A fake simulacrum
A fake simulacrum
At the Amsterdam zoo, during my kid’s art class, I go into the bird house, the section of the aviary made up like the Southwest. Listening to the birds, it make me long to hear the grackles of Austin. It feels like home, makes me smile and close my eyes. They’re not as beautifully cacophonous as the grackles, but the geographic feel is enough.
Looking at the name cards later, I see they’re some birds are from North Africa, also “North and South America.” (That easily made combination of two hemispheres shows how people’s view of the world is shaped by where they are. Those of us from those Americas would never belittle each other by simply conjoining them. Each place is solidly its own, nothing to be combined as if it was all one sound.) This simulacrum, then, isn’t to be found in nature: cactuses and Southwestern ground birds mixed with African dessert and birds.
But this is fine, the trick works the same for a homesick Texan. The family running through, speaking Spanish ads to the winsome. Of course, they’re likely Spanish (they have a slight Castilian lisp). But, again, the actual thing is different, almost incidental to the reaction it evokes.
If I wanted a complete, geographically accurate loop, I’d go visit the raccoons and the skunk. Those three goofy compatriot was, wondering around their enclosure. The raccoons, sly as Huck Finn always sniffing at the gap between their grounds and the top of the wall that surrounds them. Always judging if they can make it this time. The skunk, just lumbering along after them, like a happy hitchhiker along for the ride.
Modernizing over 2,000 apps
Large organization’s biggest challenge is dealing with the shackles of success: their existing app portfolio. Next week, I’m hosting a webinar with two fine folks from AirFrance KLM on how they’re managing exactly that effort: modernizing over 2,000 applications.
It’s, of course, free to attend and there’ll be a recording you can view afterwards.
Register for it and you can attend live or get an email when the recording posts.
I fly on AirFrance KLM, so I’m always eager to hear how things are going over there.
Original programming
Software Defined Talk
This week’s Software Defined Talk episode:
It’s the re:Invent episode! We also have digressions/delights on why Oracle is so sticky despite (rival vendors tell us) how much people want to leave it. And, since it’s that time of year, Sinterklaas. Sometime in December we’ll do a listener questions (and our answers) episode. Send us your questions in Slack or in Twitter or whatever with by tagging them with hashbrowns #asksdt.
From Pivotal land
- The case for banks to get innovative with software. Fun idea from the article: “For example, in order to overcome regulatory compliance issues over privacy, the recently launched payment card service from Apple has taken an innovative position on the handling of customer data. By inserting itself between customer and bank, Apple has effectively become a privacy broker which manages the digital identity of its customers.”
- Also, another piece in German.
- Get a free copy of 451’s write-up of Pivotal’s conference, SpringOne Platform and, of course, Pivotal’s current status: ” One of the main themes running through the event was that, while Kubernetes is creating a huge addressable market for DevOps, only a small minority of enterprises understand cloud-native development. And that minority has a strong representation of Pivotal customers.” And: “Its application modernization practice delivered its first project in December 2015, and is now composed of a team of 80 specialists and 500 generalists worldwide that has, to date, delivered 160 projects for 90 customers. “
Charts, I love charts
The IT department is the real Shadow IT
I tweeted a few more charts from this Gartner report, notably reasons why The Business tries to dump those shadow IT projects back onto IT.
Apple Card momentum by age
From 451.
kubernetes, the long haul edition.
One-third of enterprises surveyed in 451 Research’s Voice of The Enterprise: DevOps H2 2019 will have standardized on Kubernetes within two years and a further 38% report that it will take three years or more.
From a report on KubeCon.
Find the books
Book exhibits are often hidden in plain site at museums, or, here, the zoo. They’re always a delightful find, esp. this type with the ornate covers. And check out that one that’s in landscape. Hand written ones - journals - can be fun if there’s pictures, or even patterns on the paper. A ledger book can be nice to look at if done right, and there’s always surprises with landscape mode on:
Anyhow, keep an eye out for books behind glass. There’s a good collection at @tropenmuseum and, of course, some at the @rijksmuseum.
Originally posted in Instagram.
Relative to your interests
Well, that was weird. This guy is like this guy when it comes to manic content creation relevant to your interests. The noise canceling is great, the transparency feature as has yet to be lifehacked (though he tries in the footnotes). Public cloud market current only $111bn of the global $3.7t computer stuff market (did I do that math right?). “Sometimes our CEO does JDARTs”. An amazingly long article about morning routine write-up obsessions. People (in Spain) do a lot of mobile banking in the morning people use mobile banking. “Percentage of women in [UK?] tech remains low at 16%, with little growth in 10 years”. Survey says: people bad at pricing. Mindfulness sounds more palatable if it’s “curiosity,” or, maybe even more exhausting. “Well. I guess we can close the file on that one..” Book claims KGB killed Camus. T-Mobile running 34,000 containers in production on kubernetes, the apps are: “order management, retail store, and call centers apps, as well as maps.t-mobile.com.” Perfect summary from Techmeme: “Black Friday online sales grew 19.6% YoY to $7.4B, as Thanksgiving sales rose 14.5%, to $4.2B; Cyber Monday sales are expected to reach $9.4B, up 18.9%” A platform for building platforms, explained.