This is a great talk and synopsis of Martin's fabulously well researched book "When China Rules the World" which I reviewed a couple years ago on this blog.  If you're not up for reading the 500+ page book, this is a good way to get the gist, and it's updated with some post-financial crisis analysis.

His fundamental argument is against the conventional thought that when a country modernises it also westernises and that we can't use Western ideas and thoughts to frame China when attempting to make sense of it.

Today myself and one of my coworkers attended the WhiskyWeb conference here in Edinburgh, Scotland.  This conference is in its first year, organised by a very small team, and was setup and organised from the ashes of a failed conference in just three months.  Located in the lovely Hub Conference Center (a converted cathedral) on the Royal Mile just steps from the Edinburgh Castle, it's in a great location for those who have never been to Scotland before.  Most of the hundred or so attendees I met seemed to be from other countries and were really enjoying the city.

The conference technically started last night with a Pub Crawl that started at the bottom of the Royal Mile and worked its way up a series of pubs.  This was pretty well attended and all the speakers were in the crowd so it was a nice way to get introduced prior to the event.

Today the two tracks of talks were help in adjacent halls.  The ending keynote speaker even had a helium remote controlled shark swimming the air above the audience's heads.  I've included some pictures.

(download)

Click here to download:

whisky-web-day-one-recap-atsDmcqqonicbrkrIEkF.zip (4.84 MB)

Josh Holmes (@joshholmes) on Failure 

The opening keynote focused on failure, how to learn from it, and why it's a good thing.  Josh is an American living in Dublin and we got to swap stories about motorcycles and Guiness and life without a car the night before.  I even got drafted to taking pictures of him with his own camera.  A nice short, inspiring, and positive talk to kick things off that was probably pretty foreign for most of the UK attendees.

Some of his main points:

• You will fail.  It's unavoidable.
• A famous quote by former IBM CEO who had an employee make a 600k (in 1950s dollars) mistake.  Instead of firing him, he responded that he "Just spent 600k training him".
• Talked about a personal failure on a technical choice: SOAP vs. Remoting
• "Losers always lose" - don't give up and become a loser!
• When times get tough, that's the time to press on
• Failure is always an option, so respect that.
• Fail fast is a good concept, but doesn't give you leave to be stupid (referencing a recent Michael Church blog post)
• How to integrate failure into your life in a positive way: 
  • TDD - fail before writing your code
  • Business Development - fail before writing your app or starting your company by doing research on your concept or idea.

A good way to start things off.

Rowan Merewood (@rowan_m) -  Estimation: "How to Dig Your Own Grave"

Next up was a talk on estimation and some common pitfalls.

Some Classic Estimation Mistakes

• Sales creating estimates
• One guy creating estimates
• Creating estimates from detailed task lists
  • you know it will change
  • gives misplaced confidence
  • encourages micro management
• Estimating a day as 8 hours

Moving on he talked about some strategies to get around some of these areas.  First he talked about how hours are too granular and suggested using half days as an example - "from the start of the day could you finish by lunchtime?" which can bring more clarity.

As a project's length scales out, scale up the increments to 1, 3, 5, 7 days.  Anything over this and you're not estimating anymore.  In response to the tendency of Agile folks not wanting to estimate or developers thinking estimates are useles: fine, stop calling yourself an engineer!

The last bit of the talk was spent talking about some conceptual models used to communicate estimation processes and risks to clients which were pretty interesting:

• Good, Cheap, Fast - choose two
• Triangle with points of Scope, Cost, Time - as you vary them, you vary the area which is the quality of the project
• the MoSCoW model
• the Kano model
  • Basic features don't deliver high customer satisfaction
  • As performance improves, customer satisfaction goes up in a linear scale
  • "Exciter Features" generate a bigger satisfaction the more of them are added

Sebastian Marek (@proofek) - Ten Commandments for a Software Engineer

It took something like 15 minutes to get the powerpoint working on this talk, so I was annoyed before the talk even started, but Sebastian pulled it out and gave a great talk on software engineering principles important to him.

1. Don't disrupt legacy systems - extract, blackbox, hide behind an interface.
2. Don't reinvent the wheel.
3. Commit often and make sure your messages are informative.
4. Document early when the problem and your mind is still fresh.
5. Don't fear Q/A - use automated, unit, and functional tests along with a CI server
6. Design for simplicitly.
7. Don't kill maintainability.
8. Don't repeat yourself - use copy/paste detection and other tools.
9. Speak up early and often.
10. Recognise and retain your top talent.

Brian Suda (@briansuda) on Data Visualisation

This was a very interesting (although I'm not sure how practical) talk that was a bit out of the norm for a technical conference.  Brian lived in the UK for awhile and is currently living in Iceland, authored a book on data visualisation, and spends his time seeing how we can help visualise various data sources.  His very graphically intense presentation was a very refreshing look at some unusual or creative ways to get data in front of users in more practical and memorable ways.

A few points:

• 3D Charts are not advisable (proportion, view obscure)
• Pay attention to your "data to ink ratio" (tufte, 1983)
• reduce visualisation as much as possible e.g. simpler is better, remove unnecessary clutter
• 2 schools of thought (simple, tufte and nigel holms more complex)
• He showed several examples of PHP generated SVG visualisations which were really interesting, these are located here: github.com/briansuda

John Mertic (@mertic) - Lessons Learned from Testing Legacy Code

John is a member of the SugarCRM project, and described coming on board a few years ago when Sugar had zero unit tests and zero functional tests.  They've spent quite a bit of time changing this, and he discussed some tools to assist on finding bad code.

• phpcpd - copy/paste detection
• phpmd  - code quality report
• phpdcd - dead code detection

He also made great points on the following items:

• Don't be surprised when you see crap
• Better to focus on functional tests first
• Build a culture of testing
• Use CI or else tests are useless

Whisky Web Day Two

Tomorrow is a Hackathon located on the exact opposite end of the Royal Mile.  I probably won't attend but all in all for £50, this conference was a bargain.

It's hard to find good books on China.  Most writings on China suffer from the author just not having lived there long enough.  The Chinese culture really can't be skimmed - you have to marinate in it.  For a long time.  The language barrier can be very real, and while modern China has a feeling of openness and transparency that eminates from the coastal cities and it's younger working class, the real China lays hidden behing many layers that most foreigners just can't get through.

Twilight in the Forbidden City was written by a Scottish academic named Reginal Fleming Johnston who was appointed as Imperial Tutor to the last Chinese emperor, Puyi.  Johnston spent thirty-two years in China, from 1898 to 1930, and wrote this incredible account of his time with the Dragon Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, who he tutored for five years from the time the boy was 13.

This is an important book as it provides a very rare glimpse into the very secretive court life of China.  It was written and published prior to the Communist takeover in China and therefore sits squarely in one of the most tumultuous periods of Chinese history, without the benefit of hindsight.  Through it all, Johnston provides remarkable opinions on the issues of the day via his brilliant writing style.

Johnston is often accused of being a monarchist, and to some extent this was true, but his belief in the Chinese monarchy was driven by three main factors: that gross mismanagement by the Empress Dowager had squandered the benefits of a strong monarchy, that millions of lives and untold suffering and chaos could have been prevented had the monarchy remained intact, and his love and respect for his pupil who he believed would someday have the necessary skills to run the country.  In short, Johnston was correct in his assessment that China has always needed a strong central government and would continue to naturally tilt towards whoever or whatever could fill that power vacuum.  In this context, why couldn't that figurehead be the Emperer in conjunction with a democratically elected parliament or some other such body?

Quite a bit of historical context is provided at the beginning of the book and seeing as how the Chinese Imperial system has ceased to exist for a hundred years, much of it was new to me.  Considerable time is spent on explaining the complex heirarchies within the family and court structures, and the backdrop of facts that he provides is richly interspersed with criticism of the rampant corruption of the Nei Wu Fu or imperial household department.  Johnston has provided what is probably the only Western eye witness account over a period of many years and he does so with discipline and rigor, often bringing into the narrative the necessary context for the reader to truly appreciate the landscape.

The story of the last emperor is ultimately one specific instance of sadness that is personalised for us during one of the most violent and turbulent period of Chinese history. Millions perished during a period of warlords, dueling republics, civil war, and World War II. There's no escaping this while reading through the book, and even though Johnston's account ends prior to the Emperor heading to become a puppet ruler for the Japanese, you can sense the foreboading.  Johnston ended up leaving China prior to major Japanese hostilities and moving back to the United Kingdom.  He remained friends with Puyi even after he ascended to the throne of Manchuko which was a controversial statement of loyalty.

Johnston tells us early in his book about the unique bond in Chinese culture between student and teacher, how it is revered above almost all other commitments, and how honored he was to be brought into that relationship.  When he retired to Scotland in 1937, he bought a small island in Loch Craignish, and proceeded to cultivate a Chinese garden.  He flew the flag of Manchuko, the new kingdom of his one-time pupil.  Despite the political difficulties he was communicating by endorsing the puppet state of a British rival, Johnston believed in the character of his student.  He believed in their relationship.  He believed in China more than many Chinese of the time.

Anyone wanting to know more about Chinese history, particular those influences that still reverberate in modern China should read this book.  It's scolarship, the quality of writing, and the personal investment in the story by the author make it a rare and delighting read, if a bit wistful.

I keep finding these little areas of ignorance that surprise me.  Today's episode: British (UK) Keyboards are different from American (US) keyboards.  I never in my wildest dreams thought this would be so, but it's true.  Instead of the @ sign being above the 3 key, it's above the Right Shift ans shares a key with the single quote.  The Enter key is smaller too, and the double quotes is above the 2 key.

I just thought they'd replace the $ sign with the £ and call it a day.  Oh well, the more you know!

Today the internet is protesting SOPA and PIPA, and it's impressive to witness.  Absolutely huge sites are blacking out to raise awareness and prevent these bills from passage.  It leaves me feeling both hopeful and saddened.  I'm hopeful that this type of activism can help curb bad bills, but ultimately I'm mostly just sad.

Here are two bills that are almost universally opposed by constituents, are fundamentally flawed from both a logical and technical perspective, opposed by the entire technology industry, and are clearly funded and pushed only by rich and corrupt special interestes.  Yet the only thing preventing them from passage is massive worldwide outcry the likes of which we've literally never seen before?

Maybe this is democracy working, but it feels like things shouldn't be this hard.  Particularly in a representative democracy.  Bad bills are bad bills and they should be dealt with, but I think the reality is that this isn't even that bad of a bill when stacked up against recent travesties like the NDAA.

So maybe we can pull out of this tailspin as a country, but I've got a sneaking suspicion this is how empires die.

I'm trying something out and it only tangentially happens to correspond with the New Year.  It looks like a resolution, but it's not.  Essentially, I'm going to unplug from most current events when at all possible.

This flies in the face of my normal desire to read and know about current events obsessively.  I may not be a full fledged news junkie, but I definitely used to read two newspapers pretty extensively, and generally spend large chunks of time reading about current events.  I even used to take daily notes of important events with the goal of being able to identify trends and analyze coverage, particularly longer running items like the 2008 Financial Meltdown or the Arab Spring.  Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that I was better off reading well researched books that came out a few months or years later.  I enjoyed the treatment of the events better, they were more informative, and the coverage more balanced, and the whole experience was of course seasoned with hindsight.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but should yield the following benefits.  

More Time

The idea had already been percolating a bit but was reinforced during the last few months of an international move where I literally didn't have time to follow current events.  The end result was I didn't care that much.  And I had a lot more time to devote to moving.  Now I'll have more time to devote to other things.

More Accuracy

There's a name for a phenomenon (that I don't have time to research) where you read media coverage of an event or detailed subject which you know a lot about and realize that the article is inaccurate, missing important details, or misses crucial nuance.  You smirk as you realize the reported missed the point or didn't do the subject justice, then move on to the next article and trust they're getting it right on all those other subjects on which you're not an expert.  I'd rather research things in a more classical manner and read books by experts, and challenge their ideas with research.  None of this requires a newspaper subscription or online RSS reader.

A More Informed Citizen

The upcoming presidential election in the United States will probably be one of the biggest wastes of time and money since the last one.  Here's a great article that surfaced recently which sums up my opinions pretty well: the US political process is dominated by money (94% of the time the candidate with the most money wins) and both political parties are essentially the same.  I've seen one blogger call them the Coke and Pepsi parties and I'm convinced it's true.  Both spend a lot of time telling you they're different, but at the end of the day, most people wouldn't be able to objectively tell.  Certainly both parties are hellbent on remaining in power and enriching themselves.  Both are consistently advancing positions that I greatly disagree with and won't be able to affect by voting for one candidate over another.  For damn sure I could never tell you (and I'd challenge you to honestly reflect for yourself) how one party affected my life compared to another to any measurable degree.

During the previous mid-term elections, I received a polling call that went through every single office and their attendant candidates that was up for election in South Florida, and asked if my choice as a voter would be affected by learning the following information.  All of them had been convicted for some form of fraud, bribery, election campaign funds misappropriation, and more.  The third party candidate calling me made a really good point: everyone in both parties is a criminal!

Ultimately, for the last two elections I've ended up spending an hour or so on Politifact for all non-national races, read the presidential candidate's books, and talked to a few people I trust and made my decision.  I've found that the above process educated me significantly more than the breathless campaign coverage I was reading every day.

A More Interesting Person

I'm not going to ignore current events - if people are talking about things that are happening, I'll tell them I haven't heard of the event, and they can explain it to me.  It's better than talking about the weather, it avoids me monologuing on my own opinions which can be a drag to others, and it'll ultimately make things more interesting for both of us.

A Few Exceptions

I will still maintain a daily reading of technical, work related, and hobby related blogs.  These are intensely interesting and enjoyable, and aren't really focused around current events most of the time.  I will also maintain a daily eye on the weather and train schedules because this is how I get to work.  I will monitor financial and investment information, but will limit most decisions to being made in a minimum 3-5 year time horizon (which is what I do anyway) and not worry about current doom and gloom.  Any substantive investment strategy should always assume gloom and doom by default and prepare for it, not react to the horrors of the day.

This is Not a New Idea

This is not a new or even novel idea.  I've seen this discussed in the book "I Was Blind but Now I See" by James Altucher, I believe it's referenced in "The Art of Nonconformity" by Chris Guillebeau, and when I really think about it, it's how I lived the first 15 years of my life without internet access in Asia.  I'm not really worried.

Updated 8 Jan 2011:

Updated thanks to a comment that just came in through email.  The phenomenon I mentioned above was coined by Michael Chrichton and is the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.  He also mentioned this in an essay title "Why Speculate?" Thanks "jcs"!

This is probably one of the more generic bucket list items I have.  Everyone has skydiving on their list, but it's also one that I could have completed at any point and just haven't out of laziness.  A good friend had his first experience in June out in Vegas and proceeded to become a converted zealot, going all the way for his license within a matter of months, and this convinced myself and a few others down here in South Florida to schedule the date.

I don't have what I'd call a major fear of heights.  More like a respect for heights.  My dad has what I'd characterize as a major fear of heights - the kind of thing where when you're walking along a balcony he's brushing a shoulder against the wall opposite the ledge.  I'm nowhere near that bad but I'm definitely not comfortable on catwalks or other similar spindly high structures.

The whole thing was scheduled very last minute, and I didn't even find out what time I was meeting my friends until 10PM the previous night, which probably served to push the reality out of my mind.  We drove down to meetup in Hollywood and immediately had a bizarre series of snafus paying for parking that culminated in us paying 10 bucks for 10 hours of parking after several unsuccessful attempts at alternate payment methods.

Piled into the car, the four of us headed south to Homestead where SkyDiveMiami is located.  All of us being technical, we joked how we hoped the experience would be better than their website looked.  We got lost several times along the way but finally made it and as we walked into the office.  Right then a guy in Super Mario Brothers Luigi costume walked through, parachute on his back, helmet and goggles on his head, and proceeded to bellow in an Italian accent: "I'm-a-Luigi and I DROP IT LIKE IT'S A-HOT" while performing several dance moves in a remarkably lithe manner.  I had to admit he was dropping it like it was a-hot.  An onlooker with a shirt that said "Sluts Love Me" laughed and then got yelled at to suit up so he could perform camera duties.

We checked in at the desk and were told to watch a movie which predictably started with a driving musical score and videos of skydivers giving the thumbs up and then cut immediately to a guy with the longest, most impressive beard I've ever seen (here he is, judge for yourself).  He began to talk about how there's no perfect plane, no perfect pilot, no perfect chute, and ACCIDENTS CAN HAPPEN.  He talked about death, and making sure we were willing to risk it all.  I kept looking at his beard.  I started to get a bit nervous.

We then began initialing and signing our way through the single most impressive legal release I could ever imagine.  We signed away our entire humanity.  There were clauses that we agreed to like even if we did sue, and won, we would have to pay all legal fees and winnings, back to ourselves.  We checked that we understood that we could die, and had reflected on this possibility.  We initialed that we had made arrangements to care for our family's financial future.  We witnessed for each other.  We declined an additional $300 fee that would release us from certain indemnifications.  We were basically scared to death after the completion of those forms.

Punctuated throughout were little interjections from some of the employees who exhorted us to not worry, we would have a blast.  They told us the only part that's weird is when we jump out first with no chute and the tandem guy jumps afterwards and swims towards us to link up.  It's got to be great to just see a constant parade of new fear coming in and out of your business each day.  We smiled thinly and began to suit up.

We had decided to do SkyDiveMiami's highest tandem jump, from 13,500 feet.  This would give us about a minute of free-fall (at roughly 120mph) until we deployed the chute at 5,000 feet, and we'd be strapped to a licensed parachutist instructor who would do most of the work.  I took a lot of comfort from the fact that if something wrong happened, we'd both die, as I'm a strong believer in the alignment of economic incentives.

Suiting up involved donning a union-suit style coverall, a harness, an altimeter, and fitting leather caps and goggles.  I listed myself as 210 pounds, and had to be weighed, where the scale confirmed I was actually 205, a full 20 pounds below the limit.

We waited outside and met our instructors.  Mine was maybe 5 feet tall and announced that "he always got paired with the big guys".  They were nice and seemed professional, checked each other's equipment and the eight of us along with one solo jumper climbed up a step ladder and into the plane.  A brief taxi later and we were taking off.  We could see out of a very large doorway that was covered by a plexiglass shield and after a minute or so we were pretty high up and I figured we were ready to jump.  Wrong.  I glanced at my altimeter, and we were at 2,000 feet.  That's when I started to get pretty nervous.  My instructor saw my glance and told me to relax, it would take us about 15 minutes to get to the proper level.  I glance around and all the instructors were sleeping.  One of them was doing his sixth jump of the day.

At this point I began to get irrationally terrified.  We hadn't even gotten a damn parking meter to work!  We'd been lost twice on our way!  I was in the plane with my friend Troy, the worst luck guy to fly with in the world: every flight I've been on with him was a disaster and we'd been delayed, emergency landed, and seen people arrested on flights we were on together.

Finally we leveled out and we were high enough you could clearly see the ocean, on both sides of Florida. The solo jumper got the thumbs up, shrugged, then just hurled himself out the plane.  That's when it finally hit me how stupid this was.  I'd had this idea that when you jump out of a moving plane you fly backwards with the wind.   But you don't.  You drop like a damn rock, straight down.  All of the instructors were talking to my friends, giving them last minute instructions.  Mine wasn't.  Instead, mine leaned over to one of my friends and shouted, "JUST REMEMBER.  THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS.  OH WAIT!  YOU'VE GOT TO GO!" and then cackled to himself as they knee-walked towards the opening.

Then it was our turn.  When you jump out you're on your knees, strapped very tightly to your instructor behind you who controls the chute.  You kneel on the edge of the plane and look down and you can barely see the ground you're so high.  Then you cross your arms, lean your head back where you can see the wing of the plane, and with no count the guy just hurls you forward and out of the plane.  It's an amazingly terrifying experience, and I was just petrified as we hurtled down at remarkable speed.

One of the things they forget to tell you in the training that was probably the second scariest part of the experience was that at 120mph you have intense wind blowing in your face which makes it hard to catch your breath.  I've traveled at 160mph on a motorcycle around a track, and 185mph on straight roads, but that's with a helmet on.  Stick your head out of the window of a car at 60mph and it can be hard to catch your breath.  I couldn't catch my breath and I was thinking to myself, great, I'm going to hyperventilate, pass out, and this is going to be so dumb.

After about 15 seconds I managed to to figure out a way to breathe and then realized my brain was working very very slowly.  We were doing turns, and it didn't feel like we were falling, but I could see the horizon getting closer.  My ears were popping like fireworks.  I tried to remember to look at my altimeter, but I couldn't, and I lost all track of time.  It seemed like four seconds after we were out of the plane we had deployed the chute.  It got a lot quieter and less scary, until my instructor announced that he was going to make a few comfort adjustments.  He had me hold the chute controls, then started fiddling, and I suddenly dropped in my harness about four inches.  I mentioned we didn't need to be comfortable.  More fiddling.  I drop another few inches.  Then we began steering the chute around.

Meanwhile, our aforementioned friend Troy had a nice freefall, but when the chute opened, they immediately began spinning around and around at high speeds.  Another member of our party could see the chute spinning like crazy and heard his instructor mention "Uh oh".  Troy later recounted to us that he got dizzier and dizzier and just closed his eyes.  We don't really know what happened, something about the chute not deploying quite right, but in the end we all made it just fine.

We glided in and the last bit that was unnerving was that the chutes are amazingly maneuverable, which means you can descend quite quickly if you want to, but as we came in for our landing it was pefect and like stepping off a curb.  My instructor actually apologized for not hittine the 5 foot sand bullseye perfectly.  I couldn't have cared less.

I had a massive headache, I was shaky from adrenaline, I had slobber coating my entire face, and I couldn't even really process what had just happened, but we were back without any problems! We all were very grateful to our instructors and the very nice and professional crew at SkyDiveMiami for a very memorable experience.

NOTE: Updated Oct 17, See Below

This is a thought that's been percolating around in my head for the last year or so, but has recently become even more crystalized: I'll probably never hire another Systems Administrator.  A corollary to this thought would be: if you are currently a Systems Administrator or want to be one, you need to seriously begin planning on how to manage a career that will be mostly deprecated within the next 10 years.

Take a look at the current state of the art in cloud computing:

• Spin up a server at your favor cloud provider (AWS, Rackspace, etc.), then use Puppet or Chef to deploy your software stack.  Now you're done.
• OR, Spin up an App at your favorite cloud platform provider, then push your code out using Git.  Now you're done.
• For both solutions, plug in some off-the-shelf monitoring, and you're operating.

What's missing here is the configuration, setup, provisioning, doc writing, black magic and/or prayer of setting up the software, hardware, and getting the code running that used to be the domain of the Systems Administrator.  In just a couple of years, deploying a web application has now become almost identical to deploying a desktop application - instead of an installer we're using Git or Puppet/Chef. Instead of a customer's computer we're using a cloud platform or cloud server.

There's plenty still to do on the networking side, but that's headed in the same exact direction due to the same exact reasons: we want to be able to clearly define and programmatically execute the deployment of complex networks, just like we can with complex server offerings.

All of this falls under yet another buzzword: Dev/Ops.  Just like the cloud, we're seeing this being adopted by smaller, nimbler organizations that are focused on web products, but the trend is clear, and there's really no benefit in doing things the Old Way.  Even if you're still running your own physical metal servers, you're going to want to make sure that your own datacenter can leverage this type of workflow.  Now, the watchword to the development team is: it's not done until I can one-click deploy it.

The laggards on this will be those industries that have regulatory or legal hurdles to overcome with using cloud services (read: healthcare) or the very large companies with services and technology that's dozens of years old with no migration plan.

SysAdmins and future SysAdmins, you need to figure out where you'll live in this new workflow.  Probably in the margins around monitoring or desktop support.  Possibly serving as the gatekeeper in a sort of "operations Q/A" role.  Expect small companies to have SysAdmin openings dry up over the next 5-10 years and get prepared.

Updated October 17: Hello Reddit/r/programming and Hacker News!  I wanted to take a few minutes and respond to a few themes that seemed to pop up in comments on HN and Reddit.

1. I'm not saying Sysadminning is dead - just that the role is quickly changing.  Seems like a lot of people (anecdotally, many Sysadmins) thought I was saying the entire profession is dead.  Yes of course we'll still need Sysadmins on some level, but the crucial difference is that for many areas of a business these needs will be less and much much different.
2. Software development is changing too.  On complex deployments, developers can't absolve themselves of the responsibility to design infrastructure considerations into the solution they're building on the front end.  It's a scary thought to think that organizations are out there that don't have this level of partnership between ops and the devs.  This is why the puppet scripts should be written first and deployed on a test environment that's identical in as many ways as possible to the ultimate operating environment (another benefit of using the cloud).
3. Of course, any more complex deployment will need devoted SysAdmins, but like I said above, the skillset and day-to-day job will be dramatically different when wrestling with hundreds of servers instead of dozens.  More and more programming will become the norm and more and more upfront input into the solution will be an absolute requirement.
4. I received a very thoughtful email from a former SysAdmin of mine (previous company) who pointed out that the job is much more along "system integrator" lines now, and that the internal vs. external network distinction is essentially going away.  I agree.
5. Whenever your'e generalizing, counter examples abound.  Sure big companies and certain computing environments will still do things the Old Way but I'd challenge readers to objectively think if most business decision makers really want to hire someone and run their email server internally or just pay Rackspace/Google/Whomever to do it and worry instead about their money-making applications.  Even those organizations that need their clusters in house will invest in tech that allows them to mimic cloud operations on their own bare metal infrastructure.
6. A couple of amusing anecdotes - the comments on HN immediately became more positive after a well known commenter defended the post, and a Googler chimed in as well.  That's when the upvotes really started coming it seems.  On Reddit, the story was quickly downvoted!  Most users chose either a "genius" or "idiot" assessment of the post.  No real middle ground.

Update Oct 16: I had to go out of town unexpectedly so I haven't mailed anything yet.  Thanks for your patience.

I'm weeding out my books and hate to just throw books out, so here's the deal.  I'm keeping this list of books updated, and if you want one, either come by (if you know me) and get it, or if you pay shipping I'll mail it to you.  Just send me a comment or an email.  I'll cross out books that are spoken for, given away, and if I don't have any takers (which is a good probability, a lot of these are pretty old) they'll be donated to Goodwill or the local library.

• Practical C++ Programming
• Data Structures via C++
• Effective STL
• OpenGL Programming Guide, Second Edition
• OpenGL Reference Manual, Second Edition
• Perl Cookbook
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• PHP Pocket Reference
• Learning the VI Editor
• Unix Netowrk Programming Interprocess Communications
• Understanding the Linux Kernel
• Getting Started with OpenVMS System Management
• DNS and Bind, 4th Edition
• C Primer Plus, Third Edition
• STL Tutorial and Reference Guide, Second Edition
• Apache Cookbook
• LISP, 2nd Edition
• OpenVMS User's Guide, Second Edition
• Learning Perl
• Algorithms with C
• Practical C
• Effective C++ Second Edition
• Building Open Source Network Security Tools
• Programming Windows, Fifth Edition

Stay tuned!

Note: I've previously read and reviewed two other books by Charles Cumming here.

Charles Cumming is an interesting author, someone I happened to find recommended to me via Amazon.com's engine, probably because I've bought books about Spain and China where two of his other books are set.  I read both these books while traveling in Europe and enjoyed his style of equally focusing on setting and story.  You really live in the environment with those books, and I had The Trinity Six on preorder after that experience.

The Trinity Six, I'll admit, was a little hard for me to get into.  Being an American, I just wasn't as familiar with the Cambridge Five incident from the UK, and I often felt like you needed to really have a better grasp of the weight of that event to fully appreciate the idea that there may have been a sixth agent involved in the ring.

Cumming seems to be a student of the John le Carré school of spy fiction writing, and having never read le Carré before, he got me to download one of his books on the Kindle, which I slogged through and although I tried valiantly, I eventually lost interest.  The idea is to provide a realistic counterweight to the over-the-top James Bond tendencies you see in movies and focus more on plausible espionage plots.  In this, Cumming betters his hero (at least as far as I can tell from my admittedly small sample size).

The plot of the book is interesting - an academic finds himself hurtling along an investigation that involves Russian interest and geopolitical consequences, and the gritty scenes do the job well.  Still, I felt that Cumming almost tried to focus less on the descriptions of the scenes for the books - again perhaps because his readers in the UK would know what London is like and probably have visited Budapest and Vienna.  As a sheltered American, I need more.

All in all, I think this is a book that has merit, but hopefully the next will incorporate the setting more, something Cumming is a master at.  My last major criticism of his previous books (of using the verb "to sink" a drink) was rectified in this outing, and I like to think I had something to do with it.  Regardless, I'll preorder his next work sight unseen.  If you like spy novels that don't involve lunatic unrealism, The Trinity Six is a good outing and a quick read.