Petro's Great Adventure V, Happy new year.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ccpetro/3153920303/

Yeah, I know, I just wrote.

And nothing new has happened.

But it's a holiday, and I'm sitting here watching a progress meter CRAWL across the bottom of the screen, so I've got nothing better to do.

Many of you have heard my hammer theory of complexity at one time or another. Partially this theory owes its insight to Greg McNutt, and partially to being in the trenches of IT/System Administration for WELL over a decade now.

Basically it goes like this:

How many parts does a traditional hammer have?

No, actually it has three parts (I know some of you answered three, but most people forget about the little wedgey bit that actually provides the pressure to keep everything together).

A Hammer, the most basic multi-part tool is a very simple system, and when it starts to go wrong, you can relatively easily determine what is going wrong and fix it. It's either the handle, the head, the wedge, or the user.

In most systems it's usually the user. But, as I am wont to do, I digress.

As you add complexity to a system--add parts to a tool--it gets harder and hard not only to figure out what is malfunctioning, it gets harder to tell IF something is malfunctioning.

I'm certain there is a line, made up of several curves that could describe this, but it's not linear, nor is it smoothly no-linear.

For instance Pliers also have three parts (two handles and the pivot pin), and it's much harder to tell what has gone wrong.

Sometimes with complex systems it's easy to tell. When you plug a 120volt/60hz piece of electronics into 220/50hz mains, and the lights go out and there is the smell of smoke you can be relatively certain that what you have is NOT a mild performance problem.

However, when you are looking at a stack of Dell 2xxx servers each with dual dual core CPUs, internal RAID systems, dual Fiber Channel Host Bus Adapters hook multi-pathed into a pair of 4gb SAN Switches talking to two or three SAN Storage Arrays each with redundant storage processors hooked up to disk array enclosures of different speeds with different drives (not in one DAE, That Would Be Wrong, but in different DAEs), and you're running VMware's enterprise server on that stack of Dells, and you've got a 1950 running Virtual Center to control them, and, and, and...

At some level you're just glad it's mostly working. There's a lot of parts in there, and there's really no one (Other than maybe the World Renown Jacob Cherkas, and even he's wrong about once a week or so) who can look at the totality of the tool and tell you it's right, it's wrong, or it's in the middle.

I mean, it's running slow? How would you know? Maybe if you were to get the whole system stable for a week and bench lined it then you'd know...nothing. You'd know what it did THAT week. The next week you changed a bunch of stuff and invalidated your benchmark.

So is the tool broken? In one sense it's pretty easy--if you're still driving nails, it's working. Assuming you're using a hammer. If your pliers are driving nails, things might not be right.

Speaking of tools, now that I'm getting off that subject, one of the odd things about this part of the middle east is their paper products.

One issue that comes up from time to time in the states is that the toilet paper might approach the texture and heft of a paper towel. This is often the case in the military and in government buildings where the people who do the purchasing don't really have to live with the results.

Here it's the opposite. Sort of.

The toilet paper we use is very similar to the kind the military gets back in the states. It's not *quite* John Wayne paper, but it's not Charmin.

Apparently, however, Middle Easterners don't really distinguish between toilet paper, facial tissue and paper towels. They use mostly the same stuff to handle all three or more jobs.

Which is annoying because they still allocate the paper towels as if two or three would get the job done, when in fact it takes a LOT more sheets of the soft stuff to absorb the water that one or two thicker sheets would.

Go wash your hands, then try to dry them with kleenex (use the kind without embedded lotion for greatest accuracy). Now go back and wash off the remaining little bits of tissue on your hands, and shake your hands over the trash can until MOST of the water is off, and wipe your hands on your trousers.

The annoying part is that some parts of the base have good paper towels (The Gym, and the Chow Hall, which has a big room full of sinks that one must walk through to get into the facility with plenty of hot water and both kinds of paper towels), and others don't (Work and trailer restroom facilities).

Yeah, it's that good here. The worst I can find to gripe about are the paper towels...No, that's not the worst, but the rest of the stuff was to be expected.

I've been reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver on my Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/Quicksilver-Baroque-Cycle-Vol-1/dp/0060593083/ and http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-kindle/dp/B000FI73MA ) (Yeah, I also have it in Paperback, but not here).

If you haven't read it...It's largely a historical novel of some degree or other accuracy about science and pseudo-science and economics (which is neither) and sex and violence and such.

A lot of the characters in the book have the same names and occupations as "real" people in history--Newton and Huygens and Leibniz and others whose names aren't as familiar.

Anyway, the last set of "Security Focus" newsletters I've gotten have had the quote: "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants," by Issac Netwon (the real one, not the caricature character in the book) is quoted.

This made me think.

Or rather it made me think about something else.

Do we *really* see further because we're standing on the shoulders of giants, or do we see further because those "giants" spent a lot of time tearing down the trees and leveling the mountains of Ain't So.

I mean we used to know a LOT of things that just weren't so. If you know that The Earth is the center of the universe, and that drinking mercury is good for your health, and all the stuff that goes with that, then you have spent a lot of time looking at stuff that isn't real. Once you start ripping apart the incorrect theories you can see a lot more plainly.

Maybe we shouldn't call it occam's razor, but rather Occam's axe, or Occam's shovel.

Anyway, I kinda lied to Bob a couple weeks ago. Sorry about that.

He had asked me what there was to do in my free time, and I completely forgot there is a "Moral, Welfare and Recreation" facility on base. This goes by the name (of course) of "The MWR". They supposedly have stuff to do there, and even (allegedly) offer dancing lessons (mostly Latin/jazz/salsa). One of the features is (no kidding) "Indoor bathroom Facilities".

I'll try to remember to stop by there in my copious free time and get a more exhaustive list of what they offer.

For those that are wondering, Most of my time is either here (72+ hours a week) or sleeping (42+ hours a week). Some reading (as above) and some working out in the gym (at least every other day) and of course the random internet wanderings.


Anyway, have a happy new year.
Regards,
Petro.
:wq