political events in the Arab world through the lens of my own political views.

I’m no political activist, but I’m a proponent of British political reform, and my gripes are centred on two features of the current system.

An electoral system should yield a government that reflects the votes cast by the electorate. Our existing First-Past-The-Post system doesn’t do that: it’s possible to command a massive majority in parliament with far fewer than half the votes cast in your favour. Thing are moving on this point, but to my mind the proposed Alternative Vote reform doesn’t go far enough, however it’s the only offer on the table.

My second gripe regards the culture of Party politics that’s been an unofficial feature of British government for centuries. It’s a system that obliges individual Members of Parliament to vote as their political party dictates even if this violates the wishes of their constituency electorate, their election promises, and even their own conscience. It’s become a seemingly unquestioned practice in Britain, and not one our Parliamentary system envisioned, and it seems distinctly undemocratic to me.

So having nailed my colours to the mast it’s time to get back to the point, and that’s despite my reformist tendencies, I can’t hide the concern I feel about the results of actually reforming Britain’s system to my satisfaction. I think I’d have a Country more completely governed by the people, so why does that worry me?

I can’t deny there’s something comforting about the perceived stability born of the status quo, and it’d disappear with the advent of greater democracy. Unfortunately I lack the idealism to block out the stupidity, irrationality, selfishness and intolerance that people sometimes display: is this really the way I’d like my Country governed? There are those in Britain that claim that reforms like those I’d support would put an end to stability resulting in political anarchy and economic disaster, and they could be right.

It occurs to me that these sentiments may be reflected in the feelings of a significant proportion of people in ‘troubled’ Arab nations. They’re the people that have left the government alone, and in turn the government hasn’t bothered them. They don’t want their world destabilised in order to replace what they feel is a relatively harmless regime with… God knows what, but they don’t trust the judgement of their fellow Arabs, especially not the idealistic fools leading the revolution.

And they could also be right, but I’d like to think that in their situation I’d have the nerve to take a chance. The fact is though that I’m happy not to be in their shoes, so I can’t be certain about what I’d actually do.

Maybe I can clarify my position by opining that dictators are just people, but people that tend to display all the frailties I listed earlier, they wouldn’t hold power for long otherwise, so can the alternative really be worse?

At a non-scientific level, I interpret something as solid because my senses tell me it is for my immediate purposes. But my senses are limited to detecting phenomena relevant to the needs of a creature of my size in the normal course of evolutionary events.

That’s fine, but at a scientific level evolution’s provided the ability for me to interact with the environment in a distinctly abnormal way: at scales well below the threshold of sensation. Fortunately it’s also given me the scope to build a machine to increase my sensitivity, so now I can see the molecules have shape defined by the solid bits, classical theory.

But is that really what the machine itself sees, or my interpretation based on its output? The thing is that I built a machine that wouldn’t just measure the World, but provide an interpreted image of it via a clever interface; the real thing may be incomprehensible to my primate brain and it’s relatively primitive senses.

Similarly many of the theories we use in science and engineering rely on such interpretation and empirical approximation, and that’s how I designed the machine. By and large, there’s nothing wrong with the approach, and it’s served us well for centuries, but as things shrink, how do you avoid measuring what you expected to see?

As I said at the beginning, my question is theoretical, bordering on philosophical perhaps. At what scale does the physical reality with which we’re familiar go away, and is it a sharp transition? Could matter represent interacting energy fields where an object has a non-zero probability of taking just about any form? Do shape and solidity have any meaning for a hypothetical race of molecular size beings?

I’m an Engineer to the core, which can be a curse as I see risk in everything. This apparent paranoia is at least partially a result of my professional training: managing risk, rather than ignoring it, is one of the core competencies of an Engineer. I’ve acquired a sound education, excellent skills and wide experience of engineering, and as such I always seek to avoid mistakes and deliver a professional service, but it would be irresponsible to ignore the possibility that something could go wrong.

As a Sole Trader I am legally considered to be Conceptric, and as such I am directly liable for everything Conceptric does. Additionally, everything I own also belongs to Conceptric: I have unlimited liability. As the size and complexity of Conceptric’s projects grow, and their nature changes, this arrangement becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the risk-averse.

Professional indemnity insurance covers the cost of correcting mistakes or legal costs arising from giving incorrect advice or making a mistake. It also helps to ease the risk-averse mind.

The cost is relatively modest for a web developer, but since I’m considering a foray into engineering consultancy I checked out the premiums for that type of work. It turned out that they’re at least 3 times higher, which tells me that insurers see my venture as substantially more risky.

In this context the unlimited liability of the Sole Trader feels even more undesirable; I don’t mind risking the money tied up in Conceptric, that’s business, but my home!

Then it occurred to me, what about incorporating Conceptric, it could assume liability instead of me. I work alone, so I’d set Conceptric up with a single Director and Shareholder, both me, as this is the simplest way to satisfy the legal requirements of incorporation in the UK, and as an employee of Conceptric I should be much safer.

It seemed like the best solution, at least it was until I read a little more.

It turns out that even though they’re employees, directors can be held legally responsible for the actions, especially negligence, of their companies. This isn’t common since a direct link between the actions of the Director and the service provided by the Company has to be proven, in effect showing the director has taken personal responsibility for the matter and is not merely acting as a manager.

But I’d be the sole director and only employee of Conceptric, surely even the most slow-witted lawyer shouldn’t have too much trouble proving I’d taken personal responsibility.

All of a sudden it seems that I could be sued both personally and via Conceptric, that’s not a step in the right direction. It seems incorporation offers dubious protection for the freelance or consulting engineer.

The insurance you’d buy even as a Sole Trader may not protect you from legal liability, but at least helps pay the resulting bill, and you’d have to be mad not to do the same as the Director of a one-man company.

My current inclination is to remain a Sole Trader and fork out for the additional professional indemnity insurance, making sure the amount insured matches the size of the engineering jobs I’m taking on, as a Chartered Engineer I may be able to negotiate lower rates.

If my income grows, or I need to take on employees, then I may reconsider. But the increased administration costs of an incorporated Conceptric are prohibitive at the moment. However, there’s one final consideration, the benefits of incorporation with respect to marketing, but I’ll address that when, or if, it becomes an issue for Conceptric.

This hands-on approach gives you a visceral feel for what’s going on and whether it’s working properly. As a aspiring Engineer I found this a great way to see how process plant related to the engineering specifications and mass balances.

Looking back, this practice was a form of testing, applied to both my knowledge and the construction of the plant. In the latter guise it’s called commissioning, and you’d be surprised the problems you can find this way, from malfunctioning components to blockages caused by dead animals.

And that’s reminiscent of the early days of computing, when fixing a problem could mean finding a real dead bug in the system.

It seems that my process engineering background has followed me into software development: I’m just as fascinated by the use of software test techniques to follow software pipes. Test by test I can find my way around code, checking my understanding of what it does, how it works, and whether it matches the original design intent.

A comprehensive and robust test suite is worth it’s weight in gold when upgrading or carrying out routine maintenance. It’s really liberating to find that you can experiment in code without worrying whether, when the time comes to redeploy, nothing unexpected has changed.

So may be I’m one of life’s testers rather than an outright developer, but then again every developer show have a little tester in them.

It was a time of optimism, and belief in the ultimate power of the financial markets. Many of us in Britain were taking advantage of the privatisation of companies like British Telecom and British Gas, including one of my teenage friends. Key figures like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan were proud advocates for the “Greed is Good” reality of unfettered market economics.

I can’t help thinking that many of the leading lights in the recent Credit Crunch learned their trade in the ’80s, and subsequently built the prevalent culture of the City, for better and worse.

“Wall Street” was interpreted in a couple of different ways, I don’t know which was intended by Oliver Stone.

There’s no disputing that Gordon Gekko was rich and powerful, and that made him an attractive character to many. Equally though, he comes to a sticky end, losing it all because of his greed. To the same minds that succumb to the lure of Gekko that’s easily ignored, they’d have seen the setup coming a mile off, they’re too smart.

To another mindset, this ending is confirmation of deep seated beliefs in the dominance of good over evil. Gekko had it coming, and Bud Fox was vindicated in his betrayal because he was defending the poor and helpless, or was he just saving his own skin? He was tempted by the dark side, but eventually he was drawn back to the right path.

I know I’ve painted a very black and white version of the movie, but things are never that clear cut.

Many of the people in the firm Gekko was targeting would have pensions based on the performance of the markets, including Gekko’s own contribution. Many of them, like the majority of the post-war baby boomers, would now be retired with a handsome pension the like of which is unlikely to be seen again, all thanks to the “Greed is Good” 1980s markets.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not free from sin. I invest in a range of financial vehicles, hoping that I’ll get enough growth to support me in my dotage. And whenever I hear claims about the evils of our financial sector I find it difficult not to remember that fact.

I can’t pretend that I’m making money without harming anyone, the markets and the world don’t work that way. I try to lead an environmentally friendly life, but I invest in petroleum and mining stocks; I make contributions to help alleviate the poverty of the majority of the population, but some of my money is inevitably invested in companies taking advantage of sweatshops.

But what’s the alternative? I could rely on the State to provide for me in old age, but I don’t trust our society to manage its own currency or its finances, now even less than before the Credit Crunch.

Britain’s public debt is too high to be sustainable, so our infrastructure is likely to decay over the coming decades, and our social support…

Private indebtedness is even more concerning. The housing market has outstripped the means of the average Briton, and generated a great deal of outstanding debt in the process. Even more debt has been amassed by excessive consumerism, a good times frenzy reminiscent of the ’80s, and much of this is leveraged against housing that’s still due for correction.

The Bank of England is going to have to buy more debt in order to keep the economy ticking over, an inevitable devaluation in the Pound Sterling, so my cash is going to drop in value relative to the developing economies where most things are made.

Another issue will be the resulting inflation, that’ll lead to a rise in interest rates, which is bad news for mortgage holders that are struggling now; you did realise that the current low rates were supposed to give you a breather to rebalance your finances. At least the resulting housing glut will give first time buyers and investors with cash a chance to enter the housing market at saner valuations.

As you’ve probably guessed, my views don’t readily reflect the prevailing attitudes of our Society. I just don’t trust its consensus judgement; maybe this explains my preference for value investment.

And for me that’s what drives investment and savings, this lack of trust in Society. Money in my pocket, or investments, or pension, means independence. That’s what I need because I can’t believe that the State wouldn’t let me down, and to have to rely on it is frightening.

And this leads me to ask an obvious question. What does State or Society actually mean if everyone in it feels a driving need to be independent?

Normal behaviour

I expect the bundle to be installed inside an RVM Gemset directory that looks a little like this.

All the gems are installed in the gem directory and are available to the application.

Problems with Passenger.

Recently I’ve been finding that Passenger doesn’t see these gems in the default location. The RVM documentation suggests a fix if the usual bundle install doesn’t produce the expected results; use the bundle install $BUNDLE_PATH option.

Doing this causes Bundler to add a .bundle/config file containing file paths and prevents the sharing of gems. In additions, and possibly in an attempt to avoid sharing, Bundler places the new bundle inside a sub-directory, ruby, as it would if I wasn’t using RVM. This leaves the Gemset structure with a duplicate.

Problems with Bundler.

This all seems fine until you want to update an existing gem or add a new one.

I made this discovery when I emptied my Gemset to find that bundle check seemed to think that all the dependencies were still satisfied, strange. It turned out it was still looking at the ruby/1.8/ directory as directed by the .bundle/config file.

Unfortunately, Rake and other application tasks couldn’t see these gems, and Bundler couldn’t install them again, dependencies satisfied remember. Worse still it didn’t seem able to manage the copy either and crashed whenever changes were needed. Under RVM, Bundler seems to break in the presence of the .bundle directory.

As you might expect from what I wrote above, viewed through Passenger it was like nothing had happened.

So I deleted the useless ruby directory. That broke everything.

Investigation.

I wondered why the .bundle directory was necessary, a legacy thing I think; I deleted it to find out, that’s what version control’s for isn’t it.

I ran bundle install, but still no joy, the error was still there, and then I tried clearing the cached gems. Great, Rake was back in action, and gem list showed me what I expected, one problem down. Bundler can now modify the gems in the original bundle, the ones the application can see. But Passenger was still dead, it just complained about the lack of gems.

I could fix it in the same way as before, using the $BUNDLE_PATH option, but that would leave me with a second bundle copy again, and a whole lot of problems trying to update them. Besides, two copies of the same thing is just a bad idea anyway.

Then it occurred as a result of the Bundler upgrade information, that Passenger was using Bundler to get the gems, and Bundler didn’t seem to know where to look. The $BUNDLE_PATH environment variable should provide that information, but Bundler wasn’t getting the message from RVM and Passenger.

My solution

Don’t use the $BUNDLE_PATH option or you’ll end up with a second bundle copy and render the original unmanageable. Make sure you delete the .bundle directory in your application root, or future attempts to use Bundler will fail.

Manage your gems using Bundler with the plain vanilla commands, like bundle install, and everything should work in development. Bearing in mind that you’ve got good development server options, like rails s and Shotgun, available you might want to give Passenger a miss. But if you don’t, and you’re using Apache, I’ve found that adding

SetEnv BUNDLE_PATH path_to/.rvm/gems/ree@thegemset

in the vhost configuration should get it working, though you might need to restart the Web Server, touch tmp/restart.txt won’t do.

Why RVM isn’t passing the $BUNDLE_PATH to Passenger, and how Passenger could find the Gemset copy in the first place, I don’t know, but I’ve got my development environment back on track. Wish I could say the same for my attempt to deploy Rails 3 to REE with Bundler.

I already had a Macbook and an iPod Touch, the latter of which has almost completely taken over regular Email, Twitter and RSS duties, whilst the former is essential for my software development and engineering activities.

We both love reading, but we also live in a small house with limited space for our book collection. Our local library isn’t well stocked with the science fiction genre I favour, and with an Amazon basket of full of books I don’t have space for, it was time to go electronic.

Instapaper is great at making web content more accessible on either of my existing platforms, and I use it regularly, but neither is great for serious reading: the iPod screen is too small for anything other than casual reading; the Macbook is too bulky, warm, slow to start up, and the screen has the wrong aspect ratio.

I wanted something specifically for reading, and this is where the Kindle seemed to fit.

At first the interface seemed pretty awkward to someone used to an Apple touchscreen, but after a week of use I’m getting pretty slick with the five-way control and keyboard. I regularly use searches, highlighting, bookmarking, and I’m sorry to have to admit, the dictionary.

It seamlessly integrates with Amazon, as you might expect, but I particularly like the ability to try a sample any books or magazines you might be considering, I’ve several lined up.

There are loads of classics freely available on the Web from sites like Project Gutenberg. They’re not the kind of thing I’m likely to buy normally, but I’ve already downloaded “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.

As I write this, I’m a quarter of the way through Darwin’s masterwork, I’ve bought and started a series of Alastair Reynolds short stories I’ve had my eye on for months, and I’m even considering a subscription to a Analog magazine through Amazon – one of the samples.

The one fly in the ointment is that I’d have liked to use the Kindle to read some of the many academic papers I’ve been neglecting. However, with only 6 inch screen it’s pushing things too far, not surprising really.

I’ve tried it and the text can be made just about legible, but doing so compromises the usability of the Kindle: you really don’t want to have to scroll. And after all that, the text on a large document is only just big enough to read, so you’re asking for eye strain.

I’ve noticed that the TV is suffering from neglect, a result of the resurgence in reading caused by the Kindle and iPod Touch. I keep asking myself whether this is temporary, novelty driven behaviour, but I suspect it will be permanent.

“You see, I tend to change from one media to another, and explore anything that interests me at the time”, she explained. She isn’t one of those artists that has a particularly successful theme and moves to mass produce pieces.

This doesn’t make things easy, but during development we managed to draw together coherent themes in her work and present them as collections. But she’s certainly not saying “here you are, this is what I do”, she wants to keep her options open.

As she explained her position, it seemed strangely familiar. The fact is that I’ve always been that kind of generalist, and I’ve exactly the same misgivings about marketing myself, but this is where I’d start.

Pick and choose where you’re seen, and I’m not just referring to seedier side of the Web. Use services you’re comfortable with, you’ll express yourself more effectively: I don’t like the feel of Facebook, so I don’t use it, but I like Twitter.

Make sure all your online profiles tell a consistent story so that you’re not confusing potential customers. OK we’re generalists, so what story do you tell? Talk about what you can do, and why being a generalist makes you such a valuable asset without making rash promises.

On the techie side, I look at the way search engines like Google and Bing perceive websites with Webmaster tools and Google Analytics. Try checking the keywords their crawlers identify to see if they’re seeing what you expect, it can be quite instructive.

Finally, try a Vanity search by sticking your name or brand into Google. Look at the results and see if they correspond to the image you’d like the World to see. How many pages correctly, and flatteringly, apply to you will give you a clue to how much work you’re got left.

These are just a few ideas to get started, and they’re not guaranteed, but I’m testing them on myself, and then maybe Margarita.

I’ve been using Sinatra for more and more projects, but there came a point this week when I realised that I was in danger of accidentally upgrading gem versions without testing first.

Dependencies in crisis

You see, my applications all use the system gems, and require "gem_name" to load the most recent local version.

As the number of applications on the server grew, I found that this had the effect of automatically upgrading all my applications whenever I upgraded a gem, whether intentional or otherwise.

Now I like to take advantage of bug fixes and new features of the latest releases whenever possible, but I don’t necessarily want to upgrade every application in a single mammoth coding session, or have to hold back the deployment of a new application until the others have been upgraded and fully tested.

Gem and version dependency control

It dawned on me that I needed some control over both the actual gems and the versions each application used.

Simplicity

The simplest approach is to control what it available in the application load path before loading it in the usual way, and these are the commands for the job.

gem "gem_name", "gem_version" require "gem_name"

I tried this with some success, and quite a few of my applications are still using this method for now. But I decided to try using Bundler as a long term solution.

Bundler

If you want to know about Bundler I suggest you try the github repository or some of the posts on Yehuda Katz blog.

I found it pretty easy to integrate with Sinatra by following these instructions, and my Gemfile looked like this.

source "http://rubygems.org" gem 'sinatra', '1.0' gem 'haml', '3.0.13' group :test do gem 'rspec', '1.3.0', :require => 'spec' gem 'rspec-rails', '1.3.2' gem 'cucumber', '0.8.3' gem 'cucumber-rails', '0.3.2' gem 'webrat', '0.7.1' end

Testing with WEBrick went like clockwork, working smoothly with both RSpec and Cucumber, but when I tried to get things running on Passenger this is what I saw.

This had me stumped for quite a while. I reinstalled Bundler; checked out the installation of Passenger, my $GEM_PATH, and the Ruby environment; nothing worked.

The solution turned out to be much simpler than all that: add the Bundler gem to the Gemfile dependencies.

gem 'bundler', '0.9.26' gem 'sinatra', '1.0' gem 'haml', '3.0.13'

I wish it had occurred to me earlier, but the simple ones never do. Anyhow, my Passenger deployments work perfectly, and I’ll be migrating all my Sinatra apps over to Bundler.

Capistrano integration

And if you, like me, want to use Bundler to manage dependencies during Capistrano deployment, you might like to try these useful recipes.

But the time came to rebalance my portfolio, and I’m here to report that I’ve learned something new about my tactical approach: there’s a right order for trades… and a wrong one.

The position.

Aquarius Platinum (AQP) has more than doubled in price since I added to the position I’d held since before the Crash. But at 450p a share I wasn’t really expecting much more.

What’s more, above average growth in the UK stock portion of the portfolio means it’s too large for my chosen asset allocation.

The strategy.

I prefer to maintain a stake in any company I’ve owned that doesn’t give me a good reason to back out. After significant growth I’ll reduce my holding and use the profits to diversify into new stocks. So the plan was to sell half of my AQP position, hold on to the rest and buy GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

I’ve been watching them for a while, and in the light of the current return on fixed interest investments, I estimate the dividend makes this stock worth £13–14 per share.

An additional attraction is the relative stability of these large pharmaceutical companies: my portfolio could use a little added stability considering the natural resources companies it contains.

Decision made! I’m going to move some of my money from AQP to GSK; and the remaining cash released from AQP will be redistributed to other asset classes. How hard can that be?

The tactical error.

Quite, as it turned out the Markets chose this week to teach me another lesson.

My first mistake was to get greedy: AQP was off its highs, but still representing a respectable profit, I was reluctant to sell without getting top dollar.

But wait, I’ve already got cash earmarked for incremental investment into other asset classes. I thought I’d be clever and use my spare cash to take up a position in GSK, leaving AQP to return to the highs when I could sell to replenish the cash.

My error was in the order I planned the transaction.

The aftermath.

The market fell steeply after I bought the GSK stock, and the AQP followed.

Strategically there’s nothing wrong with this, I’m in this for the long haul and I’m confident these two will recover.

Tactically I’m trapped with both stocks in my portfolio, which is even more unbalanced than before I started!

If I’d sold AQP first and it’d risen, I’d have lost out on a little profit but secured the GSK position for the dividends as planned. Importantly the portfolio would be balanced.

If AQP had dropped, I’d have secured the profit I already had and could have bought GSK even more cheaply. The portfolio would still have been balanced.

And what about the cash to meet my other investment plans?

As it is I’ve lost the opportunity to take my profit on AQP, bought GSK at a higher price than necessary, thrown my portfolio even further out of balance, and tied up cash that I could be using to buy other assets at a handsome discount.

Once again I’m humbled, and just because I failed to consider the order of my actions. Not a mistake I’ll make again.

You see I’m an Engineer that’s learned maths from a practical perspective. We’re taught particular mathematical procedures for application to specific engineering problems: the emphasis is on correct application.

But the series pointed out the sweeping range of mathematical branches in existence, each with techniques that can be applied to many different types of problem, but frequently discovered simply because they were there!

On a practical level, we’ve conceived many types of geometry and calculus, each based on their own initial assumptions, sometimes building on what went before, but often starting from a totally new perspective.

And I guess being an Engineer, the magic lies in the application. It’s possible to apply multiple types of mathematics to the same problem, using those differing viewpoints as leverage to free the solution.

The physical sciences are full of mysteries, seemingly intractable problems suddenly solved by a change in mathematical toolkit. It turns out that understanding our Universe is a function of picking the right mathematical tools for the job, those that describe the problem domain in the simplest way.

I’ve come to view mathematics as a language: a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for the physical Universe itself. Only maths provides the kind of rich syntax that’s required to understand such a mind boggling domain.

That human minds could construct this DSL is a beautiful thing, and the basis of my fascination. For me to understand how to find the right tool might take a while, fortunately there are smarter people around to show me the way.

With the Liberal Democrats and Labour having much more in common, the Tories could be forgiven for thinking that PR would leave them out in the political wilderness forever. At every Election the other two would gang up against them to form a coalition government.

This is why a successful Tory / Liberal Democrat deal could be pivotal. If the Liberal Democrats can prove to the Tory membership that they can work together, that there’s some common ground, it’ll show that PR isn’t the political suicide they suspect.

Such a situation could benefit the Country in the short-term, with the two Parties limiting the extremes of both manifestos through compromise on the Economy, Defence, Education and Environmental policy. The show stopper of Electoral reform could be left for another day.

But reform must come, and there are many Tories, especially those with MEP backgrounds, for whom this holds no fears. But as always you have to win the trust of the majority before progress can be made.

Sacrifices made during current negotiation on the subject of reform could bring greater rewards later in the form of all party support. We pro-reformers may need to exercise a little patience.

The latter is more about good leadership and confidence. That type of strength stems from the ability to compromise without feeling you’re losing control. You know the type of thing… being able to take advice, considering other points of view and adapting to changing conditions when formulating your plans.

And that’s exactly the sort of thing that Cameron and Clegg should be up to now. The greatest test of their ability to lead is lies in coming to some agreement and then winning the support of their respective parties. That’s what’ll determine how ‘strong’ the new Government will be.

We’ve had a long history of majorities yielding dictatorial Prime Ministers: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and most recently that noted control freak, Gordon Brown. They may have possessed strong positions in Parliament, but considering the results how strong was their Government? Each lead us to their own brand of blinkered disaster: the loss of a balanced Economy, an illegal war in Iraq, and the Credit Crisis.

I voted for the Liberal Democrats—in an ubersafe Conservative seat I might add—to indicate my desire for a hung parliament. The absence of a single dominant party is the way of the future. Manifestos will be statements of Party negotiating position rather than an outright promise to the Electorate, that’s often broken.

The modern society is a complex web of systems in constant flux, it’s not one in which anyone can survive with the entrenched opinions our adversarial system promotes. General Moltke once said that “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy”, and that’s still just as true.

Flexibility is the key and electoral reform is the way to get it precisely because it’ll ensure that no single party will be dominant again. This doesn’t have to mean perpetually weak government, rather it imposes a responsive approach to politics of which the General would approve.

If our current politicians can’t adapt, we’ll have to find some new ones that will. Cameron and Clegg are both young men that touted the need for change during the election campaign. With long careers ahead of them it’s time to start learning.

But that’s what Human Resource (HR) departments are paid to do. If you think about it though, you can’t honestly expect them to have a clue what most of these jobs entail; especially for technical roles.

If the job description is inaccurate how do you know if the employee in question is actually doing what you’re paying them to do? Perhaps more importantly, how do employees, including you, know what’s expected?

Taking a managerial stance, without supporting documentation you can’t prove a thing in the case of a dispute. So you just have to hope that employees do whatever needs doing to make your business a success: scary stuff for a control freak like me.

Until you realise that it requires trust; your trust in them, and their’s that you value their contribution and that they’ll be fairly treated and rewarded for their efforts. But there’s a catch. Trust becomes much harder to build and maintain as the number of people grows: why do you think no one trusts Politicians.

This makes large companies unruly and essentially unmanageable places, so it’s not a big surprise that most managers give up. If you want progress choose smaller self-determining groups where trust has a chance.

Everyone needs to know each other and believe, really believe that each has something to offer and will do their best. Self-determination is important so that everyone knows the team rules and believes they’ll be dealt with fairly: effort will be rewarded, slacking punished.

Large companies are a focus for funding and fulfil the a necessary role as legislation machines. You can’t take a product to mass market without wading through a morass of quality and safety documentation. Only large organisations can carry the kind of overhead this demands, and this is where their future lies.

Innovation is the province of small agile—with a little ‘A’—organisations. This is a strategy that can be realised by outsourcing, or by thinking differently about corporate structure. Loose alliances of small groups provides the manpower and range of skills to tackle large projects. There’s no reason a company can’t be formed this way.

The future is small, local and agile… choose trust over documentation.

The handles are plastic and after about 20 years the splines that connect them to the tap bodies have started to break up.

I thought I’ll replace them with something a little nicer, chromed metal ones should do. I looked around locally and found just what I was looking for… but you couldn’t buy them without replacement tap bodies as well, in fact you could buy any handles on their own. The Internet supplied the answer in the form of prompt service from Not Just Taps.com.

I suspected that the cold bath tap washer was started to fail last night. Replacing the washer is an easy job I’ve done many times and for which I carry spares, this should only take 5 minutes tomorrow I thought.

Unfortunately once dissembled, it became obvious that the tap body was also shot: I don’t have spares for that, and it took a long walk around town on Sunday to yield a suitable, though not exact, replacement part. Definitely not a 5 minute job!

The point of this post is that in both of these situations finding parts locally was really hard, and frequently a straight replacement was unavailable. But what really struck me was that the cost of the parts was often many times that of a complete new tap!

A mass manufacturer can benefit from economies of scale when producing their product, but are our spares too expensive or the taps too cheap? If the latter is true, doesn’t it encourage waste: throwing away useful products because they’re not worth fixing?

I’ve been talking about my bathroom, but this situation will be familiar to anyone who’s tried to get any consumer product fixed. But it can’t be right… can it?